Borders for profit: transnational social exclusion and the production of the NAFTA border

Abstract

The focus of this paper is the production of the 'North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)' border that defines a trans/national social field and directs the day-to-day lives of migrant women who organise their livelihoods around the Mexico-Guatemala border. We document and investigate emerging transnational spaces and practices of social exclusion and symbolic violence (Bourdieu) that boost domestic economic interests, externalise social responsibility, privatise social risk, and reinforce national boundaries. We argue that policies and practices in this transnational social field are directed by market logic and that, accordingly, trade agreements and migration management regimes organise place and space to make the most of global inequalities through the simultaneous facilitation and restriction of mobility. Crucially, the coordinated ambivalent control of borders in this transnational marketised social field produces an entrepreneurial context that makes possible a range of profits through the selective symbolic dispossession of nation-states, nationalities, and migrant bodies: economic, political, and social.