Narratives of Immigrants as a Threat and Criminalization of Immigrants and Their Movements

To achieve the criminalization of migrants, governments, media, and anti-migrant groups resort to narratives that portray them as inferior, unassimilable, and a threat to the country’s stability, national identity, labor markets, or national security.Footnote ¹⁰ The media shapes these public imaginaries, in which migrants are represented as violent and aggressive savages that must be stopped.Footnote ¹¹ Sharma argues there is a growing perceived need to protect migrant-receiving nations from “dangerous aliens.”Footnote ¹² Once the portrayal of immigrants as a threat is invented, governments and other agents justify the creation of laws that prevent and punish immigrants’ movements. The discursive representation of immigrants of color varies in different regions of the world, yet themes of immigrants as a problem and a threat are universally present. In the United States, for example, these populations have traditionally been depicted as a threat to national security and are considered violent and vicious.Footnote ¹³ Hooghe and Dassonneville state that narratives in the United States “focused on racist resentment toward ethnic minority groups,” mostly with regard to Mexicans.Footnote ¹⁴ Otto Santa Ana argues that the United States’ political narratives severely dehumanize immigrant workers.Footnote ¹⁵ This dehumanization includes animalizing immigrants, which means portraying them as wild animals or savages that must be hunted by potent border predators of the state. For instance, along the border regions of the United States and Mexico, it is common to use terms like coyotes to refer to smugglers and pollos (chickens) to describe undocumented immigrants.

Immigrants are considered a burden in other regions and are often used as scapegoats for internal social problems such as unemployment or security. In Europe, migrants have been used by some extreme right-wing parties, whose leaders take advantage of growing discontent toward immigration policies and the influx of refugees.Footnote ¹⁶ For these radical right-wing parties, immigrants threaten national identity (the “necessary” ethnic homogeneity) and also increase “competition” with locals for limited resources such as employment. In Europe, these narratives also permeate mobilizations in response to the refugee crisis.Footnote ¹⁷ Richmond and Valtonen argue that wealthy and predominantly White countries have initiated a crusade to protect themselves from these perceived threats to safeguard their territories and privileged lifestyles.Footnote ¹⁸ These discourses emphasize feelings of insecurity around immigrants, specifically the perceived threat they pose to the economy, society, racial purity, and national identity.Footnote ¹⁹ For Fennema, one reason for the resurgence of these parties and narratives as well as their sympathizers is the growing perception of the dysfunction of national governments.Footnote ²⁰ Decision-making is viewed as having been centralized at the level of international organizations. Thus, among the public, there is a strong belief that national governments have lost credibility, leadership, and control over their borders, and these new far-right parties advocate for recovering state control over their countries.Footnote ²¹

These ideologies have gained strength for different reasons. According to Richmond and Valtonen, these ideas grow due to the nostalgia evoked by a “simple life” – the idea that, in the past, the inhabitants of wealthy countries felt safer in more ethnically or racially homogeneous places.Footnote ²² With the demographic transformations linked to global migration, these groups now feel that they are living in less secure and more “chaotic” conditions because of ethnic diversity. Other scholars posit that these criminalizing characterizations originate in fears over global terrorism that intensified after the attacks on New York and Washington, DC (9/11/01), Madrid (3/11/04), and London (7/7/05). From such a perspective, all immigrants of color from poor countries are a threat that must be stopped and punished.Footnote ²³

Immigration Restriction and Immigrants’ Control in the United States

The United States was a sovereign nation for more than a century before immigration became a political issue. The first major piece of legislation on immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This Act set the bar for entry into the country and had an openly racist frame directed toward a specific group: Chinese workers. By excluding members of this group based on class and race, the Chinese Exclusion Act paved the way for the immigration policies of the twentieth century.Footnote ²⁴ Although repealed in 1943, the judicial decisions derived from the Chinese Exclusion Act still shape current legal approaches to immigration. The second relevant moment in immigration legislation was the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924, which expanded the regulations of the Chinese Exclusion Act and prohibited most immigration from Asia into the United States.Footnote ²⁵

These restrictive laws were repealed in 1965 with the passage of the Hart-Celler Act, which set an annual quota of 20,000 immigrants from each country of the world. This act changed the face of migration to the United States – from primarily European to increasingly Asian and Latin American. In this context of multiethnic migration, the United States began to pass new laws restricting the rights of migrants. The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) eliminated judicial review for some deportation orders and established mandatory detention for a significant number of non-citizens.Footnote ²⁶ They also allowed for the use of secret evidence in specific cases. Some of the most damaging consequences of these laws are the deportations of legal permanent residents. Under IIRIRA, if permanent legal residents are found guilty of “aggravated felonies,” they face mandatory deportation. Relatively minor crimes such as shoplifting or drug possession could lead to mandatory deportation for long-term residents.Footnote ²⁷

After these laws were implemented, immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean became more likely to be deported. The punitive and severe 1996 regulations disproportionately affect people of color. Kevin Johnson argues that, since the majority of immigrant populations living in the United States are minorities of color, the differential treatment toward non-citizens corresponds to legal practices that amount to racial discrimination.Footnote ²⁸ These practices have created an environment of tension and fear within Latino communities.Footnote ²⁹

The ideology of global apartheid was further strengthened with President Trump’s election. He campaigned for the presidency primarily on the slogan “Build the Wall.” Although there has long been a physical structure separating the United States from Mexico, this slogan itself is harmful to migrants as it implies that Mexicans pose a threat to the United States. On the campaign trail and as president, Trump has continued to take openly anti-immigrant positions. In several speeches, President Trump has portrayed immigrants as a threat by suggesting they are violent, criminal, and dangerous people.Footnote ³⁰ These anti-immigrant narratives, accompanied by a series of legislative decrees have led to the removal of thousands of immigrants and the expansion of immigration bans to more countries.

US Immigration Policy and the Southern Border

The ideology of global apartheid was challenged by the recent “Migrant Caravan” (or “Caravan for Life”), which began in 2018 in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. This caravan was formed by Salvadoran, Honduran, and Guatemalan migrants who escaped the economic deprivation and violence of their countries. According to different reports, the caravan reached in some moments 17,000 people.Footnote ³¹ However, official data confirms that only five thousand of them reached the northern border of Mexico. On their way, Guatemala and Mexico closed their borders in response to pressure from the US government. However, this migratory event marked a milestone since it was not the traditional clandestine migration; the caravan was visible, massive, and filmed live in broad daylight. The caravan challenged and confronted classic actors in migration processes such as traffickers, governments, and NGOs. The migrant caravan reconfigured conventional ideas of clandestine migration. It also reconfigured territories, particularly for Mexico, which has traditionally been a migrant transit country and, on this occasion, became a “barred” country.Footnote ³²

Immigration Restriction and Control of Immigrants in Europe

European nations have also taken radical measures to keep people from poor countries out of their territories.Footnote ³³ These measures have been supported by right-wing governments, parties, and anti-immigrant discourses favoring increased restrictions on African migrants. For van Houtum, this has been manifested significantly in the reinforcement of borders and territorial limits: “[T]he European Union (E.U.) has composed a so-called ‘white’ Schengen list, and a ‘black’ Schengen list and the white list represents the countries whose citizens do not need to apply for a visa for a visitor transit in Schengen countries.”Footnote ³⁴ These lists indicate who is welcome (Whites) and who is not welcome (non-Whites) in Europe. This trend has continued in Europe after the migration crisis experienced in 2015. Many countries closed their borders in 2015 when more than a million migrants and refugees from Syria tried to reach the continent. Conflicts arose due to the different responses of each country to this migration crisis. While countries like Slovenia and Croatia closed their borders, others like Germany opened their borders and received a large number of refugees. Germany’s attitude, described as generous, has been recognized internationally; however, it has sparked conflicts within the European community. Immigration is still a subject of controversy and contentious responses by European countries.Footnote ³⁵

Other expressions of this paradigm are present in different countries in Europe. For example, the migrant detention camp operating on the island of Lesvos, Greece, is a human rights crisis. Media have reported that thousands of migrants from various countries are stranded in Lesvos. Due to political decisions in different European countries, these migrants have been unable to continue their journey to Europe. The situation has become unsustainable not only for stranded migrants but also for the island’s inhabitants.Footnote ³⁶

Denmark, a country where immigration was not previously present in the political agenda, has proposed similar initiatives designed to isolate immigrants.Footnote ³⁷ Liberal parties have discussed sending “undesirable” immigrants to the small islet of Lindhom (in the Baltic Sea), with barely any infrastructure. According to a report by El País, these immigrants would be required by law to leave the Scandinavian Kingdom.Footnote ³⁸ The Minister of Immigration, Inger Støjbeg, who is from the liberal party Venstre, declared on Facebook: “They are not welcome to Denmark and, they have to know it!”Footnote ³⁹ As reported by El País, this is just one among more than one hundred measures the Danish government has taken against immigrants.Footnote ⁴⁰ As van Houtum affirms, “with the construction of a gated island of wealth, and with the conscious denial of regular access to citizens from 135 countries, the E.U. widens the gap globally and regulates mortality of people on a global scale.”Footnote ⁴¹ All these restrictions mean that immigrants are increasingly vulnerable during the migration process and also when they are in the destination country, as described in the next section.

Vulnerability in the Immigration Process

When people choose to migrate despite legal restrictions against doing so, they are resisting “the territorial confining and material deprivations which the system of global apartheid imposes on them.”Footnote ⁴³ In this process, Spener argues, “migrants face a wide variety of forms of personal, structural and cultural violence.”Footnote ⁴⁴ For example, migrants from Senegal travel in rickety boats across the Strait of Gibraltar to enter Europe through Spain. As reported by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in 2016, more than 5,000 migrants died or disappeared in the Mediterranean Sea.Footnote ⁴⁵ Other NGOs say the number of deaths could be more than 13,000.Footnote ⁴⁶ Additionally, there is evidence of at least 20,000 people trying to reach Europe who died in the Mediterranean Sea in the past two decades; meanwhile, from 2000 to 2013, the number of immigrant deaths among those trying to reach Australia is approximately 1,500.Footnote ⁴⁷

In August 2010, Mexican authorities discovered the bodies of fifty-eight men and fourteen women who were murdered and piled in the small room of a ranch near the city of Matamoros, which borders the United States (in a dark irony, the city name literally means “kill moors”). The dead migrants included people from Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, and other countries. Although no one has been convicted for their murders, authorities suspect Los Zetas – a paramilitary criminal organization from Mexico – were the perpetrators. The murdered migrants probably refused to comply with the organization’s demands to become hitmen and drug smugglers or could not afford an extortion payment. Human rights organizations estimated that 20,000 immigrants are kidnapped every year in the journey to the United States from Latin America.Footnote ⁴⁸ A significant number of Guatemalan and Brazilian immigrants report that traveling through Mexico was the most dangerous part of their journey.Footnote ⁴⁹ This journey is particularly unsafe for women and children: as published by Amnesty International, six of every ten Central American women and girls are victims of sexual violence during their journey through Mexico.Footnote ⁵⁰ The range of risks involved in this stage of the journey is a direct consequence of restrictive migration policies.

Nevertheless, despite all the risks and the new scenarios of hypervigilance, immigrants continue their odyssey; as van Houtum states “they adapt to the new rules, invent personalities, disidentify themselves by throwing away their papers or even crudely erase their fingerprints, that is, immigrants multiply and constantly build in new liminal forms.”Footnote ⁵¹

Living under the Threat of Deportation

The vulnerabilities that migrants face occur throughout the migration process. However, once immigrants manage to reach their destination, they live under the threat of these deportation regimes. The fear under these immigration policies changes family and community dynamics. Immigrants and their families become more vulnerable due to the fear of deportation. Immigrant workers do not claim their labor rights and are, therefore, more exposed to labor exploitation. Likewise, families, for fear of leaving their homes, also see their health and education affected negatively.Footnote ⁵²

In Europe, by 2016, the number of unauthorized immigrants peaked at 4 million. Many of these immigrants are refugee asylum seekers who arrived during the immigration crisis in 2015.Footnote ⁵³ This crisis led to a growing migration emergency in Europe, with an increase in border closures and surveillance of migrants’ entry.Footnote ⁵⁴ This crisis also led to an increasing number of deportations. Some countries have been accused of using racial profiling to identify unauthorized migrants. In the United States, the high numbers of unauthorized migrants (11 million), combined with anti-migrant narratives and restrictive immigration, have created the conditions of possibility for mass deportation.

The approval of the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in the United States facilitated mass deportation by allowing the government to remove individuals without judicial review. According to official statistics in the last three decades, the United States has deported more than 7 million people. Most of these people were men from Latin American countries, revealing raced and gendered patterns in mass deportation.Footnote ⁵⁵ This deportation regime caused many harmful consequences for individuals, families, and communities.Footnote ⁵⁶ For example, millions of children have been separated from their parents as a result of deportations. The mass deportation system in the United States is very particular, not only because it expresses specific elements of the apartheid ideology, but also because its laws have historically been racist and discriminatory. Furthermore, the United States deportation system is a paradigmatic case of the negative and unquantifiable consequences for deportees, their families, communities, and the countries to which they have been forced to return.Footnote ⁵⁷

Multiple sources report that Spain has deported an average of 20 immigrants per day since 2011 (a total of approximately 50,000), most of them Moroccans. Government agencies cite their “irregular” status in the Spanish territory as a reason for expelling migrants.Footnote ⁵⁸ Meanwhile, France, a country with historically stable relationships with Spain, has a policy of deporting migrants to regions outside the European Union, but also within it – mostly to Spain. Since no official physical boundaries separate the two nations, activists argue that France selects immigrants for deportation to Spain according to an ethnic profile. Between January and October 2018, France deported almost 10,000 immigrants to Spain.Footnote ⁵⁹

In Australia, like in the United States and Europe, deportations have also increased in the twenty-first century. Whereas only about 1,000 people were deported a year in the 1980s, by 2015, this number had risen to 10,000 per year. At the same time, there were about 13,000 people in immigration detention facilities in Australia in 2014, compared to fewer than 100 in 1990.Footnote ⁶⁰ Many people deported from Australia during this time were residents who had not returned to their countries of birth in a long time. Immigration enforcement in Australia has thus imposed many mental, social, and economic dilemmas for deported people.Footnote ⁶¹

Each of these actions in Europe, the United States, and Australia play a fundamental role in preserving global apartheid.Footnote ⁶² At the same time, they become binary decision-making mechanisms: to admit entrance through borders or not, to include or to exclude.Footnote ⁶³ These actions show how the United States has recently reinforced the apartheid ideology with the border wall construction and everyday anti-immigrant discourses, and how European countries have adopted this doctrine to maintain racial segregation, particularly in its application to people of African and Middle Eastern origin.Footnote ⁶⁴

The Emergence of a Desperate, Disposable, and Cheap Labor Force

As a result of these restrictive immigration and deportation regimes, immigrants must choose between their confinement in poor countries and joining a desperate labor force in another country.Footnote ⁶⁵ This situation turns out to be highly convenient for the global economy, which requires a workforce with these characteristics. These workers are incredibly vulnerable. Employers can easily fire them, cut their salaries and benefits, and prohibit them from forming unions, which precludes the possibility of strikes or negotiating labor standards. In this context, wealthy countries manage to impose conditions that produce a population of vulnerable laborers. Wealthy countries are aware that, eventually, this workforce will be integrated into global exploitation circuits before and during their migration as well as after deportation. These trends have been reported in countries like Canada and Israel, and in the Latin American region where immigrants with or without work visas are likely to be exploited.Footnote ⁶⁶ In Latin America, transnational service companies hire people who have been displaced by neoliberal policies or deportation since a substantial part of this population is fluent in the English language and has knowledge of North American culture.Footnote ⁶⁷

Border Closure for Political, Humanitarian, and Security Reasons

In 2015, Costa Rica witnessed the arrival of a large number of Cuban and African immigrants who were in transit to the United States; the situation became problematic when the Nicaraguan government decided to close its southern border. As a result, at least 5,000 Cubans and hundreds of Africans became stranded in Costa Rica. Nicaragua justified its actions by arguing that Costa Rica acted irresponsibly by allowing these people to pass through their borders. Nicaragua vigorously defends its territory against threats such as drug trafficking, gangs, and human trafficking.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, these actions also led to the death of twelve African immigrants, who drowned in 2016 while trying to cross Lake Cocibolca in Nicaragua, in their journey from Costa Rica to the United States.Footnote ⁷⁰

A similar situation has been suffered by hundreds of thousands of people who were forced to leave Venezuela in recent years due to the country’s political crisis. According to the UNHCR, more than 3 million Venezuelans have been forced to flee from Venezuela in 2015. Many crossed the border into neighboring countries, but this unleashed a crisis in the region. In Ecuador, thousands of Venezuelans found themselves stranded when Ecuador decided to close the passage through Rumichaca International Bridge. According to reports, this forced an increase in the undocumented crossing that involved a perilous route for women and minors. International organizations have requested Ecuador to “refrain from actions like closing borders, restricting access for people who might need international protection, punishing irregular entry or presence, requiring official documents like passports and records of past criminal activity, and resorting to immigration detention and hate speech.”Footnote ⁷¹

In Europe, one typical example is the ongoing conflicts in the Island of Lesvos mentioned previously. These conflicts between countries and regions over migration policy lead to negative consequences for migrants and at the same for the inhabitants in these territories. For Harrison, these new territories of micro apartheid hold a liminal position in the global racial hierarchy, in which countries and regions ally themselves with the dominant White minority. These countries attempt to sandwich themselves “between the ‘Civilized White’ and the ‘Barbarous Black’ countries.”Footnote ⁷²

“Voluntary” Return Programs Enacted by Racist Ideologies

In October 2018, the Chilean government set up a Plan of Humanitarian Return to return Haitians living in Chile to Haiti.Footnote ⁷³ Given the reasons Haitians migrate, this voluntary return is more of a punishment than “help” from the Chilean government.Footnote ⁷⁴ Undocumented Haitians living in the country were invited to sign a document requiring them to leave and not return to Chile for nine years. Scholars labeled these measures as racist due to their singular focus on Haitians – who are nearly all Black.Footnote ⁷⁵ In an interview with Widner Darcelin, spokesman of the Haitian Communities in Chile, he described this allegedly humanitarian program as a deportation program.Footnote ⁷⁶ Salazar and Ramirez affirm that this program is entirely discriminatory since it fundamentally targets Haitians living under extreme poverty in Chile.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Chilean government has justified these deportations by arguing that Haitians have not been able to overcome cultural barriers to integrate into Chilean mainstream culture.Footnote ⁷⁸ According to this report, in the five months since the plan was implemented in October 2018, almost 700 Haitians signed a commitment to “voluntary” return.Footnote ⁷⁹

Some studies reported how the Israeli government had invited African immigrants to leave the country voluntarily, a policy that follows a similar segregationist logic, where it has offered African immigrants US $3,000 either to return to Africa or move to another country; if they refuse, they are threatened with the alternative of facing imprisonment.Footnote ⁸⁰ From the government’s perspective, this initiative turns the deportation of temporary or irregular migrants into a voluntary and humanitarian process of leaving the country. It excludes women, children, parents of dependent children, and slavery and human trafficking victims. However, this policy is intended to remove “infiltrating” groups from the territory, which, according to the Israeli government, entered without proper documentation.Footnote ⁸¹ Furthermore, the government has initiated an anti-immigrant campaign based on the idea that “migrants might threaten the Jewish character of Israel.”Footnote ⁸² Although a significant number of these immigrants are fleeing violence and armed conflicts in their home countries, the government has categorized them as economic immigrants rather than refugees.

Free Trade Agreements

Another strategy for creating a disposable workforce has been through free trade agreements. These pacts create the conditions for thousands of people to lose their jobs in their home countries and force them to migrate without documentation to wealthy countries. Immigrants with undocumented status are easily exploited. In this regard, Harrison states that “this neoliberal regime – in which developed nations aid poorer nations on the condition that they restructure their economies and political systems to accommodate maximum wealth accumulation by multinational corporations – has arrived packaged as so-called free trade.”Footnote ⁸³

Walia cites the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as an example since it dramatically impoverished many Latin American countries.Footnote ⁸⁴ In the case of Mexico, more than 15 million people fell into poverty, and more than 1 million were displaced. Many Mexicans were forced to leave their communities, and now work as undocumented immigrants in the agricultural sector of Canada. Willen provides examples of this cheap labor export trend in Israel, as well. The Israeli government recruited workers from Thailand, Romania, Turkey, and China, responding to employers’ demands. These workers are very “attractive” since employers presumed these workers are politically neutral. These employers are also attracted by the flexibility in which these workers are hired, meaning there are few labor regulations – making it easier to exploit them.Footnote ⁸⁵ Willen describes the circumstances in which these movements and hiring processes occur as a form of human trafficking.Footnote ⁸⁶

These examples show how apartheid ideology operates and how it achieves its objective of racial segregation.Footnote ⁸⁷ People of color are either forced to remain in their countries of birth or suffer exploitation or even death if they attempt migration in search of better circumstances. These actions show covert racism, whereby governments justify their restrictive migration policies by claiming that immigrants are not capable of integrating and therefore are culturally incompatible with the native culture. In reality, these arguments are an expression of racial intolerance.Footnote ⁸⁸

Preserving Wealth among a Minority

The mechanisms discussed help maintain the global apartheid system by eliminating most non-White people from wealthy countries and confining them to much poorer nations. Thus, they seek to guarantee that the vast majority of the world’s wealth stays in the hands of a White minority.

For scholars like Feagin and Ducey, this form of global organization preserves the power and wealth of Whites by creating an unfair distribution of resources.Footnote ⁸⁹ According to Titus, the practice of apartheid includes the idea – implicitly assumed or explicitly stated – that a particular group has more rights than others, for example, the presumption that American citizens have a right to access social security while Mexican immigrants do not.Footnote ⁹⁰ Global apartheid involves a strong commitment to protecting and preserving the privileges of White people, which take the form of regulations, immigration laws, and work programs, among other measures. All these mechanisms permit the ideology to operate.

These immigration laws, work programs, and other types of regulations establish racial categories that justify the existence of privileged and unprivileged groups. This ideology separates who belongs to a determined territory and who ought to be removed from it, or conversely, who holds rights and who does not.Footnote ⁹¹ At present, there is a concern about the excessive growth of this doctrine, mainly because this ideology resorts to increasingly subtle mechanisms. These practices invigorate racial segregation.Footnote ⁹² For Feagin and Ducey, this trend is historically rooted in the aggressive exploitation of Native Americans and African slaves.Footnote ⁹³ They argue that White elites have created all possible mechanisms to maintain this social order, from laws to specific institutions.Footnote ⁹⁴ Although Feagin and Ducey’s arguments apply primarily to the United States, these same ideologies can be found worldwide.