Class and Classification at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Walking ATMs and the immigration spillover effect: The link between Latino immigration and robbery victimization

“…We do so because, as stated previously, robbers looking to victimize undocumented immigrant Latinos cannot distinguish undocumented from documented immigrants -and for that matter, immigrant from native-born Latinos. In places with heretofore few Latinos, potential robbers may assume that those with an Hispanic appearance and who speak Spanish are suitable targets for robbery (Heyman, 2001;Romero, 2006). Thus, looking only at migrants or, worse, only undocumented migrants, is unnecessarily restrictive and unrealistic.…”

Theorizing Cross-Border Mobility: Surveillance, Security and Identity

“…Notably, fixed checkpoints, unlike roving patrols, may allow officers to act on the basis of the Mexican appearance of the occupants in referring motorists to a secondary inspection area for questioning. 4 In practice, this is exactly what happens at fixed checkpoints, as documented by ethnographical accounts and interviews of Border Patrol officers (Heyman, 1995(Heyman, , 2001, also see Ungar, 1998: 53-70). Remember, the challenge faced at such checkpoints is how to speed through traffic while targeting specific travelers, a situation common to the broad range of mobility controls discussed in this paper.…”

Ports of Entry as Nodes in the World System

“…I observed, for example, primary inspectors diverting to secondary a man "going to Tucson to buy building supplies" who did not know what he was looking for or how much money he might spend (unfortunately, I was not able to follow up the resolution of this inspection). Hence-and this is a key point-the inspection process involves the construction and application of a "plausible story" (Heyman 2001), an interpretative construct about the entrant, her rights, her relations with other people, and her past and future lines of action. As the example just above suggests, such plausible stories often work efficiently to apply the law, but their social effects cannot be ignored, as in the case of racial and other profiling.…”

“…From the beginning of humankind, people have moved across space through a variety of social arrangements (e.g., as guests and traders with letters of introduction) but, as a diagnostic of the modern era, we notice the novel phenomenon of thorough state categorization of rights to mobility across defined territories, as seen in the development of passports and other documents used heavily at ports and other checkpoints (Torpey 2000;Caplan and Torpey 2001). This forms part of the broader trend toward the identification, categorization, and governance of individuals (see Heyman 2001 on this process in United States immigration law). Mobility is thus central to characterizing capital's circuits, particular commodities within them, and individuals in the ensuing social and political world system.…”