Ambiguous jurisdictions: navigating U.S. Foreign-Trade Zones as extraterritorial spaces

Sleights of Hand: Free Ports, Bordering, and the Racial Capitalist Roots of Economic Nationalist Strategies in the US and the UK

“…Ethnographically and archivally, the examples I include in this article are from two interwoven projects that stemmed from earlier work on different and specifically positioned transnational imaginings of the agency, and effects on identities and livelihoods, of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Kingsolver 2001). One project has been focused on the tensions and ambiguities between understanding rural US Foreign-Trade Zones (FTZs) as workspaces inside or outside the US and the labour injustices resulting from the potential exploitation of jurisdictional ambiguity (Kingsolver 2021) in these extraterritorial zones. 7 Ironically, Trump's economic nationalist rhetoric of 'American jobs for American workers' depended on a profoundly globalised landscape of production on US territory, raising the question of what an 'American job' might be, along with who he meant to include in that phrase as 'American'.…”

“…The signage conveying those threats is prominent in most FTZs, but jurisdictional ambiguity is exploited by corporations operating in the zone. I have interviewed local officials and workers alike who had been told by zone operators that local, state, and federal laws (especially about labour protections) did not apply within the zones, although the legal framework governing the zones only applies to the commodities moving through them-for customs purposes-and does not negate the rights of the people moving through the zones, as long as they keep all the parts within the razor-wire fencing or tapedoff section of floor marking the FTZ space (Kingsolver 2021).…”

World Anthropological Perspectives on Economic Nationalisms*

“…An obvious example of the global "hidden in plain view" (Orenstein, 2011: 38) across the US is that of Foreign-Trade Zones (FTZs), often placed in very 7-32 ARTICLE | ANN E. KINGSOLVER, ANNAPURNA DEVI PANDEY, GUSTAVO ONTO, CHRIS C. OPESEN AND HANNAH APPEL rural areas to take advantage of contingent low-wage labor hired through staffing agencies so the corporations using the zones evade direct legal accountability to workers (Kingsolver, 2016(Kingsolver, , 2021. As Dara Orenstein (2011: 37) notes, "When Congress passed the Foreign-Trade Zones Act of 1934, at the dawn of the New Deal, it inaugurated a profoundly new spatial practice.…”

“…US FTZs create "offshore" working conditions "onshore" by enabling corporations to exploit the ambiguity of which jurisdictions apply to the space. Kingsolver (2021) found that sometimes even those responsible for enforcing local laws were confused about whether they had the right to go inside the plant when company representatives in FTZ spaces behind barbed wire and turnstiles told them they did not (they do). The disciplining of workers inside the zones controlled by US Customs and Border Protection is so strong that one labor advocate said to Kingsolver in a 2019 interview that a death inside the zone was neither reported to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (which records national data on workplace injuries) nor by newspapers, given the restricted access of the press to the zones and workers' silence due to fear of losing their jobs.…”