Homeland, p.37
Homeland, page 37
How did things get so bad at home, anyway? That larger question is beyond Peters’s remit, but his description still offers some clues as to what the answer might be. As one ideal training site, we have the “unusable” “industrial plants” that huddle ominously on the outskirts of America’s urban landscapes. As another, we have “housing projects.” These projects might once have symbolized the optimism of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, a project undertaken when America’s growth engine was roaring, but now they are “uninhabitable,” although Peters must know that many people do, in fact, continue to inhabit them. The factories became unusable because growth slowed and the corporations that built them stopped investing in their operation, and the projects, which once housed a class of people referred to as the working poor, are now little more than decrepit containers in which to store people who are still impoverished but increasingly struggle to find any work at all.
This pessimistic vision may seem like a non sequitur, a somewhat paranoid conception of domestic social decay shoehorned into what is otherwise a coherent (if very contestable) account of what the United States will need to do to maintain its global dominance in the twenty-first century. It is not. Underneath the racism that animates the passage, Peters also gestures toward an awareness that global stagnation is producing deindustrialization, persistent underemployment, and growing surplus populations inside the United States as well. During the first decade of the war on terror, the kinds of training, tactics, and equipment Peters urged the military to develop would be tested and refined throughout Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and elsewhere. Following the global financial crisis, however, many Americans would come to realize that economic stagnation and precarity were coming for them as well. In turn, the government realized that this new kind of war fighting also had many useful domestic applications. If the military the United States had built and the tactics it had developed could be sent to foreign countries to manage surplus populations and their attendant problems—from political instability to guerrilla insurgencies to migration—then those same tactics could also be used to manage urban poverty, the discontent of the chronically underemployed, and unwanted migrants at home.
Skip Notes
* This phrase reveals a lot about the extent to which capitalists have naturalized an economic system that is, in reality, man-made. In finance-speak, “secular” means anything not pertaining to the business cycle, which is the term for the process by which capitalist economies grow, eventually overheat, suffer some kind of crisis, struggle through a recession, and then begin to grow again. One expects growth to fall in the latter stages of the business cycle, but if growth falls even once the effects of the business cycle have been accounted for, then you have a “secular” decline in growth. What’s revealing about the term is what it doesn’t say. If anything not related to the business cycle is “secular,” then the business cycle itself is divine.
Chapter 9
Borders, Squares, Real Estate, Streets
I can’t breathe.
—protester recovering from tear gas exposure in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, 2011[1]
I can’t breathe!
—protester arrested at Occupy Wall Street, New York City, 2011[2]
I CAN’T BREATHE!
—chant heard at Black Lives Matter protests, United States, 2014–20
Americans don’t use the phrase “surplus population” when they talk about the un- and underemployed people who try to make their way to the United States each year. Instead, they talk about “illegal immigrants,” and they talk about the country’s southern border. In the early spring of 2005, hundreds of journalists, outfitted with their usual array of notepads, audio recorders, and video cameras, began to gather in Tombstone, Arizona. Situated about thirty miles from the Mexican border, Tombstone had been a boomtown for silver mining during the late nineteenth century, as well as the site of the legendary O.K. Corral gunfight in 1881. A ghost town for much of the twentieth century once the silver ran out, Tombstone’s population barely surpassed a thousand in the twenty-first, a number the visiting journalists, American and international alike, might well have doubled all on their own. They had come to report on the national coming-out party of the Minuteman Project, a group established, in the words of one of its founders, to “launch a movement against illegal immigration” and “demand action from the federal government.”[3] A six-month recruiting drive had summoned nearly a thousand volunteers to Tombstone (now the town’s population had nearly tripled). They were there to carry out a monthlong “border watch” along a several-dozen-mile stretch of desert. They sat on lawn chairs in combat fatigues, peering into Mexico through binoculars and keeping their sidearms at the ready. They were there to hunt for migrants. With the Minuteman-to-journalist ratio sitting close to one to one, they had little trouble getting out their message.
The group was founded by two men. Chris Simcox was a former kindergarten and grade school teacher from Los Angeles. He had a failed marriage and a teenage son. Following September 11, his ex-wife filed for sole custody after Simcox began leaving angry voicemail messages on her phone, ranting about the impending nuclear destruction of Los Angeles and the necessity of teaching their son how to use firearms. “I will no longer trust anyone in this country,” he said in one message. “My life has changed forever, and if you don’t get that, you are brainwashed like everybody else.”[4] He moved to Tombstone, turned the local newspaper, the Tumbleweed, into a forum for his anti-immigration views, and began running small border watch operations in 2002. He couldn’t get himself into the national media, however, until he linked up with Jim Gilchrist a couple of years later. A Vietnam veteran and retired accountant, Gilchrist contacted Simcox after being impressed by one of his interviews and proposed the national border watch event.[5] Their meeting catalyzed a plan for action that had been building inside Gilchrist for years. It was on September 11, he wrote, that “he realized that he was, in effect, an American without a country….As the events of that day unfolded, they revealed that the murderers were Islamo-fascist terrorists who had overstayed their visas and were living in the United States illegally. If immigration laws had simply been enforced, the lives lost that day might have been spared.”[6]
Drawing from various parts of American mythology, from the militia-driven rebelliousness of the Revolution to the flinty-eyed determination of the frontier days, the Minuteman Project made for compelling and effective political theater, which was good, because it wasn’t terribly effective at anything else. The news media oohed and aahed over the handful of migrants the Minutemen spotted during their initial monthlong border watch, but false alarms and long, boring nights out in the desert chill would become much more common than genuine sightings, which occurred, on average, only once every fifty hours on patrol.[7] Even when a patrol did find migrants, they couldn’t pursue and apprehend them. That was the U.S. Border Patrol’s job, and the Border Patrol wasn’t about to tolerate a group of self-selected and untrained vigilantes stopping Mexicans at gunpoint or attempting to carry out citizens’ arrests. As the Project’s leaders knew, that was for the best, because the organization’s volunteers were not exactly paragons of youth, health, or fitness. Veterans and law enforcement officers made up a large portion of the group’s ranks, but not veterans of the war on terror, and not on-duty police officers who had taken time off in order to serve their country at the border. The veterans had served in Vietnam or even Korea—one Minuteman was eighty-three—and the police officers were retirees.[8] They were people whose careers or marriages or military service had ended long ago, and they were hardly in any condition to chase down young migrants desperately fleeing Mexico in search of work. When they did see migrants moving through the landscape, the most they could do was phone it in to Border Patrol and, if they were close enough, shine flashlights at them. Their effect on the number of migrants who successfully crossed the border landed somewhere between “negligible” and “none.”
That is not to say the patrols served no purpose at all. In addition to the many column inches and hours of television coverage the Minutemen won for their cause, the patrols allowed those who participated to feel as though they, too, were helping to fight America’s war, even if military service or police employment were no longer available to them. The sociologist Harel Shapira, who spent time with the Minutemen both at their camp and on patrol and then wrote a very informative and entertaining book about the experience, found that even as they failed to catch migrants, they succeeded at creating a nostalgic fantasy world in which they could live dangerously and heroically. Men and women in the group were expected to fill their traditional gender roles, with men going out on patrol and women handling food preparation and camp administration, even though patrolling almost never involved anything more physically arduous than sitting in a lawn chair, bundling up against the nighttime cold, and holding a pair of binoculars up to one’s face.[9] The volunteers’ very presence at the camp also constituted an act of resistance against what they universally regarded as a disturbing deterioration of the national character. “Being a citizen does not mean sitting on the sofa with a can of beer and bag of potato chips while watching football,” one said. “The sad thing is that for many Americans today that is what it has come to mean.”[10] Volunteers wore military fatigues, amassed impressive caches of weapons, and adopted nicknames like the ones soldiers had in the army. (“Legolas” saw himself as a skilled tracker,[11] while “Blowfish,” who had served in Vietnam as a Green Beret, commanded more respect and deference than anyone else.)[12] Any military-grade thermal scopes or night-vision goggles that made their way into the group’s equipment stores became instant objects of fascination and desire.[13] Collectively, the high-tech gear, rugged desert setting, military argot, and largely imaginary sense of danger allowed the Minutemen to feel as though they were frontiersmen, Indian hunters, and soldiers in the new century’s first great war. “I was ready to enlist,” one said of the days following September 11. “I got this bum leg, but I would serve my country in a heartbeat.”[14] And another: “I can’t go and fight in Iraq, but I can come down here and make sure these borders are secure….You better believe those terrorists are trying to come through over here.”[15]
On the ground, all of this produced scenes like something out of a Coen brothers film. One volunteer mistook cows for migrants so many times that someone else put up a sign at camp: a picture of a cow below the words “To all people on the line: this is bovine in nature, and not to be confused with Illegal Aliens.”[16] One day on patrol, a trio of Minutemen who had invited the sociologist to tag along became convinced that the firefight they’d long anticipated was finally popping off. I’ll quote Shapira’s account at length:
I’m standing with Andrew. We’re facing the empty stretch of desert that is Mexico. And suddenly a helicopter comes at us. It is coming from our left, to the west, over the top of a mountain. It shuttles toward us, straddling the barbed wire fence that separates one stretch of desert from another.
…Mark rushes toward us. “Hey, did that helicopter have any writing on it?” There’s desperation in his voice. Andrew says it did not, seemingly happy that his own observations have been confirmed. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Mark continues in haste. “It was fucking unmarked. It was a Mexican fucking military helicopter.”
Jack races to his truck. He takes out two pistols from inside, and with his back [against] the driver’s side door he cocks them both. Mark makes a run to his own truck, pulls out his bulletproof vest, and proceeds to strap it on. Andrew hobbles in haste. He falls on the way. I help him up. He gives me an admiring glance. We make a run for Jack’s truck, where Mark is now also hunkered down. The exhilaration is contagious. The fear, the excitement, is intense. Everyone has at least one gun in their hands. Jack yells out, “They’re coming at us tonight, they’re fucking coming at us.” Mark puts a fresh clip into his gun. “There’s gonna be a god damn shoot-out tonight.” All of us are crouching beside Jack’s truck.
The helicopter disappeared, and the attack failed to materialize, but the trio were not dissuaded from their theory that it was undercover Mexican military. They hypothesized instead that the Mexicans had deployed aircraft to scout the Minutemen. “Maybe they also want to know where we are so they know where to bring the illegals so they can cross,” Mark said.[17]
Part of what made the Minuteman Project volunteers so ludicrous, aside from the slapstick hijinks, is that none of them seemed to understand what the border really is. The United States no longer has a border that one can see on a map. What it has is a border system, a set of physical barriers, surveillance techniques, law enforcement agencies, and checkpoints that allow the country’s security apparatus to scrutinize the public and intimate lives of impoverished migrants and business travelers alike, and whose agents are authorized to enforce the country’s migration laws not just at the border but deep in the heartland and in foreign countries thousands of miles away. Two decades after September 11, thwarting terrorism remains the government’s primary justification for this system, but its real function is to insulate the United States from the human consequences of the economic regime it manages. With growth slowing and no good solutions on offer, the global economy has in a sense decided that it simply has no use for as many as two billion of the earth’s inhabitants. As the steward and prime beneficiary of that economic system, the United States has decided in turn that those two billion people and their attendant problems will need to be monitored, tracked, and kept out of the homeland whenever possible.
That immigration could have inspired the kind of mediagenic and carnivalesque political theater that unfolded near Tombstone would have seemed unlikely during the 2000 presidential campaign. The 1990s had seen a concerted government effort to harden border security in California and Texas. By the end of the decade, however, the issue had largely fallen out of the conversation, as indicated by the fact that immigration never came up even once during the three presidential debates between Bush and Gore.[18] Little seemed poised to change in that respect during the first eight months of the Bush administration. If anything, the pressures on the Republican Party had more to do with easing immigration restrictions and carving a path toward legal residency for the millions of undocumented migrants who lived and worked in the country. Bush had received just a third of the Hispanic vote in 2000, and conventional wisdom held that Democrats enjoyed a natural electoral advantage with Latinos that would only increase with time. If Bush wanted a chance at a second term, he would need to do something significant to attract Hispanic support. Accordingly, legislation that would legalize the presence of the country’s undocumented migrants sat among his highest priorities heading into the second half of 2001, and supporters had reason to be optimistic about its passage. Major labor unions, Democrats, and self-identified “compassionate conservatives” might have disagreed on the details of the legislation, but all agreed that immigration reform was achievable in one form or another. “The entire political climate seems in hindsight almost unrecognizable,” as Daniel Denvir writes in his book on American nativism. “States like Utah, North Carolina, and Tennessee were issuing driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants.”[19]
This sense of openness and possibility surrounding immigration reform had vanished by the morning of September 12. Among the many painful bits of news to absorb over the following months were two reports that helped to revive immigration as a live issue on a national scale. First, while all nineteen of the September 11 hijackers had entered the country legally, variously bearing student, tourist, or business visas, the conservative journal National Review retrieved fifteen of those visa applications and found that none had been filled out properly, which should have resulted in their denial.[20] Second, the Immigration and Naturalization Service had approved student visas for two of the hijackers six months after they rather famously died while crashing planes into America’s most important buildings.[21] Not only was immigration policy too welcoming, but the people in charge of implementing it were incompetent as well.
With the country’s immigration laws and enforcement apparatus facing simultaneous crises of legitimacy, the federal government made a number of sweeping changes to both, and not the kinds Bush was talking about in the summer of 2001. On March 1, 2003, the U.S. Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the entire U.S. Border Patrol were reorganized under the same new parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security. This all but guaranteed that the government’s immigration officials and policy makers would now be much more focused on keeping immigrants out than on identifying the best ways to let them in. Visions of can-do strivers making their way to the United States in search of peace and prosperity were out. Now the rhetoric more closely mirrored that of people like Attorney General John Ashcroft, who said in 2002, “Our enemy’s platoons infiltrate our borders, quietly blending in with visiting tourists, students, and workers.”[22] In order to repel these platoons, the government increased the budget and swelled the ranks of the Border Patrol, which now lived under the parent agency Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In 2002, federal appropriations to the Border Patrol stood at $1.4 billion, already more than a fivefold increase from 1990. They would grow to $3 billion by 2010 and $3.8 billion by 2015.[23] The number of people working for the Border Patrol more than doubled over the same period.[24]
The Border Patrol became perhaps the most powerful and ubiquitous domestic law enforcement agency in the country. Part of this has to do with the extraordinary size of its jurisdiction. While you or I might think that a commonsense definition of America’s border region goes something like, “the parts of the country that are within a few miles of Mexico or Canada,” that is not how the government defines it. According to a regulatory measure instituted in 1953, the U.S. “border” comprises all inland territory within one hundred miles of the country’s international borders and coastlines. It is a thick outline drawn around the continental United States and Alaska. Because of its small size, Hawaii is entirely borderland. Within this jurisdiction, which includes some two-thirds of America’s roughly 330 million residents, the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution does not fully apply, because Customs and Border Protection officials are permitted to search anyone’s belongings without needing to obtain a warrant.[25] The range of tasks performed by Border Patrol agents is expansive: They establish vehicle checkpoints throughout the Sunbelt, question passengers on Amtrak trains and Greyhound buses about their citizenship, and conduct training missions in more than one hundred foreign countries, including Iraq.[26] As for the 100 million Americans who don’t live within the Border Patrol’s jurisdiction, they still fall under the authority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whose tens of thousands of officers operate throughout the country’s interior. Both organizations began to recruit heavily among veterans as soldiers started returning from Iraq and Afghanistan late in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and as the numbers of these Army grunts turned immigration cops increased, they brought with them the military tradition of coining derogatory nicknames for the enemy. In the 1960s and 1970s, North Vietnamese fighters had been referred to as “gooks.” In Iraq and Afghanistan, they were “hajjis” and “ragheads.” On the border, migrants were “tonks.” “Tonk” is the sound a migrant’s head makes when you hit it with a flashlight.[27]
