The Homoerotics of Immigration Control

Bill Clinton found similar comfort in the homophobia-anti-immigration relay. Damaged by his administration’s early promise to change the military’s anti-gay policies, he took solace, it would seem, in his capacity to appropriate anti-immigrant fervor to reinstate his legitimacy as guardian of the nation. When Proposition 187 seized the imagination of a California electorate, Clinton quickly solidified his own neoliberal agenda by championing and expanding Operation Gatekeeper. Concerned that Proposition 187 demonstrated wide cross-over appeal for voters, and cognizant of his need to maintain California’s electoral votes, Clinton appropriated anxiety about immigration, decrying the unhumanitarian aspects of Prop 187 that his evacuation of welfare would later mimic, while simultaneously taking up the mantle of law and order to harness anti-immigrant fervor.

Operation Gatekeeper entailed a systematic strategy of policing the Mexico/U.S. border at popular crossing points, through the massing of agents and technology, particularly in urban areas and along the Rio Bravo.¹ This strategy, still in place more than a decade later, makes it nearly impossible for people to cross individually or in small groups in rural California or Texas. People coming to the U.S. without a visa often must turn themselves over to smuggling enterprises or try to cross independently in the barren, parched regions of the Arizona Sonora desert. There they die from heat prostration, hunger, and exposure.

A centerpiece of Clinton’s presidency and later welcomed by George Bush, Operation Gatekeeper has become the condition of impossibility for more than 3000 people.² Since the inception of Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, on average, one person has died almost every day trying to cross the Mexico-U.S. border. Occasionally these deaths gain national attention, as, for example, when eleven skeletons were found in a railroad car in the Midwest months after the car had entered the U.S., or as when a border patrolman loaded a dead woman’s body onto the hood of a patrol vehicle because a mortuary hearse failed to show up. But most often, these deaths go un-noted in the mainstream media. They occur in an underdeveloped region of the country; they occur regularly, most frequently from spring through early fall, during what one human rights activist calls “the dying season.”³ Why has such an abundance of death not stirred more debate? Why have the recent debates about so called immigration reform and the massive border fence not centered on the daily deaths? What prevents a national outcry sufficient to change public policy?

I’d like to suggest that a partial hint to the answer lies in the relay between AB101 and Prop 187—in the unspoken, unacknowledged desires that helps to structure national discourses about immigration and keeps nativism afloat in ever newer guises. The fights over AB101 and Prop 187 emerged after a sea change in the U.S. economy. The demise of a Fordist manufacturing system entailed, in part, the reorganization of the nation’s political economy. The locus of capital accumulation transitioned from manufacturing to the management of money and led to what some call the financialization of the U.S. economy. To support this transformation, the Reagan-Bush administrations hacked away at the social safety net and supported policies that helped depress real wages for the majority of U.S. workers. By the end of the 1980s, the storied “nuclear family” could no longer function easily with only one wage-earner. In short, the much vaunted two-parent, single-bread-winner family structure was under economic duress—a duress made fiercer by a series of recessions that left most wage-earners feeling their vulnerability to economic change. It was in this political-economic climate that the battles over enlarging the concept of rights and maintaining access to social services emerged.

1. See, Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the ‘Illegal Alien’ and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary. New York: Routledge: 2001; Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. [↩]
2. See Wayne A. Cornelius, “Controlling ‘Unwanted’ Immigration: Lessons from the United States, 1993-2004,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31(4), July 2005: 775-794. He estimates deaths in the first ten years of Operation Gatekeeper to be nearly 3000. In the intervening four years many hundreds if not thousands more have died. [↩]
3. Evelyn Nieves. “Illegal Immigrant Death Rate Rises Sharply in Barren Areas.” New York Times. 6 August, 2002. [↩]