In May 2016, Kenya announced its intention to close Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, as well as Kakuma, another camp. Together the camps housed about 500,000 people, mostly Somalis who episodically arrived in the camps over the previous 25 years, fleeing from periodic violence compounded by famine in their homeland. Beginning with the collapse of the US-backed dictator’s government in 1991, Somalis fled genocidal violence by warring militias competing for territory during the 1990s, an era followed by another calamitous explosion of violence in 2006 that destroyed a brief period of relative calm when Ethiopia, with US military support, invaded to overthrow the nascent Islamic Courts Union government. The foreign invasion precipitated the emergence of Al Shabaab, a militant Islamic fundamentalist movement labeled as terrorists by the rest of the world, whose predations against civilians have persistently sent people escaping across the border into refugee camps during the past decade. Many in the camps have no homes to which they can return and no communities in Somalia where they are safe, a reality compounded by the fact that many camp residents arrived as babies or were born in the camps and have never even visited Somalia. With Kenya’s announcement about the camps’ imminent closure, Somalis throughout the diaspora began scrambling to try to figure out where their relatives in the camps should go.1
For the past decade I have worked with Somali refugees who were resettled in the United States from Dadaab and Kakuma (see Besteman 2016). Tracking their efforts to find safety over the past two and a half decades has made visible for me a structure of global apartheid, backed by militaristic force, through which people from the global south try to navigate the borders, barriers, and violences imposed on them by governments and multilateral institutions based in the global north. Building from the experiences of Somali refugees, this paper offers a broad-brush view of a world order in which race and mobility feature as primary variables for which heightened security and militarization are the answer. This article attempts to sketch out some dimensions of this new world order, a militarized form of global apartheid.2
Militarized global apartheid is a loosely integrated effort by countries in the global north to protect themselves against the mobility of people from the global south. The new apartheid apparatus takes the form of militarized border technologies and personnel, interdictions at sea, biometric tracking of the mobile, detention centers, holding facilities, and the criminalization of mobility. It extends deeply into many places from which people are attempting to leave and pushes them back, it tracks them to interrupt their mobility, stops them at certain borders for detention and deportation, pushes them into the most dangerous traveling routes, and creates new forms of criminality. It stretches across most of the globe, depends on an immense investment of capital, and feeds a new global security-industrial complex. Because the new apartheid relies on and nurtures xenophobic ideologies and racialized worldviews, it recasts the terms of sovereignty, citizenship, community, belonging, justice, refuge, and civil rights and requires the few who benefit to collectively and knowingly demonize and ostracize the many who are harmed. I begin my analysis with an explanation of the terminology I utilize, followed by an overview of South Africa’s signature system of apartheid, which provides the structure for the subsequent elaboration of the emerging system of militarized global apartheid.
On Vocabulary
Throughout this article I use “the global north” to mean the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, the Gulf states, and East Asia. This list overlaps considerably with the group of states identified by political scientist and Pentagon consultant Thomas Barnett (2003) as “the Functioning Core” interconnected through globalization in his influential “The Pentagon’s New Map.”3 Barnett argues that the Functioning Core should initiate US-led military occupations in the areas he identifies as “the Non-integrating Gap,” places outside of globalization that constitute the greatest security threats in the world today: “the Caribbean rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia.” Of additional concern to Barnett are the “Seam States”—Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia—that buffer the Non-integrating Gap from the Functioning Core. He promotes a strong US military presence in the Seam States as a strategy to control mobility and secure the Functioning Core against terrorism.
From the vantage point of my Somali acquaintances who live within Barnett’s Non-integrating Gap, the poverty and insecurity of the Gap look like an intentional creation of the Functioning Core—a series of militarized borders, imprisoning refugee camps, detention centers, tightly policed and dangerous border crossing zones, violent interventions by militaries and agents of the global north, and regions made unsafe by the rise of terrorist organizations in response to those interventions. While Barnett, much like Thomas Friedman (1999) before him, defines the Gap as globally disconnected—which for Barnett is a condition to be remedied through US-led military intervention—those who live within the Gap might see its insecurity as produced by a combination of militarized interventions by the global north (in support of friendly dictators, to overthrow unfriendly dictators, for the Global War on Terror, for resource extraction, and for other corporate interests of the global north) and militarized containment (closed borders, refugee camps, deportations and detentions of unauthorized border crossers) designed to thwart the border-crossing mobility strategies of residents forced out of the Gap by such interventions.
Life in many places within the so-called Gap is undeniably insecure. Returning to the experience of Somalis, every one of my Somali acquaintances in the United States had to leave behind in the refugee camps precious family members rejected from the official resettlement process managed by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the US State Department. Everyone I know sends monthly remittances and worries constantly about their relatives still living in insecure refugee camps and in the dangerous regions of Somalia subject to US drone and air attacks, famine, and attacks by Al Shabaab.4 My friends’ remittances flow through indigenous banking networks that are always under threat of being shut down by the US government for security reasons. Their remittances buy things obtained through informal long-distance trade networks interrupted by insecurity. Their relatives flee Al Shabaab into Kenya but are then forced to move from the camps when insecurities flare or their refugee statuses are revoked; they move between Nairobi and the refugee camps when xenophobic ethnic cleansings sweep Nairobi; they make their way north to get on leaky boats in attempts to cross the Mediterranean; or they make their way south to South Africa, where they face periodic xenophobic violence that leaves them maimed or dead (Steinberg 2015). Their search for security is hardly unique; the global south houses the vast majority of the world’s refugees and displaced people—those threatened by climate change, disease, poverty, and war. Barnett’s understanding of the Non-integrating Gap, much like Friedman’s earlier definition of “turtles” (e.g., those countries that resist joining capitalist globalization), mistakenly presumes that the poverty and insecurity in these regions is due to their global disconnections. But the view from the south reveals this to be a myopic argument that ignores global connections that pervade the global south through transnational emigration and diasporas as well as myriad global military, corporate, and nongovernmental organization interventions.5
The life strategies pursued by my Somali acquaintances demonstrate how the available scholarly vocabulary fails to adequately capture the encounters through which people from the Non-integrating Gap engage the rest of the world. For the Somali diaspora, “transnational” is inadequate because their connections are not necessarily made between and through national entities or frames but are made, for example, between refugees incarcerated in camps in Kenya and people living in stateless southern Somalia, between refugees living with no civil rights in South Africa and refugees in UNHCR refugee camps, between refugees in camps in Kenya and refugees in camps in Yemen. The nationalist frame is almost completely irrelevant in the lives of Somalis except for the fact that national governments from the global north, in the name of their own security, regularly intervene in Somalia or to contain Somalis, either through attempts to impose new governmental structures that continually prove irrelevant to people living in Somalia or to impose new security regimes through proxy armies, alliances with warlords, or drone attacks. And one of the primary ways in which the nationalist frame is made consistently relevant for Somalis seeking security is through militarized border controls that other nations wield against their ability to move, in effect incarcerating them in zones of profound and enduring insecurity. The central argument of this article is that the militarized border controls that constrain the movement of Somalis and others from the global south constitute a racialized global form that warrants the use of the term “apartheid.”
Somalia is but one example of the effect of policies in the global north that incarcerate and traumatize people in the global south in the name of security and profit in the global north. In the globalized contemporary, the emergence of a system of militarized apartheid used by wealthy and powerful countries in the global north against people from the global south is the signature form of globalized structural violence of our era. Other scholars have used the phrase “global apartheid” to describe the historic and current world order, arguing that from the age of exploration to the age of imperialism, to the colonial era, to the age of the Cold War, to the age of neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus, to the current moment, the global north has been engaged in projects of racialization, segregation, political intervention, mobility controls, capitalist plunder, and labor exploitation of people in the global south (Booker and Minter 2001; Hage 2016; Harrison 2002, 2008; Jacobs and Soske 2015; Marable 2008; Mills 1997; Mullings 2009; Nevins 2008; Richmond 1994). While terms like “imperialism,” “globalization,” and “transnationalism” have been helpful for highlighting many important dimensions of these global processes, the term “apartheid” shifts the frame to capture the use of race and nativist language to structure mobility, belonging, elimination, and extermination, as well as the relevance of border controls and the hierarchical modes of excluding or incorporating racially delineated people into a polity for labor exploitation. My argument builds on this perspective by acknowledging the significance for this emergent world order of new forms of militaristic border security and containment.
After reviewing the basic dimensions of how apartheid was implemented and regulated in South Africa, I turn to a consideration of how the contemporary iteration of a racialized world order and a hierarchical labor market dependent on differential access to mobility on the basis of origin replicates apartheid structures. Along with imperialist interventions, the expansion of systems of “capitalist plunder” (Clarke 2010:59) engineered by agents of the global north into the global south renders localities in the global south unsustainable or unpromising for ordinary life, forcing people from the global south to confront the apparently contradictory demand for their labor and the militarized borders of the global north in their search for security, employment, and a sustainable life. The article notes how the global north is massively investing in militarized border regimes that reach far beyond territorial borders to manage the movement of people from the global south, both to create an exploitable labor force and to contain those considered “undesirable” or expendable in detention centers or refugee camps far from the borders of the global north. The effects include drownings in the ocean, deaths in the desert, detention centers, refugee camps, and holding facilities as the global north invests in ever more militarized forms of engagement and control, redirects vast resources to fortify its borders, and divests from most forms of engagement with the global south other than exploitation and policing.
Apartheid
From 1948 to 1990, South Africa created the most extensive and extreme apartheid structure in the contemporary era. Apartheid is a legal edifice that mandates, constructs, and enforces the supremacy of one racial group over another. In South Africa, the apartheid system supported by the National Party after its political victory in 1948 systematized white supremacy through policies and laws designed to manage the “threat” posed by Black people by incarcerating them in zones of containment, while enabling their controlled and policed exploitation as workers on whose labor South Africa was dependent.6
The basis of creating an apartheid social order is the invention of mutually exclusive legally defined identities and the sorting of those identities into geographically demarcated areas through mandated residential racial segregation. In South Africa this was accomplished through the creation of distinct official racial categories into which every single individual was placed, a process accompanied by the delineation of race-based geographical areas and the removal of people rendered “out of place”—because their state-assigned racial identity was not consonant with their residence—in order to create residential zones of racial homogeneity. The removal of people of color from newly designated white space affected 3.5 million Black South Africans, making this process “one of the largest mass removals of people in modern history” (Michigan State University, n.d.).
A particularly devious component of the apartheid racial landscape was the creation of new independent “homelands” for Black South Africans, which enabled their disenfranchisement from areas legally defined as white.7 Black South Africans were stripped of citizenship rights in white South Africa and reassigned through removal to urban townships or to one of the homelands, which were small, overcrowded, remote, fragmented geographical areas that were far from life sustaining. Homelands offered little to support Black South Africans: they were infertile places devoid of the modern amenities, education, infrastructure, health care, and service delivery that White South Africans enjoyed, governed through structures and authorities emplaced and managed by the apartheid regime. While the apartheid government promoted the homelands as spaces of cultural authenticity and native belonging for Black people, in reality they functioned as population dumps and labor reserves from which men and women were drawn into white South Africa to work in the mines, on farms, and in domestic service to create profit and comfort for White South Africans.8 The legal presence of Black workers in white South Africa was contingent on employment. Because the South African economy was heavily dependent on Black workers, the government issued passes to Black workers that identified them as employees, and without those passes, their presence in white space was illegal. The purposeful impoverishment of the homelands ensured a labor supply of Black people who had to seek employment from White people outside the homelands, but as noncitizen guest workers, they lacked the right of democratic participation extended by the state to their White employers.
Black South Africans, of course, refused to comply with removals, border controls, mobility controls, and the pass system, relentlessly moving into white spaces, establishing squatter communities, moving through white spaces without passes, resisting efforts to remove them back to homelands, and in general challenging constraints on their mobility and civil rights. The militarized security apparatus required to maintain racial segregation; monitor borders and mobility; catch, detain, and deport people who violated pass laws and residential zoning laws; protect white neighborhoods against black mobility; watch, police, and supervise the movements of Black people in white territory; and monitor the activities of anti-apartheid activists was not only extraordinarily costly but ultimately unsustainable.
In sum, “apartheid” as it unfolded in South Africa contained five key elements. First, apartheid relies on an essentialized cultural logic that ties people to place through racial and nativist ideologies and discourses. Second, ethno-racialized groups and their respective territories created through apartheid practices are unequal because the territories inhabited by the subjugated are disenfranchised and impoverished by design. Third, the delineation of territorial belonging is reinforced by a bureaucratic system of identity documentation and mobility controls that perpetuate racialization. Fourth, in addition to being a system of identity management, racial segregation, and racial supremacy, apartheid is also, critically, about the control and exploitation of the labor of the subjugated. And fifth, because apartheid is exploitative, unfair, and unjust, its maintenance requires a massive, pervasive, and expensive militarized security apparatus. Across all five elements is the role of the state in sanctioning, through law and policy, racial oppression as apartheid’s distinguishing feature. These elements, I argue, are now taking shape systemically on a global scale through a constellation of policies and laws, many of which have roots in white settler and European colonialism and imperialism. To build my argument that we are living in an age of militarized global apartheid, the following sections address each element in turn.
Cultural Identity, Nativism, and the People-Territory Link
Two decades ago, Gupta and Ferguson (1997) wrote about the efforts by political elites and anthropologists alike over the past century to tie people to place, thus enabling the illusion that cultural identity roots people in particular geographical places where they are imagined naturally to belong. Tying people to place through the simultaneous creation of cultural identities linked to nation-state membership informed the idea of immigration and influx control, making mobility seem threatening to the consolidation of nationalist identities within politically delineated territorial borders.
Over the past century, states in the global north have been crafting nationalist identities for citizens while building mechanisms to police cross-border movements of citizens and noncitizens as a critical expression of sovereignty. Such identities took shape within historic struggles over European imperialism and colonialism across the globe—struggles that racialized populations and produced racialized categories of slaves, indentured laborers, and indigenous peoples. Racial differences emerged in particular localities in conjunction with place-specific hierarchies and conditions of colonial or imperial relationships, but place-specific racial logics across the globe were connected through what Lisa Lowe (2015) calls an “Anglo-American settler imperial imaginary” (8). Consequently, over the past several hundred years, a central component of nationalist identity formation has been the role of race and, in different places and with different iterations, white supremacy, in structuring membership, belonging, and hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion.
As is well known, the consolidation of nationalist identities occurred through the promotion by elites of particular ideologies, discourses, and cultural understandings about who belonged to the nation-state by virtue of descent and birth (and thus who did not), political processes of exclusion, and the creation of the passport used by countries to clearly brand those who belong and to exclude those who do not (Torpey 2000).9 The study of nationalism as a politically and ideologically engineered project has generated an enormous amount of scholarship that will not be reviewed here, except to note that in the white settler colonial states of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (as in South Africa), in the colonizing states of Europe, and in the new nation of Israel, the process of consolidating a nationalist identity connected to political membership was a specifically and lethally racialized project.10 Along with genocides and removals of indigenous peoples, white settler societies built liberal democracies fundamentally based on whiteness (and in the case of Israel, Jewishness), and the racial hierarchies worked out through European colonialism shaped racialized national identities in Europe.11 The history of liberalism is uncontestably conjoined with the history of imperialism and colonialism—a history of racialized segregation, white supremacy, and resource extraction that underpins the current iteration of global apartheid (Losurdo 2011; Lowe 2015).
In the United States, the very first legislation to define the qualifications for citizenship (the Naturalization Act of 1790) restricted citizenship only to free Whites, whose mobility into the United States remained unfettered, a law that remained on the books until 1952. This policy obviously required the government to create rules to determine who could qualify as white and to use such racial categories to determine political enfranchisement, including influx control policies. Post–Civil War concerns about consolidating an American identity based in whiteness produced, for the first time in American history, influx control policies that defined particular racial groups for specific exclusions. National-origins quotas emplaced in 1924 and lasting until the 1950s restricted Asians and others deemed nonwhite with a color bar that mirrored the color bar previously used against African Americans and indigenous peoples who were already in the United States (Calavita 2007; Frederickson 1981; Losurdo 2011; Ngai 2004; Omi and Winant 2015). Despite the legal and social transformations signaled by immigration reform in 1965 as well as other progressive legislation intended to interrupt the history of white supremacy in the United States (such as the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts), ensuring white supremacy nevertheless remained an ongoing political project in subtle as well as overt ways.12
Canada, Australia, European countries, Israel, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—enacted similar racial logics of exclusionary citizenship, through genocide and removals of indigenous colonized peoples in the cases of Canada and Australia, through ideologies of racial superiority, through laws that racially restricted citizenship after the end of colonialism in Europe, and through restrictive heritage-based requirements for citizenship in Israel and the GCC countries. Following the end of European colonial rule and the emergence of a global regime of mandatory citizenship, European states that had offered a limited extension of citizenship to some of the colonized began curtailing that policy, constructing instead a new regime of mobility controls (such as France’s restrictions on citizenship for the children of immigrants enacted in the 1980s and the UK’s restrictions after 1962 on immigrants from India, the Caribbean, East Africa, and Hong Kong; Losurdo 2011; Mills 1997:29; Richmond 2005; Silverstein 2005; Stolcke 1995; Torpey 2000:150; Wilder 2005). Thus, at the very moment that former colonies were transitioning to independence and gaining political freedom, former colonizers were working to ensure the hegemony of an international structure to control population movement, enforce the national conferral of citizenship as the only form of internationally recognized political belonging, and make certain that they could retain whiteness as a key factor in determining who would be allowed to cross their borders.
Israeli citizenship law defines Israel as a Jewish state devoted to maintaining and protecting a Jewish character, and Israel’s immigration and naturalization policies are specifically intended to ensure the ongoing political and social marginalization of Palestinian and other non-Jewish people (Barak-Erez 2008; Gans 2008; Mundlak 2007; Willen 2010).13 A heritage-based definition of citizenship is also employed in the Gulf states, all of which make it virtually impossible for foreign migrant workers—a vast majority of the population in all Gulf states—to obtain citizenship (AlShehabi 2015; Gardner 2010; Longva 2005; Mahdavi 2016). Citizens, who receive substantial economic benefits and access to secure public jobs, are empowered to police the presence of migrant workers through the kefala system, through which migrant workers, mostly from the global south, are allowed entry on visas controlled by citizens. The kefala system enables a strict hierarchy between those whose ancestry grants them rights of belonging through citizenship based on genealogy and those who lack such rights despite their economic contribution to the nation. It is a form of supremacy (with roots in the relationships between regional ruling families and British colonialism) that follows the same logic of identity and belonging used to shape Canada, Australia, the United States, and European countries as white states and Israel as a Jewish state.
To summarize thus far: rights to legal membership in the modern nation-state have taken shape through the delineation of territorial borders; the extension of rights of membership based on logics of belonging defined by settler colonialism (United States, Canada, Australia, Israel), heritage, and the particular population dynamics in play under and following colonialism (Europe, Gulf states; also East Asia); the management of documentation to identify who belongs and holds citizenship rights (passports and visas); and the identification and management of internal others who are temporary or permanent residents but who are denied full citizenship rights. The chorus of scholars cited here have carefully charted how these processes took shape over centuries of what Cedric Robinson (2000 [1983]) called “racial capitalism”: the systemic processes of exploitation and profit that characterized settler colonialism, plantation slavery, the displacement of indigenous people, and the creation of racialized mobile populations of immigrant indentured labor and workers. Concurrently, official policy and populist rhetoric in countries across the global north cohered an understanding of belonging that enabled the delineation, containment, and exclusion of those defined as foreign others—those who do not really belong to the nation. Policing the mobility of those who do not really belong has become a primary occupation of states in the global north, through a growing array of surveillance technologies that turn racialized bodies into borders to be monitored and interrupted.
Impoverishment and Disenfranchisement
The second element of apartheid is the rendering of ordinary life as unsustainable in areas designated for the racialized underclass while also ensuring that the apartheid state maintains a hand in monitoring and managing such areas. Scholars have recorded the devastating impact on local lives in the global south of a wide variety of interventions by the global north, actions that followed and sometimes continued the decades of plunder by colonial extraction, including the following:
1. Military interventions such as support for dictatorships, insurgencies, and wars that left devastation and vast population displacement in their wake.14
2. Austerity regimes imposed by multilateral institutions based in the global north in the form of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) that diminished the provision of public services, produced widespread unemployment, opened national resources to the marketplace, sparked riots over food prices, and produced a crisis of legitimacy for governments.15 Millions of those displaced from their jobs or their land by austerity programs left home to look for work, becoming excess workers within the new neoliberal world economic order.
3. Corporate capitalist plunder throughout the global south by agents of the global north seeking to extract profitable resources either directly, through agreements with militias or local political elites that bypass and exploit local residents, or through imposing mandates regarding land tenure and agricultural practices that benefit foreign corporations.16
4. Trade agreements that benefit the global north and hobble the global south, like the effect of NAFTA in Mexico that devastated Mexican farmers (Holmes 2013; Nevins 2008).
5. Large-scale land acquisition for the production of biofuels, timber, and food crops in places like Sudan, Mali, Madagascar, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Mozambique by firms and governments from China, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Japan, Europe, and the United States (Sassen 2014). Economies weakened by structural adjustment policies have been unable to absorb the displaced, producing impoverishment and exodus.
Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) has argued that late liberalism is about making any form of life that does not create market value dispensable, and, if such non-market-productive life forms are defined as threatening to the market, then the state strangles them as a potential security risk. When applied to a theory of global apartheid, it becomes clear that the aggressive penetration of neoliberal capitalism (and capitalist plunder) in the global south has created “excess populations” that are to be either captured for the market as cheap producers, exploitable workers, or temporary guest workers or made expendable through forced removals and displacements, incarceration into refugee camps, or being allowed to sicken and die. The patterning of this transformation is driven by a racist logic of securitization that defines bodies in the global south as either security threats to or exploitable labor for the global north.
Identity Documentation and Refusal
In response to immigration panics, the global north has consolidated what some have referred to as a “fortress” operation through expanding deportations and tightening the requirements for allowing entry that reflect a clear geographic and racial bias (Carr 2012; Cetti 2015; Davis 2005; Miller 2012). People in the global north who lack appropriate entry documents face a context that analysts call “crimmigration” (see Vasquez 2015): immigration panics that conflate undocumented status with criminality or terrorism, drawing out racialized fears of immigrants and producing a surge of policing and surveillance to identify, incarcerate, and remove the undocumented (see also Gomberg-Muñoz 2016b; Hing 2009). The racial logics motivating and guiding these practices mirror the management of pass law violations in apartheid South Africa that filled jails with Black people. In the global north of today, just as in apartheid South Africa of the last century, states have embarked on programs of mass refusal and mass incarceration to discipline, punish, and remove from society undocumented racialized foreigners. Containment and refusal policies include the management of the international refugee regime—a paramount example of the link between nationalist associations of race and place, identity documentation, and border control—and guest and temporary worker programs that allow border crossing only for the purpose of labor exploitation.
Gaining official refugee status by the UNHCR is made contingent on a strict reading of political persecution that gives people the right to have crossed an international border to make a claim of persecution but then strips them of all meaningful political and civil rights in countries where they do not “belong” while their claims are reviewed by authorities. The formal global process of refugee identity documentation and management makes extensive use of refugee camps—what Khosravi (2011) calls “the most significant characteristic of the modern nation-state” (70)—as holding facilities to restrict the mobility of refugees. The international system of such camps protects state sovereignty, and specifically the sovereignty of wealthier countries in the global north that fund the agencies that manage refugees, from the movement of people in the global south, where the majority of refugees originate and the majority of refugee camps are located (Gatrell 2013; Hyndman 2000; Legomsky 2006; Verdirame and Harrell-Bond 2005). As Albahari (2015) has observed, the “overarching aspiration” of Frontex, the European Union (EU) agency responsible for border control policy created in 2005, is to ensure that “potential asylum seekers and persons needing protection do not reach the territory of EU countries in the first place” (90) because of the legal obligation to consider the asylum applications of those who manage to cross the EU border. The same desire governs asylum policy in the United States and in Australia, whose brutal militarized efforts to bar ships carrying refugees from docking have prompted international outrage (New York Times Editorial Board 2015a).
Israel’s version of this theme is the construction of the largest detention center in the world as well as a wall across the Sinai to thwart African refugees, while flatly denying almost all asylum claims and blocking any right to legal employment or state benefits for African immigrants (Shamir and Mundlak 2013). Elsewhere in the global north, Japan and South Korea accept very few refugees each year, citing concerns about maintaining cultural and racial integrity as a justification for their closed-door policy. The GCC states have allowed some refugees to enter, but as temporary guests and not as refugees with a path to citizenship.
Critical scholars thus argue that the international management of refugees enacts a fundamental inequality that grants power to the global north over people in the global south who are fleeing persecution, war, or disaster, often for reasons enumerated in the previous section.17 Meanwhile, people who carry passports from the global north can usually go wherever they want.
Because people from the global south are on the move for a variety of reasons that do not neatly fit into the official requirement for refugee status, the global north has emplaced other forms of containment, such as detention centers and holding facilities, in addition to refugee camps, to arrest the movement of those who lack official entry visas. Detention centers originated in South Africa when the English created internment camps during the Boer War and have since become a favored model for countries across the global north for managing unwanted immigrants who are suspected of lacking an authorization of residence (Fassin 2011). In the United States, the 1986 and 1996 immigration reform acts expanded the criteria for detaining and deporting immigrants, allowing the number of detainees to balloon to over 400,000 per year since 2012, held across a shadowy and secretive network of public and private facilities, with a budget for their detention in 2016 of over $2 billion. Over 30,000 immigrants, the vast majority from Mexico and Central America, are imprisoned in detention centers in the United States on any given day, a quota set by Congress and fulfilled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Consequently, the business of detention has become hugely profitable, with the two major private contractors posting net profits of $301 million (Corrections Corporation of America) and $115 million (GEO Group) in 2013 alone (Detention Watch Network, n.d.; Fleischner 2016; Gavett 2011; Gonzalez-Barrera and Krogstad 2014; Miller 2014).
In addition to detention centers within their borders, some countries are increasingly intercepting migrants at sea long before they reach the border and removing them into off-shore holding facilities (Amnesty International 2016; Flynn 2014; Legomsky 2006). In addition, countries in the global north are now outsourcing the detention of migrants to transit countries where they can be kept far from the borders of the global north: the EU border has been pushed into Turkey, Mali, Libya, Senegal, Tunisia, Morocco, and Ukraine, which receive European funding to detain and deport migrants despite the horrid conditions in some of their detention facilities (Albahari 2015; Cetti 2015; Lucht 2011; Trilling 2015). Because these agreements originated from the very small numbers of Africans attempting to reach Spain and Italy in the 1990s, Ruben Andersson (2014b) argues that the massive outpouring of investments in border security prior to 2013 (e.g., prior to the Syrian crisis) was explicitly to keep black Africans from moving north. The racist logics driving border security penetrate into North African countries charged with detaining black Africans who periodically round up black people to display for official visits from their European funders (Andersson 2014a).
Similarly, the US border now exists between Mexico and Guatemala, where the United States funds and empowers Mexican security forces to detain and deport migrants from farther south.18 Such policing operates outside of American, European, and Australian regulatory control, is subject to little oversight or transparency, and offers countries on whose behalf migrants are detained and deported deniability about human rights abuses conducted by the countries and contractors they fund.
Detention removes from society those considered undesirable while authorities decide where they should go. The spectacular rise in deportations—to 2.5 million people in the United States over the past decade—has led scholars to call this the Age of Removal and to label the United States as a Deportation Regime (Marshall 2016). Since deportations require authorities to figure out where they think deportees belong based on the logic that ties people to place, people are deported to countries they may have left as infants and perhaps never even visited. The resonances with apartheid South Africa’s insistence that Black South Africans “belong” to homelands that they may have never visited is obvious. Research on the fate of deportees reveals the stigma, dislocation, and alienation they experience after being deported to countries where they lack social networks, language skills, and political rights. They are “de facto aliens in their country of citizenship” (Coutin 2010:206).
The disregard for human life, dignity, and basic rights evinced by refugee camps, detention centers, off-shore holding facilities, and deportation is made even more brutally clear with the murderous effects of border management regimes whereby Mediterranean maritime patrols for Frontex push migrants into more dangerous sea routes, the Prevention through Deterrence strategy along the US-Mexican border funnels migrants into ever more hostile desert environments, and Australia’s maritime patrols push boats overloaded with migrants back out to sea. Because of these strategies an estimated 20,000 people drowned in the Mediterranean during 1994–2014—and a record high of over 5,000 in 2016 alone—trying to reach Europe. Thousands have died in the Sonoran Desert, most disappeared by the desert’s desiccating power before their remains can be discovered. An estimated 2,000 people have died, most by drowning, at the Australian frontier during 2000–2016 (Albahari 2015; BBC News 2014; Border Crossing Observatory, n.d.; De Léon 2015; New York Times Editorial Board 2015a, 2015b). The now-normalized practices of abandoning people in refugee camps, incarcerating people in secretive detention centers, and interrupting migrant routes in order to push people into life-threatening environments show the centrality of racism for creating categories of the disposable and killable and the lengths to which countries in the global north will go to restrict the entry of brown people from the global south because they lack entry documents.
Such outcomes will likely only increase with the emergence of smart borders that use a combination of biometric and other data sets to manage mobility. For example, the biometric border utilized by the US VISIT (US Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology) program relies on a strategy of defining the mobile according to a hierarchy of “risk” characteristics. An algorithmic analysis of a broad array of data sets, including biometric, health, financial, educational, travel, communications, and other information produces a risk assessment of each traveler and identifies risky categories of people, long before a traveler reaches the US border. As Louise Amoore (2006) argues, the application of biometric borders and the push to clearly and unambiguously define illegitimate travelers will mean that the undocumented can be profiled as terrorists and thus made subject to violent interventions, including detention, imprisonment, and death. Since racial profiling is allowed by the US Department of Homeland Security and by border security operations in the EU and Canada, there is no doubt that Smart Borders will continue to utilize racial criteria to target immigrants, most especially the undocumented, for scrutiny and disposability (Menjívar 2014; Shields 2015; Vukov 2016).
Labor Exploitation
And yet, while engineering the most highly elaborated border controls ever, the global north remains dependent on the labor of border crossers for everything from agriculture to domestic service, restaurant and hotel work, elder and childcare, amusement parks, poultry and seafood processing, logging, heavy construction, sex work, and more. Because the demand for cheap labor confronts the fortress mentality, many countries in the global north have created complex, layered forms of “hierarchical integration” (Razsa and Kurnik 2012)—policies that allow the entry of temporary migrants to perform certain economic functions while denying them basic rights of self-determination, democratic participation, and civil protections, just like South Africa’s pass law system. In fact, guest worker programs in the global north are modeled on South Africa’s pass system to regulate Black labor for the benefit of White employers (Hahamovitch 2011). In reviewing Europe’s efforts to create a shared approach to managing migrant workers, Feldman (2012) shows how in the early 2000s neo-nationalists who favored policies to protect the White working class and cultural integrity came to an agreement with neoliberals who welcome the economic benefits of globalization on a strategy to allow cyclical migration into Europe of temporary guest workers. This compromise approach, utilized as well in the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, and the Gulf States, satisfies almost everyone except the migrants themselves, he argues.
Temporary migrants are allowed to cross borders into countries in the global north through a dizzying array of work visa categories that apply to different sectors of the economy and carry different rights and protections. Work visas, which are intended to ensure control over imported workers, share a set of similar characteristics across the global north: most are temporary, forbid migrant workers from bringing their families, are controlled by employers and not workers, and are often managed by labor brokers who charge high fees to prospective workers, leaving them deeply indebted. They are designed to create a flexible, replaceable, disempowered, and disposable work force that cannot make demands on the host country and will not challenge the cultural integrity of the host culture.
Reports by ethnographers and labor activists about the consequences for workers of the guest worker visa programs for agricultural workers in the United States and Canada are uniformly dire, leading the Southern Poverty Law Center (2013) to call them “a modern-day system of indentured servitude” (2). Because workers are bound to the employers who control their visas, it is nearly impossible to challenge widespread wage theft, derelict housing, denial of access to medical care, abuse, confiscation of documents, retaliation, debt bondage, and blacklisting (Benson 2008; Binford 2013; Brennan 2014; Hahamovitch 2011; Holmes 2013; Southern Poverty Law Center 2013). The GCC countries are those most dependent on guest workers, where guest workers primarily from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Indonesia comprise between 50% and 90% of the population in each country. Guest workers arrive through the kefala (or kafala) system. Kefala visas are controlled by employers, do not grant workers protection by labor laws, forbid their involvement in labor unions, deny them a path toward citizenship, require celibacy of women guest workers, impose stringent rules about family reunification, and make it nearly impossible to protest abuse (see AlShehabi 2015; Dito 2015; Gardner 2010; Mahdavi 2016; Parreñas 2008). Similarly, Israeli law stipulates that migrant workers can never be considered residents for purposes of social security benefits, must permanently remove their babies from Israel when a mother’s visa expires, and cannot hold a guest worker visa at the same time as another family member (Mundlak 2007; Willen 2007).
In all countries where they are used, guest worker programs enable the importation and expulsion of people in response to economic fluctuations, political currents, and security panics. Just as with the periodic deportation frenzies of Mexican workers in the United States during the twentieth century (Nevins 2008; Ngai 2004), GCC states expelled Yemeni, Jordanian, and Palestinian workers after their home countries supported Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War (Flynn and Grange 2015), and after the first intifada, Israel replaced Palestinian workers who commuted from the Occupied Territories with imported workers from Thailand, Turkey, China, and the Philippines. The 200,000 workers imported by Israel during the 1990s became 10%–12% of the labor force and were targeted by mass deportations in 2002–2004 and again in 2012 in response to an economic downturn and a political campaign that promoted the deportations as a security measure to protect Israel’s Jewish character (Raijman and Kemp 2007; Shamir and Mundlak 2013; Willen 2007). The “exclusionary and oppressive effects” (Shamir and Mundlak 2013:128) of the legal regime governing migrant workers are multiplied by abusive racial profiling practices during deportation campaigns, ensuring that migrant workers are persistently and only recognized as temporary and expendable foreigners. As Menjívar (2014) has noted for the United States, across the global north, in the name of security, citizens are comfortable with the suspension of civil rights of immigrants in the form of racial profiling, detention, surveillance, criminalization, and deportation.
In many countries in the global north, the contained and controlled workforce of authorized guest workers is augmented by a much larger workforce of undocumented people who endure exploitation, racism, insecurity, and the persistent threat of deportation in order to perform jobs that citizens refuse to do. Nondemocratic states, like in those in the Gulf, can import huge numbers of guest workers while enforcing restrictions on their rights and making “draconian use of deportation,” but, as Castles (2006:746) suggests, democratic countries such as the United States and Japan prefer to tolerate high levels of undocumented workers instead, because of the possibility that documented guest workers will use democratic ideologies and institutions to fight for expanded rights and pathways to citizenship.
The numbers are very high, indeed. One in four foreign-born persons in the United States is unauthorized, totaling over 11 million people in recent years (Dreby 2015). Mexicans comprise 58% of the undocumented in the United States, many of whom work in agriculture, where Mexicans, half of whom are unauthorized, constitute 94% of the workforce (Holmes 2013). Migration scholars in the United States argue that the current approach to migrant labor in the United States intentionally creates an exploitable racialized underclass. Visas for nonagricultural short-term jobs are capped far below demand, and, while visas for agricultural workers are not capped, many employers choose to hire undocumented workers rather than confront the bureaucracy required to apply for legal papers for the workers they seek to import (Wilson 2013). Undocumented people earn less, pay taxes but cannot collect benefits, have less job security and more dangerous jobs, have greater financial insecurities, cannot complain about poor work conditions or abuses in the workplace, and have no opportunities for upward mobility. Their situation is “precarity as policy” (Gomberg-Muñoz 2016a:147).19
The outrage is compounded: across the United States, immigrants held in detention centers awaiting trial and possible deportation are used as cheap labor. Some receive only credits toward toiletries and food in return, and others earn about 13 cents an hour, a pay rate put in place for prisoners in 1950 and never changed since then for immigrant detainees. During 2013, according to the New York Times, between 60,000 and 135,000 immigrants “worked in the federal government’s nationwide patchwork of detention centers—more than worked for any other single employer in the country” (Urbina 2014). These are not people convicted of a crime—they are civil detainees awaiting a judge’s determination of their legal status.
Ethnographies about the experiences of those in the global north who hold guest worker and undocumented status describe the racialized hierarchies of belonging, rights, and human value created and reinforced by migration controls (see, e.g., Benson 2008; Boehm 2016; Brennan 2014; De Genova 2005; Feldman 2012; Gardner 2010; Gomberg-Muñoz 2011; Holmes 2013; Jackson 2013; Khosravi 2011; Mahdavi 2016; Parreñas 2008; Willen 2007). The resonance with South Africa’s apartheid era pass laws is evident. What these ethnographers describe is a system of labor control that depends on importing people from regions that have been made unsustainable for human life and ensuring their exploitability in the global north by criminalizing the presence of those who lack documents or by making their presence in their place of employment dependent on their employer, who holds their labor contract. The labor structure simultaneously ensures that they submit to racialized hierarchies that put them on the bottom and denies them rights and recognition as members of the national body.
The Militarized Global Apartheid Apparatus
Thus far I have been building my argument about global apartheid. Here I turn directly to the militarized security apparatus that maintains that apartheid. In the past two decades, the EU and the United States, as well as Israel, have transformed border security into a spectacularly militarized operation that absorbs ever-growing resources, sets a global standard for nationalist aspirations, and feeds xenophobic political rhetoric.
The US border, most especially in the south, has become a militarized zone with the transfer of military technology and strategy, including helicopters, aircraft, balloons, drones, radar, surveillance technology, high-resolution video cameras, satellites, vehicles, weapons, and other hardware, some repurposed from wars abroad. In a first for the military, legislative reforms in the 1990s linked to the War on Drugs allowed the military to join local police and border patrol to provide training, equipment, technology, border surveillance and intelligence, and even to deploy ground troops (Dunn 2001; Heyman 2008; Palafox 2001; Rosas 2007). The effect of border militarization, in concert with the Constitution Free Zone stretching inland 100 miles from the border, is a de facto military occupation where policing has shifted from community oriented to militaristic; where militarized language and behavior are now the norm for local police and border patrol agents; where military tactics like raids, interrogations, and extensive surveillance techniques are routinely employed; where military training to identify specific targets translates to racial profiling to catch those suspected of lacking documents; where militarized operations are conducted in secret without public review; and where civil rights do not need to be observed (Dunn 2001; Miller 2014; Nevins 2001).20
And yet, despite the massive militarization of the US border, the vast majority of immigrants who attempt to cross without documents are successful, leading some commentators to suggest that the militarized performance of border security is intended to appease white racism and discipline brown migrants, drawing a clearly demonstrated “line of exclusion, guaranteeing eternal inequality between those who have and those who do not” (Miller 2012), while also ensuring a steady supply of exploitable labor. The militarized border is thus like a spectacularly costly form of hazing that makes visible a “merciless logic of disposability” (Rosas 2007:97) that stops some and kills some while forcing those who successfully get across to endure painful, wrenching, humiliating journeys that demonstrate with utter clarity that the global north sees them as replaceable, exploitable, abusable, and forgettable.
Even before the refugee “crisis” of 2015, the EU similarly plowed money into militarizing its border regions in an attempt to push back African and Middle Eastern migrants, investing 2 billion euros in fences, surveillance systems, and personnel during 2007–2013 (Trilling 2015). The Frontex budget expanded from 19.1 million euros in 2006 to 84.9 million in 2012, reaching 98 million euros by 2014 (Andersson 2014b). Meanwhile, the maritime rescue operation Mare Nostrum by the Italian navy launched in 2013 was replaced a year later by Triton, a Frontex maritime operation created to secure the border rather than offer rescue (which was subsequently taken on by humanitarian volunteers and activists; Tazzioli 2015; see also Albahari 2015). The rising number of deaths by drowning is the unsurprising result of a militarized curtain intended to push people into the most dangerous sea routes. Because militarizing the borders is legal, migrant deaths in the sea and in the desert cannot be legally attributed to the border security policies of the global north, making deaths on the border battlefield unacknowledged as a casualty of war.
Conclusion
The security apparatus described above, like apartheid, dehumanizes racialized others through blocking their routes of mobility, channeling them into the most dangerous regions of the sea and the desert, incarcerating them in refugee camps in remote and inhospitable regions for indeterminate periods, and subjecting them to removals from white space over and over and over again. The United States, Europe, Australia, Israel, and other countries in the global north are claiming to maximize their own self-protection through gating, policing, removing, and drowning people. These are state-sanctioned investments in forms of structural violence that cause people to die. Border controls, deportations, and deaths in the desert and at sea reveal state sovereignty at its points of enactment and clarify how the state uses law, territorial boundaries, and militarized security structures to promote and ensure a particular hegemonic racial identity. In the United States, the extensive removal of minorities into prisons and immigrants into detention centers affirms, in case there was any doubt, the hegemony of whiteness as an ongoing state project. States shape populations by policing who gains entry and by removing the undesirables. Removals are acts of racism—they are racist projects of cultural consolidation, and they are often hidden within self-serving discourses of security. Apartheid in South Africa collapsed because of its unsustainable internal contradictions, the debilitating financial cost of its security apparatus, and its inherent evil. This is something worth thinking about.
Notes
Catherine Besteman is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Colby College (4702 Mayflower Drive, Waterville, Maine 04101, USA [clbestem@colby.edu]).
1. As of this writing, the closure decision has been suspended.
2. This paper is a highly abbreviated version of a book project that develops the arguments, theoretical concepts, and ethnographic examples in much greater detail, including the cases of India, East Asia, and China, which are not discussed here due to space limitations. Furthermore, because the article condenses a broadly comparative and nuanced argument, I am aware that it may appear to reify categories like the “global north” and the “global south.” I hope readers will understand that these categories are, of course, internally complex and diverse and that my use of broad-brush tactics here is a heuristic necessity.
3. First circulated as a PowerPoint slide, the argument later became the basis for an Esquire article and then a book of the same name (Barnett 2004). Barnett also includes in the Functioning Core some of South America, as well as India and China. I do not include the latter two states as part of the global north because of their status as migrant-sending states. India, in fact, was the country of origin of the largest number of migrants in the world in 2017, at 17 million people (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2017). Barnett does not include the Gulf states, which are presumably lumped into the Middle East, placed within the Non-integrating Gap.
4. According to the New America Foundation (n.d.), the United States launched 41 raids and drone strikes in Somalia between March 2003 and January 2017, killing an estimated 348–415 people.
5. For anthropological critiques of Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree, see Haugerud (2005) and Nordstrom (2005).
6. In South Africa, “Black” has historically been used to include people defined as ethnically Black African, Indian, and Coloured, a legal category created for everyone else who did not qualify as white (such as people with Khoi, Malay, Chinese, and mixed race ancestry). The set of policies that came to constitute apartheid in South Africa did not appear in 1948 as a newly designed model of social order; rather, they reflected and persistently expanded colonial era practices of racial identification and segregation, the restriction of voting rights to White people, divide-and-rule governance practices for Black people, and the exploitation of Black workers—all fundamental components of colonial intervention and control in South Africa that preceded the rise of the apartheid state under the National Party (Frederickson 1981; Wolpe 1972; see also Mamdani 1996; Pierre 2013).
7. The South African government removed people categorized as Indians and Coloureds to separate residential zones, not homelands.
8. This statement is not intended to imply that the homelands did not carry emotional and affective meaning for those who lived there. See Dlimini (2009).
9. See Gatrell (2013) on post–World War I population movements in Europe that pushed people into areas that “matched” their nationalities as new nation-states consolidated. Sassen (1999) argues that World War I refugee flows produced new, interlinked conceptions of state sovereignty and nationalism in Europe, a conception that became globally hegemonic.
10. There is a huge literature on this point. See, e.g., Frederickson (1981); Hage (2000); Losurdo (2011); Lowe (2015); Mills (1997); Shamir and Mundlak (2013); Wolfe (1999, 2006).
11. “Europe was made by its imperial projects,” write Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper (1997:1).
12. See, e.g., Alexander (2012) on mass incarceration, Brodkin (1999) on residential segregation, and Massey and Denton (1993) on the demographics of segregation.
13. See also the essays in Soske and Jacobs (2015) assessing the ways in which Israel is an apartheid state.
14. On Central and South America, see Bohmer and Schulman (2008); Coutin (1993); García (2006); Grandin (2006); Manz (2004); Tate (2015); on Africa, see Besteman (1999); Morgan (1990); Nordstrom (1997); Weissman (2014); on Southeast Asia, see Tang (2015); on Iraq and Afghanistan, see Crawford, Lutz, and Savell (n.d.).
15. Of the many reports that explain and critique SAPS, see in particular Brown (2015:135–150); Caplan (2006); Ferguson (2006); Finnegan (2003); Goldman (2005); Grandin (2006); Harrison (2002); Harvey (2005); Klein (2007); Pfeiffer and Chapman (2010); Sassen (2014); Stiglitz (2002).
16. For examples, see Clarke (2010); Grandin (2006); Hedges and Sacco (2012); Soluri (2005); Striffler and Moberg (2003); Tabuchi, Rigby, and White (2017); Watts (2006).
17. For ethnographic discussions of these points, see Agier (2005); Hyndman (2000); Nyers (2006); Turner (2010); Verdirame and Harrell-Bond (2005). On the narrowing of opportunities for asylum, see Bohmer and Schuman (2008); Fassin (2005).
18. Carasik (2015) reports that the United States provided Mexico with nearly $3 billion to combat the movement of unauthorized people and drugs between 2008 and 2015. See also Menjívar (2014).
19. The implications of such a large undocumented workforce extend throughout society, as an estimated 16.6 million people in the United States live in mixed-status families, where undocumented workers are dependent on their documented spouses for things like driving and bank accounts and where families face the daily fear of being torn apart by discovery and deportation (Boehm 2012; Dreby 2015; Gomberg-Muñoz 2016a; Vasquez 2015). Gomberg-Muñoz (2016a), who has conducted several extensive studies of undocumented Mexican migrants in the United States, writes, “The current employment visa system does not seem to prevent the migration of low-paid workers so much as it keeps workers in low-paying positions by foreclosing their possibilities for legal immigration and any opportunities for upward mobility that legality affords” (40).
20. The number of people employed to carry out this work is staggering. The Border Patrol expanded threefold in the decade after 9/11. After the Border Patrol joined the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the Customs and Border Protection Division (CBP) in 2003, the CBP became the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the United States with 60,000 employees. Immigration and Customs Enforcement employs another 20,000. Miller (2014) adds to this the 200,000 employed by the Department of Homeland Security and the 650,000 police officers affiliated with border security to claim that the total number of personnel assigned to work on border security has become “the equivalent of a small army” (18). The financial resources are equally staggering: the Border Patrol budget has tripled since 9/11, reaching $3.8 billion in 2015 within a CBP budget of $12.8 billion, within a DHS budget of $61 billion (US Department of Homeland Security 2016).
