Entrapment Processes and Immigrant Communities in a Time of Heightened Border Vigilance

Human Organization, Winter 2007 by N��ez, Guillermina Gina, Heyman, Josiah McC

Serious risk decisions are further complicated by the widespread existence of mixed status families (with citizen, legal resident, and undocumented members),6 as well as people with ambiguous status in the process of legalization (referred to earlier as arreglando). Such close connections between documented and undocumented, in a situation of intensive law enforcement, force people to decide whether to favor some family members over others or to keep families with very different mobility rights as a unified moral unit. Tougher immigration enforcement efforts and policies often are not sufficient to suppress this moral decision-making and the subsequent defiance of the state. However, they do confront people with constant, terrible dilemmas, anxieties, and tensions. The personal cost of entrapment is enormous.

Concluding Discussion

The study of entrapment processes has significant implications for applied social science in three regards: social analysis, public policy, and research methods and ethics. Studies of migration and mobility need to include in their analysis both the barriers and fears involved in defying detention and deportation by state officials but also the ways people protect themselves and obtain mobility along with the consequences of such action. Applied social science and public policy aimed at increasing public participation and the subsequent delivery of useful and effective health and social services must take into account constraints on movement and means of getting around them.

Implications for Social Analysis

Mobility has been a central area of concern in recent social theory, often emphasizing unbounded movement and its social and cultural effects (Appadurai 1996, Hannerz 1996, Ong 1999). Many insights have come from this work, especially the concept of transnationalism and the shift away from viewing culture as having a singular and fixed place (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Kearney 1996, 2004; Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992). We have come to understand that freedom and accessibility of movement is fundamental to people's well being in the contemporary world. Long distance, transnational travel receives the most attention, but even local mobility is fundamental. People move to receive education and health services, to vote and attend public meetings, to visit friends and family, to work, to shop, and so forth.

However, ease, volition, and freedom of movement have been overstated, especially for relatively powerless populations. Movement inequalities originate from and interact in complex ways with other inequalities, such as nationality/ citizenship, race and ethnicity, age, gender, and class. Hilary Cunningham and Josiah Heyman (2004) propose that we pair the concept of mobility with enclosure, thus calling attention to the dual processes that enable and restrict movement of specific people at concrete places and times, rather than abstractly proclaiming a new era of unbounded mobility.

The modern state practices delineation of spaces through borders, identification of people through documents like passports, and surveillance of populations through inspections that require presentation and performance of identity documents (Giddens 1985, Torpey 2000). Surveillance, following Michel Foucault (1977), becomes a positive component of freedom, in this case the freedom to move openly near and across borders. It is a "normal" aspect of life for the documented. But there also is an "illegalized" population in the United States, lacking documentation acceptable to the US government. Such people move around the borderlands and across the international boundary deliberately avoiding surveillance,7 or are locked into place by entrapment processes-they are outside "normal" surveillance and freedom. In this sense, our discussion of entrapment processes and hidden populations is a spatial extension of Nicholas De Genova's analysis of illegality (2002,2004,2005).8