The Asymmetric Border: The United States’ Place in the World and the Refugee Panic of 2018

Abstract

The year 2018 saw a moral panic in the United States in the media and among many citizens over the treatment of refugees/asylees at the U.S. southern border, particularly the separation and detention of children apart from their parents. This happened in the context of a period in U.S. political history in which “immigration,” without much discernment about different types of immigration, was central to political discourse. In fact, in terms of numbers, there was no immigration crisis at the border. Undocumented migration from Mexico across the southern border of the United States has been in decline for many years, and the irregular movement of people from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras is currently small by historical standards. The only crisis, to which the U.S. panic was a response, has been a human rights crisis. Families and children seeking asylum from horrendous civil‐rights conditions in their countries of origin were criminalized and denied their right to asylum hearings. The panic points both to the extreme politicization of immigration in the United States, particularly since Donald Trump's entry into national politics in 2015, and to popular confusion over categorizing different types of immigrants. But it also raises questions about the nature of the U.S. southern border in relation to the United States’ place in the world. Rather than thinking about the United States as simply the rich destination country of unfortunate people coming from poor origin countries, the refugee panic of 2018 brings into the focus the fact that the United States itself is complicit in the conditions in those countries that produce so many refugees in the first place.

Refugee Admissions and Public Safety: Are Refugee Settlement Areas More Prone to Crime?

“…11 See: https://www.state.gov/j/prm/ra/admissions/index.htm (last accessed November 17, 2019). Refugees are often confused with asylum-seekers in the context of US law (Agnew 2019). Asylum-seekers are people who have left their home country and whose claims for refugee status have not yet been evaluated.…”

Contemporary Refugee‐Border Dynamics and the Legacies of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference ⋆

“…In this special issue, both Cynthia Gorman (Gorman 2019b) and John Agnew (Agnew ) direct their attention toward theoretical and empirical understanding of state apparatuses, and especially the set of institutions and agents through which state power is exercised. Their articles explore the specific ways in which the United States utilizes creative strategies to reduce their internationally and domestically sanctioned responsibilities to refugees.…”

The Making of a Crisis: Migration and Polarization in the French Press

“…The idea that Europe and more generally, the world, is experiencing a "migration crisis" pervades media discourses. Such moral panics happen "without much discernment" about the types and volume of migration actually taking place, as John Agnew (2019) noted in the case of the US in 2018. Common representations of immigration flows are important as they are believed to shape attitudes and votes.…”