U.S. statecraft and the U.S.–Mexico border as security/economy nexus

The Rights of Noncitizens in the United States

“…Varsanyi (2008, p. 883; argues that stiffened border enforcement and restricted legalization opportunities produce "a nationally bounded, relatively free internal labor market, populated by disciplined, divided (along the lines of legal status), largely nonunion, and vulnerable labor force for which the state bears few costs and has few responsibilities or obligations." Coleman (2005Coleman ( , 2007 agrees that a "security/economy nexus" shapes U.S. policy along the U.S.-Mexico border but emphasizes that, on the ground, this nexus produces contradictory and sometimes incoherent policies. Thus, on the one hand, a porous border could be perceived as a security threat, but, on the other, some degree of porosity is needed to facilitate trade.…”

“…Large-scale restructurings of the immigration enforcement regime have made distinctions between citizens and noncitizens increasingly important. Thus, scholars have coined such terms as "crimmigration" to describe the unprecedented convergence of criminal and immigration law at the levels of statute, policy, and implementation (Stumpf 2006); "rescaling" to refer to shifts from national to local immigration policymaking (Varsanyi 2008); and "securitization" to denote the infusion of antiterrorist measures within immigration policymaking (Astor 2009, Bigo 2002, Coleman 2005, Welch 2002. At the same time, scholars have attended to a lack of opportunity for rights-claims to move forward in ways that could regularize the status of unauthorized migrants who, in earlier eras, would have had the opportunity to legalize.…”

Global City Frontiers: Singapore's Hinterland and the Contested Socio‐political Geographies of Bintan, Indonesia

“…These are epitomized both by tightened immigration and 'security' controls everywhere, increasingly revanchist cities and thousands of gated communities. Although some observers locate creative cultural hybridities in cross-border sites of fast urbanization (Dear and Leclerc, 2003), the force and exclusions on which such urbanization rests give others much less cause to be sanguine (Coleman, 2005).…”

Immigration Policing Through the Backdoor: City Ordinances, the "right to the City," and the Exclusion of Undocumented Day Laborers

“…Even though the federal government has plenary power over immigration matters, Congress and the executive branch, starting in 1996 and continuing in the post-9/11 period, have authorized local and state governments to undertake immigration policing should they choose to assume that responsibility (Coleman, 2005;Varsanyi and Provine, 2007). While the fundamental constitutionality of this devolution of immigration policing powers is still being debated by legal scholars (Hethmon, 2004;Pham, 2004), current local immigration policing does not conflict with federal plenary powers as they have been explicitly authorized by Congress.…”

“…On one hand, neoliberal restructuring has simultaneously lowered barriers to the international flow of capital and raised barriers to the international flow of people (Coleman, 2005;Varsanyi and Nevins, 2007). However, as discussed above, a combination of increasing border militarization, lax internal workplace enforcement by the federal government, and continued demand by businesses for flexible labor has resulted in an increase in unauthorized migration, now with cities on the front lines.…”