Biopolitical Borders Kritik - Berkeley 2018

CNDI 2018 – Biopolitical Borders K
Thesis
1NC – Borders = Biopolitical
The border is a space that makes biopolitical domination possible and performs the
biopolitical sovereign and subject
Munster 04 Danish Institute for International Studies | DIIS Peace, Risk and Violence Copenhagen,
Denmark Current position Senior Researcher & Coordinator of Research Area on Peace, Risk and
Violence
Giorgio Agamben’s provocative description of the ‘state of exception’ has provided fertile territory for critical
scholarship on the meanings of torture, the accrual of emergency powers tothe executive, and the cam p.
He argues that ‘The state of exception, which was essentially atemporary suspension of the rule of law on
the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given apermanent spatial arrangement, which as such
nevertheless remains outside the normal order’ (1995, p. 169). The border is a permanent state of
exception, which makes the ‘normal’ biopolitical control of government inside the territorial frontier of
the state possible. This paper argues that governmental procedures of examination at the border
institutionalize a continual state of exception at the frontier that in turn performs the spatio-legal fiction
of territorial sovereign and the sovereign subject in each admission/exclusion decision. This argument I
smade not from extraordinary cases or even from the consideration of the adjudication of asylumclaims,
but rather from the mundane, ordinary evidence of the everyday passage of millions of normal travelers
across the border. Rather than view the border as a simple line indicating thelimits of sovereign jurisdiction, this article adopts
the performative view of borders. FollowingButler’s analysis of the performativity of identity , Wonders
argues that ‘although states attemptto choreograph national borders, often in response to global pressures, these state policies
havelittle meaning until they are “performed” by state agents or by border crossers...Border agentsand
state bureaucrats play a critical role in determining where, how, and on whose body a borderwill be
performed’ (2006, p. 66). There are lessons to be learned about the politics of thesovereign state and
citizenship in general from the specific and longstanding example of institutionalization of the state of exception at the borders. Isin
provocatively argues that thedominant
motif of contemporary state policies is anxiety, and the production of
the neuroticcitizen (2004). I want to push this analysis of the circulation of anxiety and neurosis further, andto suggest that the
(momentary) reduction of all travelers tohomo saceras they traverse theborder can provide the ground for an empathetic, cosmopolitan ethic –
based not on citizenship,but precisely on alienation
borders are used as a biopolitical tactic which contributes to disposability of

immigrants
doty 11 (Associate Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona
State University, Bare Life: Border-Crossing Deaths and Spaces of Moral Alibi, April 12,
2011)
Deep tensions strain at the edges of the nation-state and the contemporary mobilities that continually
contradict presumptions of stability and stasis which underpin conventional notions of a world of
sovereign entities which are willing and able to control movements across and within their territories.
Foremost amongst the many tensions is the one created by the relative ease with which human beings
traverse the numerous spaces demarcated as sovereign, most notably those whose movements are
deemed ùnauthorized', ùndocumented', ìrregular', and ìllegal'.(1) States throughout the world have
responded to this form of human mobility with restrictions meant to make unauthorized border
crossings difficult and dangerous and thus to discourage them. Nowhere is this more powerfully
exemplified as in the US border control strategy of `prevention through deterrence', which was put into
practice in the 1990s and which remains the cornerstone of US border enforcement policy. The result in
too many cases has not been deterrence but tragedy and a skyrocketing death rate of migrants crossing
the US-Mexico border in increasingly dangerous and remote areas. Over the past decade or so writers,
both academic and nonacademic, have created a large body of literature on this topic. (2) The borderlands
of the world are particularly appropriate sites for examining contemporary instances of state(s) of
exception and the creation of `bare life'.(3) Geo- graphical border areas are the prototypical margins of
`the state', ie spaces where law and order are simultaneously rigorously enforced and elided and where
tensions are often the most obvious and the most extreme. An essential task of statecraft is thus to
manage the tensions that are inherent at the borders. Such management takes place against particular
historical, social, and political backgrounds. In terms of unauthorized migration, this background
includes issues of race and class as illustrated by the fact that poor, relatively unskilled, but often highly
sought after, Third World migrants have at various times been both wanted and unwanted, wanted for
their labor but unwanted as human beings. In a word, they are perfect candidates for being reduced to
bare life. In this paper I examine the issue of migrant border-crossing deaths around the US - Mexico
border and the policies that have led to the drastic increases in these fatalities. Scholars across a
number of disciplines have, in recent years, turned their attention to the concepts of biopower and bare
life offering insights into how power is exercised and statecraft practiced. This paper contributes to this
conversation in three ways. (1) I highlight the fact that biopower is exercised differentially across
different populations. It is thus important to raise the question of who is the subject population of
biopolitics/biopower. The subject population here consists of human beings who cross the US-Mexico
border without documentation. This implicitly calls attention to the relevance of Foucault's writings on
biopolitics for the international realm. While Foucault's focus often seems to be on very local operations
of power, these are not unconnected to the international, and indeed, when it comes to border politics,
local practices of power are inextricably linked to the international or the external. (4) I argue that
Foucault's work has much relevance for understanding border politics, whose fundamental purpose is
the construction of boundaries demarcating the internal versus the external. Further, I suggest that race
is significant to this process and that Foucault's writings are extremely suggestive and helpful in
illuminating important aspects of border politics. (2) I call attention to the significance of geographic
space/landscape in the process of obscuring official state responsibility for the moral consequences of
the bare life that is made possible by the creation of spaces of exception. I thus draw explicit attention
to the ethical/moral implications of biopower. Drawing upon the works of Foucault and Agamben as
well as recent discussions of their work, I highlight the significance of geographical space to this
particular practice of statecraft in the borderlands circa the US ^ Mexico divide. I suggest that the spatial
landscapes in these areas have been essential to the workings of statecraft during the past twenty years
and that these spaces have functioned to provide a moral alibi for any responsibility on the part of the
United States for the deaths of undocumented migrants. (3) Finally, in the conclusion I briefly raise the
question of agency in the context of bare life and the state of exception. Often discussions implicitly
seem to presume the absence of agency, thus precluding the possibilities for resistance. To be sure,
official government responses to the tension between sovereignty and human mobility have created
èxceptional' spaces in which human beings are subject to being reduced to bare life. However, these
spaces, while ripe with that potential, do not always result in an actualization of bare life. Possibilities
for resistance inhere in exceptional politics.
The border is a key site of regulation for populations and creation of Biopolitics
because it is a key site of examination and policing
Mark Salter 2008
Mark B. Salter is a full professor of political science at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada. He is currently the Editor-in-chief of Security Dialogue, an academic journal in the field of
security studies. Mark B. Salter (2008) When the exception becomes the rule: borders, sovereignty, and
citizenship, Citizenship Studies, 12:4, 365-380, DOI: 10.1080/13621020802184234
Though not a specific topic of their work, the

border touches on a number of interests for both Foucault and
Agamben, notably, security, law, sovereignty, population, and territory. In terms of policing the
population, the border is crucial both in terms of constituting the population through the decision
to admit or exclude and in terms of measuring and manipulating the quantities and qualities of the
population through citizenship, immigration, and refugee claim adjudication. In addition, though unaddressed
by either author, the border also represents the distinction between inside and outside, domestic politics and
international anarchy (Walker1993). Foucault argued strongly for a multifaceted analysis of power: ‘sovereign and
disciplinary mechanisms are two absolutely integral constituents of the general mechanisms of power in
our society’ (1980, p. 108). The border represents a critical case of both of these kinds of power: the
sovereign power to ban or exclude; the disciplinary effect of the border examination on sovereign
subjects. Prozorov argues that the twin concepts of sovereignty andgovernmentality ‘are permanently at work in mutual deconstruction’
(2005, p. 82). As Honigargues, the dynamic play of power/law is continually in flux: ‘the to and fro betweenadministrative and judicial
governance is most visible in exceptional settings that are leastdomesticated (emergency, national security, immigration politics,
border policing, colonialgovernance)’ (2005, p. 211). In particular, this
bordered state of exception is not a suspension of
the law (where there is no law), but rather the expression of the threshold of law. Wherever the border
is located, however it is administered, the border has been and continues to be an on going state of
exception. Though borders may be at airports, rail stations, cruise line terminals, prescreening
points, or the physical frontier, the process I am concerned remains the same: anindividual requests entry to a
country, a claim which is adjudicated by a government official andgranted or refused. This is not to say that crossing the biometric border of the
US-VISIT programis experientially similar to crossing a remote post between two developing countries. Rather ,
it isto say that the
spatio-legal performance of that claim, adjudication, and admission/expulsion is a‘deep structure’ of
sovereign politics. Crossings are experience differently by the ‘kinetic elite’and ‘deportation class’ (Walters 2002) – but the
fundamental sovereign performance remains similar. Foucault does not examine the border specifically, but it is plain
that mobility and inparticular international mobility is an axis of deviance equal to others he
examines: sexual,criminal, psychological and epistemological deviance. While Packer argues that ‘the governanceof mobility then needs to
be understood in terms of thisnewproblematic, mobility as immanentthreat’ (2006, p. 381, emphasis added), I would argue that mobility has
long been understood asa source of threat (Torpey 2000).
Borders create an imbalance of power where the sovereign state gains rights but the
people lose them, this enables a politics of exclusion.
Mark Salter 2008
The decision to allow entry into the political community, and to become a citizen-subject of the
sovereign, must be a decision without recourse, without appeal, and without debate Recourse,
appeal, debate gives lie to the claim to fixity and stability, upon which the claim to sovereign power is
built. The population cannot be counted democratically. In its application to the border, we would say
that the citizen gives up his/her right to freely enter the state while the sovereign does not renounce
his/her right to ban individuals from entry into the state. It is true that the sovereign does not accept
any obligation to accept (even) citizens back into the territory –especially if the sovereign decides that
the citizen constitutes a danger to the sovereign. Higginsis clear: ‘there is no general right for an alien to
obtain entry into another country. If he is escaping persecution, he has the right to seek asylum; but no
state is obliged to give it to him...it is wholly exceptional – and contrary to international law – for a
resident national to be refused re-entry to his country on political grounds. But clearly that does not
dispose of the matter’ (1973, p. 344). In each of these cases, it is the administrative, discretionary
determination of status that precedes any legal claim.
1NC – Borders = Racialized
Borders are superimposed on land by unnatural forces, they created by and propagate
racialized Violence
Chomsky Oct. 28 2013
https://www.alternet.org/economy/noam-chomsky-americas-suburban-nightmare-and-
how-us-mexico-border-cruel-design?page=0%2C1
In order to understand the rationale behind the fortification of the border and the physical form it has
taken in recent years, it is necessary to go back a little first. The US-Mexican border, like most borders,
was established by violence – and its architecture is the architecture of violence. The US basically
invaded Mexico in a pretty brutal war back in the 1840s. The war was described by President-General
Ulysses S. Grant, as “the most wicked war in history”. [9*] That may be an exaggeration, but it was a
pretty wicked war. It was based on deeply racist ideas. First of all, it started with the annexation of
Texas, which was called the re-annexation of Texas on the grounds that it was “really ours all along” […],
that they stole it from us, and now we have to re-annex it. That took Texas away from Mexico. The rest
of the war, and the later historical period, basically involved additional land grabs. In order to
understand it, you should read the progressive writers like Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and
others. The position was, as Whitman put it eloquently, that “backward Mexico had to be annexed as
part of bringing civilization to the world”—which the US was seen as leading. [10]Emerson said it in
more flowery language along the lines of, “it really doesn’t matter by what means Mexico is taken, as it
contributes to the mission of ‘civilizing the world’ and, in the long run, it will be forgotten”. [11] Of
course, that’s why we have names like San Francisco, San Diego, and Santa Fe all over the southwest and
the west of the United States. We should really call it Occupied Mexico. Like many borders around the
world, it is artificially imposed and, like those many other borders imposed by external powers, it bears
no relationship to the interests or the concerns of the people of the country—and it has a history of
horrible conflict and strife. Take the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, for example. The British
imposed the borderline. They partitioned the overall area nearly in half and arbitrarily divided the land.
No Afghan government has ever accepted it, and nor should they. This has happened all across Africa as
well, of course, and so the Mexican border is no exception.
1NC – Borders = Neoliberal
Borders create separations between workers, this enables factory owners to divide
and conquer.
Rick Paulas Apr. 23 2018
Rick Paulas has written many things, some serious, plenty not, for plenty of places. Like, say: The Awl,
VICE, Pacific Standard, KCET, SB Nation Longform, The Morning News, McSweeney's, Wired, and a whole
slew of others. More than once, he wrangled a publication to basically pay him to eat a bunch of hot
dogs at Dodger Stadium. He tweets here and blogs here. He also edits the horror anthology The Palmer
Hotel. He lives in Berkeley and is a White Sox fan. He talks to his mother pretty consistently about the
Chicago Bears.
A national border, as Noam Chomsky once put it, is "artificially imposed and, like those many other
borders imposed by external powers, it bears no relationship to the interests or the concerns of the
people of the country." Rather, borders are largely a curse for workers. A good illustration can be found in an
examination of the United States-Mexico border. The border's current shape was drawn in 1853, with much of it fashioned during the bloody,
two-year conflict between U.S. and Mexico from 1846 to 1848. Until 1929, the border was unguarded, with immigrants having a choice
between paying fees and undergoing examinations at the scattered ports of entry, or simply crossing wherever they could .
The
Immigration Act of March 4th, 1929, proposed by a white supremacist Senator from South Carolina,
made informal entries a crime. Yet despite this new law, the number of apprehensions along the border remained static until the
end of World War II. When the majority of the 12 million military personnel came home and re-entered the
workforce, border apprehensions rose, culminating in the "wetback airlift" of 1954 , when more than one
million Mexican immigrants in America without documentation were deported . On the surface, this seems a
straightforward case of replacement workers being ousted when the original workforce returned home, but something else occurred during
this time that muddles that thesis. In
1942, with the U.S. workforce at war, the U.S. and Mexico agreed on terms
for the bracero program, allowing millions of Mexican immigrants to cross the border on short-term
work permits, mostly for agricultural work. But rather than ending the program after the war, it
continued until 1964. Why? Because in 1951, farm owners, who'd benefited from the poorly protected
(and, as such, cheaper) workforce, rallied support to extend the program . It worked, and the program was
formalized as Public Law 78. The law effectively created two separate workforces from which farm owners
choose from: one made of local workers, with protections afforded through unionization, and one was
from Mexico, and couldn't go on strike or renegotiate wages. While employers weren't supposed to use
"braceros" to break strikes, few followed those rules, which had the effect of keeping wages down for all
workers. This race-to-the-bottom between separated workforces, a fight that inherently benefits employers, happens when workers either
have different sets of rights, or are physically kept apart by a militarized border.
1NC – Zone of Exception
The border is a permanent Geospatial Zone of exception, inside of which rule of law is
suspended, allowing mass violence to be propagated upon the homo Sacer and
simultaneously propping up the Biopolitical control within the State.
Mark Salter 2008
Giorgio Agamben’s provocative description of the ‘state of exception’ has provided fertile territory
for critical scholarship on the meanings of torture, the accrual of emergency powers to the executive,
and the camp. He argues that ‘The state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of
the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement,
which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order’(1995, p. 169). The border is a
permanent state of exception, which makes the ‘normal’ biopolitical control of government inside
the territorial frontier of the state possible. This paper argues that governmental procedures of
examination at the border institutionalize a continual state of exception at the frontier that in turn
performs the spatio-legal fiction of territorial sovereign and the sovereign subject in each
admission/exclusion decision. This argument is made not from extraordinary cases or even from the
consideration of the adjudication of asylum claims, but rather from the mundane, ordinary evidence of
the everyday passage of millions of normal travelers across the border. Rather than view the border as a
simple line indicating the limits of sovereign jurisdiction, this article adopts the performative view of
borders. Following Butler’s analysis of the performativity of identity, Wonders argues that ‘although
states attempt to choreograph national borders, often in response to global pressures, these state
policies have little meaning until they are “performed” by state agents or by border crossers...Border
agent sand state bureaucrats play a critical role in determining where, how, and on whose body a
border will be performed’ (2006, p. 66). There are lessons to be learned about the politics of the
sovereign state and citizenship in general from the specific and longstanding example of the
institutionalization of the state of exception at the borders. Is in provocatively argues that the dominant
motif of contemporary state policies is anxiety, and the production of the neurotic citizen (2004). I want
to push this analysis of the circulation of anxiety and neurosis further, and to suggest that the
(momentary) reduction of all travelers to homo sacer as they traverse the border can provide the
ground for an empathetic, cosmopolitan ethic – based not on citizenship, but precisely on alienation.
1NC – Border Fluidity
Borders are fluid and configured by state power
Johnson & Jones 11
[Corey Johnson and Reece Jones Political Geography,Interventions on rethinking ‘the border’ in border
studies, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6adb/13b6502c6207b9335b8ee74acd68fe232c10.pdf, 2011]
Although the spatiality of borders has undergone shifts in recent decades, it is nevertheless still important to consider the place of borders in
border studies, i.e. where do we look for evidence of bordering practices and what are the impacts on particular places? The places of
bordering have expanded well away from the border line itself to non-descript office parks and cyberspace just as risk assessment at the border
has become pre-emptive in what Louise Amoore describes as “spatial stretching” and “temporal orientation”. As Alison Mountz will show,
political geographers must continue to interrogate the material manifestations of borders, particularly the relocation and reconstitution of
unconventional border sites offshore and to sites internal to sovereign territory. Borders are enacted, materialized, and performed in a variety
of ways. Mark Salter suggests that the performativity of borders increasingly resembles Butler’s (1988) idea of “stylized repetition of acts”.
Building on analyses of the narrative construction of statecraft, including borders, that has been at the center of critical geopolitics for two
decades, recent work suggests how border studies can be enriched by focusing on the performative aspects of borders by state and non-state
actors. Borders are, according to Paasi, enacted and performed not only as “discursive or emotional landscapes of social power” on the one
hand, but also as “technical landscapes of control and surveillance” on the other. Another concern for border scholars is how best to gain
access to the border methodologically, or which perspectives provide the most fruitful openings to borders and borderwork. Ju st
as the
“where” question is complicated by unconventional border sites, the seemingly simple question of “who
borders?” entails an increasingly complex answer since bordering practices are less and less the
exclusive domain of the state and its agents. Indeed, as several contributors point out, a range of private
actors including media, businesses, and citizens is involved in the daily work of making borders. “The
sovereign decisions of the border”, as Amoore describes, are as likely to be made by programmers and
mathematicians who write computer code as they are by uniformed border agents. According to
Mountz, gaining access to borders may therefore entail smarter use of geography’s sophisticated
methodological tools such as GIS, cartography, ethnography, and Participatory Action Research.
Conceptually, it may also be useful to move scholars away from “seeing like a state” (a constraining lens given
the increasing heterotopia of contemporary borders) and toward “seeing like a border”, as Rumford proposes. Such a
shift in emphasis would allow scholars to disaggregate the state and the border in order to
conceptualize the multiple actors and sites of borderwork. To this list of three ‘p’s’ could be added a
fourth: political. The shifting nature of borders has made them neither less politicized, nor lessened the
need for scholars to be mindful and critical of the complicated relationship between state power and
space and the fact that this relationship is perhaps most apparent at borders, wherever they are found.
Indeed, collectively these interventions put forth possibilities for an ever more robust agenda for
scholarly inquiry into borders while highlighting the need for any border scholar to accompany the
ongoing transformations of state power with critical and politically attuned eyes.
1NC – Divides Humanity
Borders are more than just territorial markers, but are ingrained into our way of life
and are the root cause of separation and discrimination
Williams 11 (Nick Vaughan- Williams, Professor of International Security and Head of the
Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, Edinburgh University
Press Border Politics: The Limits of Soverign Power,
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/researchcentres/irs/publications/vaughanwilliamspreview.
pdf, 2011) e.g.
Borders are ubiquitous in political life. Indeed, borders are perhaps even constitutive of political life.
Borders are inherent to logics of inside and outside, practices of inclusion and exclusion, and questions
about identity and difference. Of course, there are many different types of borders that can be
identified: divisions along ethnic, national or racial lines; class-based forms of stratification; regional and
geo graphical differences; religious, cultural, and generational boundaries; and so on. None of these
borders is in any sense given but (re)produced through modes of affirmation and contestation and is,
above all, lived. In other words borders are not natural, neutral nor static but historically contingent,
politically charged, dynamic phenomena that first and foremost involve people and their everyday lives.
Ostensibly, this book focuses upon one particular type of border: the concept of the border of the state.
I say ‘ostensibly’ because, as I hope will become obvious, different types of borders inevitably fold into
one another: the notion of maintaining sharp, contiguous dis tinctions between anything is impossible
and inevitably breaks down. In a common understanding of the term, the concept of the border of the
state refers to ‘external’, ‘interstate’ or ‘international’ borders that delimit and delineate states as
independent entities in the state system.1 According to what JohnAgnew has referred to as the‘modern
geopolitical imaginary’, state borders are taken to be territorial markers of the limits of sovereign
political authority and jurisdiction, and located at the geographical outer edge of the polity.2 Accom
panying this imaginary is a well-known historical account of the emergence and supposed ossification of
such borders associated with the transition from overlapping jurisdictions in medieval Europe to the
emergence of the modern sovereign state characterised by strict territorial delimitations.3 Irrespective
of conceptual or historical accuracy, there is little doubt that this imaginary, underpinned by the concept
of the border of the state, has had, and indeed continues to have, significant political and ethical
influence on the practice and theory of global politics.
The concept of borders divides humanity and infringes on global cooperation

Williams 11 (Nick Vaughan- Williams, Professor of International Security and Head of the
Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, Edinburgh University
Press Border Politics: The Limits of Soverign Power,
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/researchcentres/irs/publications/vaughanwilliamspreview.
pdf, 2011) e.g.
THE CONCEPT OF THE BORDER OF THE STATE IN CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL LIFE Like all concepts in
the practice/theory of global politics, the concept of the border of the state is politically and ethically
charged: its usage in all kinds of discourses must be seen as in part constituting the modern
geopolitical imaginary it purports merely to describe.4 One obvious example of the work that the
concept of the border of the state does is to allow for a familiar spatial and temporal compart
mentalization of global politics into two supposedly distinct spheres of activity: history and progress
inside, and timeless anarchy outside.5 In turn, such a compartmentalization permits a problematic
division of labor between scholars of politics on the one hand and international relations on the
other.6 It is clear that the concept of the border of the state does a lot of work, epistemologically and
onto logically, in shaping thinking about diverse issues in global politics. The concept of the border of
the state underpins the arrangement of, and indeed the very condition of possibility for, both
domestic and international legal and political systems. Domestically, it is integral to conventional
notions of the limits of internal sovereignty and authority, reflected in Max Weber’s paradigmatic
definition of the state as: ‘a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate
use of force within a given territory’.7 In the international sphere it enables the principle of territorial
integrity, enshrined in Article 2, Paragraph 4 of the United Nations (UN) Charter which, since the end of
World War II, has acted as the cornerstone for regulative ideals such as: the legal existence and equality
of all states before international law; protection against the promotion of secessionism by some states
in other states’ territory; and territorial independence and preservation.8 As such, and despite historical
and contemporary examples of derogations of these regulative ideals, without the notion of territorial
integrity reliant upon the concept of the border of the state there would simply be no ‘domestic’ and
‘international’ juridical–political orders to speak of in the first place. As a central feature of the
architecture of global politics, the concept of the border of the state can be thought of as a sort of
compass. It orients the convergence of people with a given territory and notions of a common history,
nationality, identity, language and culture. In this way, it is a pivotal concept that opens up – but can
also close down – a multitude of political and ethical possibilities. Not only does this particular border
delimit states but also different forms of subjectivity or ‘personhood’ that are produced by the
domestic/international juridical-political order. Like the modern sovereign state, the modern political
subject is also conceived of as being fundamentally bordered in terms of autonomy before the law.9
Hence, discourses of rights and responsibilities presume the subject of contemporary political life to be
an individual whose status is clearly demarcated: a citizen. Seen in these terms, the concept of the
border of the state is central to the production of citizen-subjects whose identity derived from
citizenship provides a series of convenient answers to difficult questions such as Who am I? Where do I
belong? What should I do? The concept of the border of the state has also framed the way
global security relations are commonly conceptualised. Although the study of security is a
fundamentally contested terrain, the modern geopolitical imaginary has had a bearing on the trajectory
of the field. This influence has been especially, though not exclusively, due to the relative dominance of
realist and neo-realist approaches in security studies. Such approaches, with their emphasis on states’
survival in an anarchical self-help system, rely on the concept of the border of the state in order to
frame their reading of the key elements of security: the referent object of the threat (national security);
the source of the threat (other states in the context of anarchy); and the likely means of overcoming
that threat (interstate warfare). Indeed, the concept of the border of the state frames dominant
notions of who and where the ‘enemy’ of the state is. As has been pointed out elsewhere, realist and
neo-realist perspectives understand security in terms of the history of the defence and/or transgression
of states’ borders.10 Although the insights of this approach have been questioned over recent years, particularly so since
the end of the Cold War, aspects of such thinking undoubtedly continue to permeate security practices. Indeed, the rise of the
notion of ‘homeland security’ in the context of Western governments’ attempts to counter the threat of international terrorism
has led to a reinvigoration of border protection initiatives: ‘the new age of the wall has begun’, writes Guardian columnist Julian
Borger, ‘ramparts and stone fortifications, regarded until recently as national relics and tourist attractions, are back with a
vengeance’.11
1NC – Structural Invisibility
The logic of borders and biopolitics is hypocritical and exclusionary, but is maintained
through a structural invisibility
Nail 13 (Thomas Nail, postdoctoral lecturer in the Philosophy Department at the University of Denver-
specializes in European philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of movement, history of philosophy,
“Violence at the Borders: Nomadic Solidarity and Non-Status Migrant Resistance”
http://mysite.du.edu/~tnail2/Thomas_Nail/Research._files/Violence%20at%20the%20Borders
%20Nomadic%20Solidarity%20and%20Non-Status%20Migrant%20Resistance.pdf, November 2013) e.g.
Borders, Violence, and Biopower. If citizenship and legal status are the conditions under which liberal
democracies understand the political agency and rights of a people, what does this mean for the millions
of people living today without status in these democracies? They suffer the violence of being inclusively
excluded from political life: of being “illegal.” In democracies liberty is said to be universal, applied
equally to all without bias, but if political universality is structurally limited to citizenship in a territorial
nationstate then there seems to be a tension here. How can liberty be universal and inalienable and
yet only for “citizens?” What about those without any status at all? This exclusionary dilemma of
territorial nation-state based citizenship is not necessarily a new problem, and uncovering its structural
paradox has not done it any harm.3 Far from destroying the nation-state, the contemporary
phenomena of extra-national affinity, migration, and political states of emergency have only
exacerbated the paradox of exclusion. Rather than weakening exclusionary models of power, the logical
structure of exceptionalism has taken on an increasingly multiple, decentralized, and permanent
formulation under modern capitalism—all the more powerful for its suppleness and contradiction. The
power of political exclusion today as Balibar writes, does “not only take place at the territorial borders
of the nationstate” but has become diffused into much more flexible border structures that have
made life itself (not merely the citizen) the site of multiple intersecting forms of power.4 Today,
juridico-political suspensions of laws and rights are invoked toward the ends of increased security
against an unidentified enemy (terror). Multinational corporations are allowed to pass freely across
national territorial borders, while the poor and undesirable are “refused” entry. States and corporations
have thus mobilized an advanced structural invisibility or exceptionalism.5 Borders are a modern
political expression of this mobilized exception. A border-dispositif, or border apparatus, today
excludes and includes less like a barricade or wall than like a passageway or sieve for capital to pass
through (for profit, control, security, etc.), and for others to get stuck in (the poor, refugees,
people of color). Borders today are becoming something much less rigid and much more
“self-regulating” and “self-transmuting” for those in power.6 That is, borders have become
modulating constraints not just to block all external movement, but also to regulate and stabilize specific
populations to a certain degree within a largely unpredictable environment. "The sovereign” may be “he
who decides on the exception," as Carl Schmitt says, but this is true today only insofar as sovereignty
itself has become increasingly multiple and flexible.7 This type of power to statistically manage
unpredictable forces is what Michel Foucault calls securitization or biopower. Biopower is a third type of
power distinct from both sovereign and disciplinary power, whose aim is not to establish an exclusive
juridical territory or control individual behavior, but to secure an unpredictable population “within
socially and economically acceptable limits.”8 The goal of biopower is not to deny movement but to
create “an average that will be considered as optimal for a given social functioning.”9 Instead of strictly
prohibiting or permitting in a binary fashion, or disciplining bodies in an institutional-grid fashion,
biopower, according to Foucault, “plans a[n] [uncertain] milieu in terms of possible events regulated in a
transformable framework.”10 One type of this transformable framework is what I call a border-dispositif
and can be seen in the case of the U.S.–Mexico border wall.
Links
1NC – Asylum Seekers
The act of naming “asylum seekers” is violence; at best shifts the borders to
reconfigure who is outside without attempting to absorb the outside
Zylinska 6 (Joanna, Prof. of New Media at Goldsmith’s in London; “The Universal Acts;”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0950238042000181647)
Indeed, even the very process of naming an Iraqi, Albanian or Kurdish refugee an ‘asylum seeker’,
towards whom the hospitality of the host nation is to be extended, is inevitably violent. Butler explains
that ‘The naming is at once the setting of a boundary, and also the repeated inculcation of a norm’
(1993, p. 8). Taking account of the performativity of the hegemonic political discourses can enable us to
shift the borders that delineate and establish the contours of the human within these discourses . This in turn can
create a possibility for a new politics of immigration, a politics that is informed by an ethics of response and responsibility that goes beyond the set of moral obligations. Looking at excluded, abject, non-human bodies positioned at the threshold of the legitimate political community,
Butler declares: “The task is to refigure this necessary ‘outside’ as a future horizon, one in which the violence of exclusion is perpetually in the process of being overcome. But of equal importance is the preservation of the outside, the site where discourse meets its limits, where the
opacity of what is not included in a given regime of truth acts as a disruptive site of linguistic impropriety and unrepresentability, illuminating the violent and contingent boundaries of that normative regime precisely through the inability of that regime to represent that which might pose
a fundamental threat to its continuity.” (1993, p. 53) Taking a cue from Butler, we might thus argue that a responsible immigration politics should not be based on the idea of integration and immersion but rather on the preservation of the outside as ‘the site where discourse meets its
However, it
limits’. This does not of course mean that all asylum seekers should be permanently kept on the threshold of the country or community they want to enter, and that we should naively celebrate them as an irreducible alterity that resists incorporation.
is to suggest that the biopolitics of devouring the other, of digesting and disseminating him or her across
the body politic, in fact forecloses on the examination of the normative regime that establishes and
legitimates the discourse of national identity. The ‘asylum seeker’ itself a product of the regime to which
s/he is subsequently opposed can only function on the outside of that regime as its limitation and a
guarantee of its constitution. (Once the community truly opens itself up to what it does not know, both
its knowledge of alterity and self-knowledge are placed under scrutiny, a state of events that leads to
the inevitable shifting of the boundaries between the host as the possessor of goods and the newcomer
as their ‘seeker’.) The idea of liberal multiculturalism in which all alterity is welcomed and then quickly
incorporated into the host community risks occluding the violence at the heart of the constitution of
this very community, even if this community defines itself in terms of diversity or pluralism, and not
necessarily national or ethnic unity. The task of refiguring the ‘outside’ as a future horizon, without
attempting to annul and absorb this outside altogether, presents itself as a more responsible response
to the ‘asylum question’.
Providing asylum absent a structural reconfiguration of citizenship and borders is but a

cosmetic fix
Hodge 15 (Paul, Discipline of Geography and Environmental studies, University of
Newcastle, Callaghan NSW; “A grievable life? The criminalization and securing of asylum
seeker bodies in the ‘violent frames’ of Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders; pg. 8)
When Butler (2009) refers to the way the being of a body is given over to others she is posing the idea that bodies are exposed to social crafting
and form. The
transfer of illegitimacy onto asylum seeker bodies is part of this instrumental social crafting
and forming within the governing reality of OSB . But what are the effects and implications for the life unrecognised in the
case of offshore and onshore asylum seekers? What citizen subjectivities are produced and nurtured by the social crafting of the life norm of
citizenship? And, what does the coalition government’s governing reality mobilise in terms of maximising precariousness as constitutive of this
life norm? The very idea of precariousness, for Butler (2009), implies dependency on social networks and conditions. There
is no life
itself but conditions of life—‘‘life as something that requires conditions in order to become livable life
and, indeed, in order to become grievable’’ (2009, p. 23). So it is not that we are born then become
precarious but rather, “. . . [t]hat precariousness . . [t]hat precariousness is coextensive with birth itself
(birth is, by definition, precarious), which means that it matters whether or not this infant being
survives, and that its survival is dependent on what we might call a social network of hands ” (Butler, 2009, p.
14). We care over the living being precisely because of its precarity and that it may die. Socially supportive conditions of life enable, and are
vital to, a flourishing life. Conversely, social crafting can also produce conditions for lives to falter; ‘‘[o]nly under conditions in which the loss
would matter’’, Butler (2009, p. 14) argues, ‘‘does the value of the life appear’’. To this she adds, ‘‘ thus,
grievability is a
presupposition for the life that matters’’ (2009, p. 14). A life is a life grieved if lost. Without grievability, there is no
life, or, rather, ‘‘there is something living that is other than life ’’ (Butler, 2009, p. 14). Under the conditions of OSB,
citizenship qualifies the being of the life to be recognised . That asylum seekers are only apprehended to
the extent that they are intelligible as a non-citizen and ‘criminal’ confers on them an insecure social
ontology beyond recognisability . In terms of precariousness, this insecure social ontology, furnished by the life norm of citizenship,
involves being given over to certain socially determined conditions of precarity. The range of practises adopted under the coalition
government’s border protection policy constitute a crafting of diminished social conditions that maximise the precariousness of asylum seekers
in order to minimise the precariousness of those sustained by the life norm of citizenship. The
social conditions for a flourishing
life are constrained for offshore asylum seekers in the name of securing our borders and protecting the
citizen’s way of life. Details of the lives languishing at sea are denied, their heightened precarity concealed. As the riot on Manus Island
and brutal death of Iranian born asylum seeker Reza Barati on 17 February 2014 attests, the very conditions of life for asylum seekers in
offshore detention reflect their insecure social ontology and susceptibility to officially sanctioned precariousness. 10 Similarly,
onshore
asylum seekers are differentially exposed to increased precarity as their status as non-citizens lay them
open to threats of reduced social amenity, confinement and detention for mere acts of nuisance . Not only
do the forms and frames of OSB produce life conditions for the already precarious life of asylum seekers to falter, but in these very conditions
solicit and recruit Australian citizens into a governed reality that differentiates the life that matters and the ones that do not. The
lawful
legitimate citizen non-target is constituted as the recognisable life to be nurtured; it is their
precariousness that is to be minimised by the ‘‘social network of hands’’ (Butler, 2009, p. 14) provided by the
life norm of citizenship. The grievable life is the citizen’s life. Under this governed reality the asylum seekers’ life
is something other than a life to be grieved . The depleted social conditions crafted under the coalition
government’s border protection policy diminish the value placed on the life of the asylum seeker; they
are non-citizens, illegitimate and unrecognisable as a life that matters. The violence of the forms and frames of OSB
lie in these modalities of materiality; in these depleted social conditions and their enactment and in the uncompromising constitution of
personhood that underscores maximised precariousness for the asylum seeker. A grievable life they are not.
Asylum programs place refugees in a subhuman context of homo sacer, depriving

them of rights
Leckie et al ’09 Jacqueline Leckie (editor) is an Honorary Associate Professor at the
University of Otago, New Zealand, Christine Sylvester (author of chapter) is a Professor
of Political Science at the University of Connecticut “Chapter 2: Bare Life as a
Development/Postcolonial Problematic” Development in an Insecure and Gendered
World: The Relevance of the Millennium Goals 2009
Agamben theorizes that sovereign states exempt themselves, or make themselves exceptions to, their
own laws against killing and their own (usually) constitutionally proclaimed standards of justice. In the
name of the state, people can be killed by the state through capital punishment, death in detention,
death by torture, or death through war. Death in a war context is thought to be sacrificial, which means
that such deaths can be honoured and memorialized. In the case of capital punishment, death occurs at
state hands after a criminal trial finds an individual guilty of a heinous crime; this exception to the state
prohibition against killing is lawful in some polities. People tortured in prison, gathered into asylum
facilities, exterminated in camps, or made to disappear by the state are in the category of the ‘homo
sacer’. They are killed or severely mistreated by sovereign states without public acknowledgement or
eulogy, in circumstances that fall outside the usual arenas of state exception taking . That is to say,
such deaths are neither sacrifices to and for the state nor cases of permissible state punishment by
homicide. Entirely excluded from a community of rights, the homo sacer enters a ‘zone of indistinction
between sacrifice and homicide’ (Agamben 1998, 83), a ‘camp’ of bare life existence without hope of
justice, where individual life–taking follows no logic. Among all the variants of pernicious biopolitics of
this sort, Agamben calls Auschwitz ‘the pure space of exception’ (1998, 134)
1NC – “Illegal” Immigration Discourse
The notion of illegality and border crossing relies on a view of legislative authority that
cedes massive amounts of power to elites
Bycura 11 (Marquette; August 2011; Graduate student of law at Arizona state
university; “Immigration Legislation’s Panoptic Gaze;” pg. 86)
In this way Sheriff Arpaio becomes a symbol of the hegemony of elites in Arizona. As Gramsci termed it,
“hegemony… explains how states and state institutions work to win popular consent for their authority
through a variety of processes which disguise their position of dominance.” For example, politicians and
influential elites can and sometimes do disguise programs and legislation that merely cement a
particular group’s dominance in society as legitimate “common sense” arguments by telling people that
it is simply “wrong” to do anything illegal. Thus “illegal” (as the ones in power have termed it) border
crossing is “wrong”. Doing something wrong warrants punishment. Therefore, by the transitive
property, illegal border crossing should be punished. The part that few question is the fact that
someone invented the law deeming it illegal to cross the border without consent, and that law can be
questioned or changed, so that the action in question is no longer illegal. Such laws cement a particular
group’s dominance. Taking it out of the context of immigration, if those in power used the same logic
and deemed it “illegal” to eat over 2,000 calories a day, and therefore eating over 2,000 calories a day is
“wrong” and should therefore be punished – people would question those in power deeming eating
over 2,000 calories a day “illegal”, which is typically what happens when a government rations food.
However, even then, some people trust the government that the food must be rationed. The same is
true of borders. People trust the government that there must be borders and mechanism for allowing or
disallowing the entry of people.
1NC – Immigration = Biopolitical
Immigration is biopolitical: Western democracies construct some as “within” the
legitimate community and others without through immigration – this allows for the
management of the in-group
Zylinska 6 (Joanna, Prof. of New Media at Goldsmith’s in London; “The Universal Acts;”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0950238042000181647)
The ‘issue’ of asylum seekers lies at the very heart of the broader issue concerning the constitution of
the public sphere. For Butler democratic participation in the public sphere is enabled by the
preservation of its boundaries, and by the simultaneous establishment of its ‘constitutive outside’. She
argues that in contemporary Western democracies numerous singular lives are being barred from the
life of the legitimate community, in which standards of recognition allow one access to the category of
‘the human’. In order to develop a set of norms intended to regulate the state organism, biopolitics
needs to establish a certain exclusion from these norms, to protect the constitution of the polis and
distinguish it from what does not ‘properly’ belong to it. The biopolitics of immigration looks after the
bodies of the host community and protects it against parasites that might want to invade it, but it
needs to equip itself with tools that will allow it to trace, detect and eliminate these parasites.
Technology is mobilized to probe and scan the bare life of those wanting to penetrate the healthy body
politic: through the use of fingerprinting, iris recognition and scanners in lorries travelling, for example,
across the English Channel, the presence and legitimacy of ‘asylum seekers’ can be determined and
fixed. The bio-politics of immigration is thus performative in the sense of the term used by Butler;
through the probing of human bodies, a boundary between legitimate and illegitimate members of the
community is established. This process depends on a truth regime already in place, a regime that
classifies some bodies as ‘genuine’ and others (be it emaciated bodies of refugees squashed in lorries in
which they have been smuggled to the ‘West’, or confined to the leaky Tampa ship hopelessly hovering
off the shores of Australia) as ‘bogus’. The bare life of the host community thus needs to be properly
managed and regulated, with its unmanageable aspects placed in what Agamben (1998) calls a relation
of exception. But the question that remains occluded in these processes of ‘life management’ is ‘[w]hich
bodies come to matter / and why?’ (Butler 1993, p. xii). Butler demonstrates the regulatory mechanisms
involved in the production and simultaneous exclusion of ‘bare life’ in a number of her works, referring
to such excluded groups as transsexuals and transgender people (1990, 1993), non-traditional family
units (1990, 1993), racial minorities (1997) or even cyborgs (1993). But it is the literary heroine Antigone,
analysed in Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, that I want to turn to for my discussion of
the issue of asylum seekers in Western democracies. Butler’s reading of Antigone, who, ‘[p]rohibited
from action, . . . nevertheless acts’, and whose ‘act is hardly a simple assimilation to an existing norm’
(2002, p. 82), will allow me to think about the working of the performative in different political
discourses, and about the possibility of their resignification.
1NC – Sovereignty
Sovereignty maintains control over territory through borders and exclusion
MacDonald 11 (Keith D., Graduate student in Criminology at the University of Ottawa;
“An Archaeological Analysis of Canadian Immigration Legislation: From Welfare State
Liability to Neoliberal Subject,” pg. 24; https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/19860)
Dating back to the middle ages, sovereignty is the absolute rule of power by a prince/king/monarch (the
divine right of the king) in order to maintain control and authority of the territory (Foucault. 2003
[1976]: 34-35). The territory is the fundamental element in juridical sovereignty and principality.
Sovereign power is exercised over subjects who inhabit the territory. both metaphorically and literally
(Foucault. 2003 [1976]: 96). Ruling through obedience, which is ensured through the sword. protects the
sovereign (Foucault. 2003 [1976]: 240). Traditionally, the king had the power of life over his people. to
take life or let live (Foucault. 2003 [1976]: 241). Sovereignty is a form of governance with characteristics
such as constitutions, laws and governing authorities. 'The right of the state in international and national
law to control the entry and residence of individuals within its borders is today taken as one of the
essential conditions of sovereignty' (Dua. 2003: 41). We see the use of sovereignty with the exclusion of
the lepers in the Middle Ages as sovereign authority was exercised through a combination of laws and
regulation, as well as religious rituals, which brought about a binary division between those who were
Iepers and those who were not (Foucault. 2007 [1978]: 9). In other words, to maintain control of the
territory, the sovereign authority illustrates his power over the inhabitants by separating and excluding
the contagious Iepers. This example displays how sovereign power is exercised in relation to subjects of
the state's territory through various mechanisms such as exclusionary laws and regulations, leper
colonies, etc. Sovereignty supports and sets up the conditions of possibility for discipline to surface.
Sovereignty constructs subjects to be excluded and included

Liability to Neoliberal Subject,” pg. 83-85; https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/19860)
This section will engage with the elements of sovereignty. biopower and state racism, and how they help
to make sense of the documents. The contradiction between sovereignty and biopower will be
discussed. as well as how this is reconciled with the introduction of state racism. Sovereignty: Subjects
and 'Enemies' In a general sense, there is a sovereign right for nations to control their borders and
regulate subjects within that territory. The state also has a sovereign right to protect their international
border by excluding any foreign national in the defense against degeneracy and abnormality
(Christensen. 2004). In order to protect the population, a nation must identify (1) its subjects and (2)
those it considers 'enemies' (inside and outside the boundary of the state) to be excluded (which
involves rejection and expulsion/deportation). Subjects of the Sovereign In all three documents, the
individuals who Canada identifies as its subjects" were its citizens (IA. 1952: 3. 1.; IA. 1976: 4. 1.: IRPA.
2001: 19. 1.). This category was expanded in 1976 and 2001 to include members of the family class and
independent/economic immigrants (IA. 1976: 6. 1.: IRPA, 2001: 12. 1-2). The latter two documents also
permitted the entry of Convention refugees if they had a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of
race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion, as well as those at
risk of torture or cruel and unusual treatment or punishment (IA. 1976: 2. 1.2001= 3. 2. d.). The
identification of a nation's subjects distinguishes the individuals they have vowed to protect from
'enemies'. Under sovereignty, protection comes via the creation of laws that define certain behaviour as
threatening and then excluding those that engage in such acts. This exclusion is justified, as a state's
subjects are no longer exposed to persons considered a threat, which ultimately protects the
population. With that said, let us now turn to the individuals in the documents that Canada considers
threatening 'enemies'. In all three documents, it appears that threatening 'enemies' were individuals
suffering from a disease, disorder, disability or other health impairment whose admission would cause
or might reasonably be expected to cause excessive demands on health or social services (IA. 1952: 5. a-
c.: IA. 1976: 19. 1. a. ii.: IRPA. 2001: 38. 1. c.) (Ftnt: Which were identified in all three documents in the
bad immigrant section.) (all of whom were ultimately rejected from entering into Canada, or removed if
they had gained entry). As we saw in the literature review, according to Christensen (2004), such
practices are considered racist in a Foucauldian sense (Ftnt: Racism in a Foucauldian sense is on the level
of the population, not on the level of the genetic), as they defend society against degeneracy and
abnormality by relying on a discourse of sovereignty that gives the state the power to decide who
should be taken care of and who should not be looked after. The potential effect of excluding these
classes made possible a self-perpetuating circle where immigrants were prohibited from coming to
Canada because of the conditions that resulted in them being designated within that class in the first
place. For instance, immigration applicants from countries that are unable to provide adequate health
care for certain conditions (for whatever reason) were excluded from Canada and exposed to a greater
risk of death in their country of origin because the resources to address these situations were largely
absent. Noted in the literature review, Mosoff (1998) argues that the rationale for this was that the state
fears they will burden already overwhelmed medical and social systems; it argues that by excluding
these classes, the Canadian state protects its population, and in the process exposes these individuals to
a greater risk of death.
1NC – Borders Suture Racism
The borders of the state define enemies of the population and define who can be
killed based on a racial markers
Foucault (2003 [1976]) argues that state racism emerged in the nineteenth century and is defined as
whatever 'justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the
death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or population' (p.
258). What this means is that the 'death' or 'killing' of individuals deemed 'enemies' of the state is
justified through the use of racism. which ultimately strengthens the population (the object of
biopower). The term race and racism will briefly be explained for clarity's sake. Under sovereignty, while
some ancient cultures were sensitive to cultural identity and had a discourse or perceptions of hierarchy
(in which they assumed superiority) they did not conceptualize race in modern, embodied terms (Hyde.
1997: 224). Accordingly, Foucault's conception of race does not refer to divisions primarily based on
skin-tone, heredity or bloodlines (Kelly 2004: 61-62). Foucault's comprehension of race is grounded in
centuries of discourse where race had little to do with physical appearance (Ftnt: Foucault alludes to
how in the Middle Ages the predominant form of racism was religious racism in which European
Christians saw Muslims as the racial other. (Foucault, 2003 [1976]: 65-89)) and referred to the
population/nation that individuals belonged to (Kelly, 2004: 62)(Ftnt: The words “nation” and “race”
were once used interchangeably (Kelly, 2004: 62)). This suggests that the modern understanding of race,
which began in the early 1800's, as a "natural trait inherent in the body may appear well entrenched in
ordinary thought, but it is not particularly old" (Hyde. 1997: 224). It is important to note that the use of
the term racism (in Foucault's state racism) is not the same as in the contemporary socio-political
context, as it is the biopolitical exclusion of individuals which needs only the idea that they are harmful
to society, not that they are dangerous at a genetic level (Kelly, 2004: 61-62). Simply put, the old term of
racism (the one in which Foucault is referring to) is on the level of the population (as in a
society/nation), and the modern term is on the level of genetics. For Foucault (2003 [1976]), race is a
'way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between
what must live and what must die' (p. 254). This allows for the identification of 'enemies' of the
population, inside or outside the boundaries of the state. and thus licenses the killing of those people .
When Foucault (2003) [1976]) says he does not simply mean murder, but also every form of indirect
murder [letting die]: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some
people, or quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on (p. 256). Foucault (2003 [1976])
argues, 'once the State functions in the biopower mode. racism alone can justify the murderous function
of the State (p. 256). State racism is evident when a state makes the distinction between those it keeps
alive, those it kills, and those it merely allows to be exposed to greater risk of death (Kelly, 2004: 61).
Shein (2004: 18) built on the work of Foucault and argues that state racism is not only a tool to
legitimate death, but also works as a mechanism of power. Racism goes beyond justifying death, as it is
a power that controls and normalizes the population. Shein argues that the normalizing effects of state
racism (whatever they may he) should be developed, whether it is through a disciplinary or regulatory
form.
Contemporary state racism manifests itself as bio-nationalism -> makes provisions for
“good” immigrants
Maybe an impact?

With an experimental application of state racism two the contemporary geopolitical situation Kelly
(2004: 58-64) argues that we are currently witnessing a shift from a focus on state racism to that of bio-
nationalism. For Kelly (2004: 62), bio-nationalism accompanies state racism wherein a population strives
to strengthen itself as a nation-state. Bio-nationalism supposes that with the emergence of the
economy, there is a need to make it stronger, which strengthens the population as a whole. In order to
strengthen the economy, a race/nation systematically selects skilled and wealthy immigrants who will
be economically beneficial to their country [regardless of their national origin, or if they are physical
different). Kelly (2004: 62) argues that in order to do this, a race/nation must draw upon a form of state
racism that involves making large-scale use of prejudice to systematically select immigrants. The
selection of these immigrants does not strengthen the race/nation at the level of the genetic, but at the
level of the economic, which strengthens the whole of the population, which is the object of bio-
nationalism (Kelly, 2004: 62-63). Here we are seeing the importance of the productive citizen geared
toward improving the economy: bio-nationalism uses prejudice in favour of strengthening the nation as
a whole (Kelly. 2004: 64).
1NC – Queerness
Sexuality is constructed at the border
Lubheid 2 (Eithne, PhD. in Ethnic studies; Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the
Border, University of Minnesota press; pg. 101)
Lesbian and gay exclusion functioned until 1990 not because of its grounding in rational thought but
because of its ability to weave together a range of disparate, sometimes contradictory, and often clearly
unreasonable homophobic discourses and practices into a "chain or system." This weaving-together
found institutional crystallization in the Class A medical exclusion system, which was supported by "the
state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, land] in the various social hegemonies." At the same
time, this formation generated its own "disjunctions and contradictions." Contradictions included the
ways that the formation contributed to production of the very sexuality against which it claimed to
guard the nation. Quiroz's case offers a valuable window onto the ways that border monitoring enabled
the production of official immigration- service definitions of lesbianism, around which exclusions-that
potentially affected not just self-identified lesbians but any woman who did not clearly conform to
current heterosexual standard-were organized. Border monitoring, in turn, crucially depended on
establishing procedures whereby immigrant sexual confessions could be mandated. Quiroz's case, and
her strategies of resistance, also provide information about the ways that sexual monitoring of the
border was gender differentiated, even though suspected lesbians and gay men were barred from entry
under a shared provision. As the case makes clear, racial and class histories integrally structure how
gender and sexual identities are produced, negotiated, oppositionally deployed, and sanctioned at the
border. Quiroz's case also raises critical questions about how migrant women negotiate sexual identities
and communities when the threat of state- sanctioned exclusion or deportation structures their options.
Though an "end" to lesbian/gay exclusion in the broadest sense has not occurred, the transformation of
conditions of struggle, and of relations between affected individuals and groups, is beyond question.
Sexual regulation at the border leads to sexual regulation within

Wilson=Pete Wilson, a candidate for California governor in the mid-90s who portrayed immigrant
women’s sexuality as a threat to state services
Lubheid 2 (Eithne, PhD. in Ethnic studies; Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the
Border, University of Minnesota press; pg. xx)
Wilson's claims legitimated heightened immigration-control efforts that particularly targeted Mexican
women and men (see chapter 5). It also reinforced a long-standing provision of immigration law that
denies entry to anyone deemed "liable to become a public charge," which has been used particularly
against poor and minority women of childbearing age for more than a century. Lawmakers seeking to
reform welfare quickly took up Wilson's strategy by attributing a host of social ills to the allegedly
irresponsible sexual behavior of poor and minority women within the United States. Welfare reform
rhetoric became largely organized around the idea of controlling the "unbridled sexuality of usually
racialized welfare mothers" rather than responding to such issues as low wages in the service sector, the
shortage of subsidized childcare, and institutionalized discrimination." Gwendolyn Mink summarizes the
outcome of welfare reform, as codified by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
Reconciliation Act (PRA) of 1996: “[The Act] hardens legal differences among women [in the United
States] based on their marital, maternal, class, and racial statuses. It segregates poor single mothers into
a separate caste, subject to a separate system of laws. While middle-class women may choose to participate in the labor market, poor single
mothers are forced by law to do so (work requirements and time limits). While middle-class women may choose to bear children, poor single mothers may be punished by the government for
making that choice (the family cap and illegitimacy ratios). While middle-class women enjoy still-strong rights to sexual and reproductive privacy, poor single mothers are compelled by the
government to reveal the details of intimate relationships in exchange for survival (mandatory maternal cooperation in establishing paternity). And while middle-class mothers may choose
their children's fathers by marrying them or permitting them to develop relationships with children-or not-poor mothers are required by law to make room for biological fathers in their
families (mandatory cooperation in establishing and enforcing child support orders).” These gender- and class-differentiated effects intersected
with long- standing racial inequalities, too. Mink explains: “Although work requirements mandating that women on welfare work apply indiscriminately to
all poor single mothers, it is poor mothers of color who hear their heaviest weight. African American and Latina mothers are disproportionately poor and, accordingly, are disproportionately
enrolled on welfare. . . So, when welfare rules indenture poor mothers as unpaid servants of local governments (in workfare programs), it is mothers of color who are disproportionately
harmed. And when time limits require mothers to forsake their children for the labor market, it is mothers of color who are disproportionately deprived of their right to manage their family's
Welfare reform, which substantially ended much

lives and it is children of color who are disproportionately deprived of their mothers' care.”
public assistance rather than poverty, thus multiplied inequalities within the United States by once again
targeting poor and minority women's heterosexualities for surveillance, control, and punishment. These
examples make clear that although patriarchal heterosexuality has been elevated as a national
imperative, race and class dimensions further determine whose heterosexualities are valued and whose
are subject to surveillance and punishment. Welfare and immigration laws work in tandem to control
poor and minority women's heterosexualities, making it more difficult for them to legally enter the
United States and ensuring that such women within the United States are subject to punitive regimes
and negative stereotyping. Sexual regulation at the border articulates sexual regulation within.
1NC – Militarization
Militarization of borders bad
Trinkunas 15 Harrold Trinkunas, Foreign Policy Deputy Director, Center for
International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford University,
11-20-2015, "Fear itself: Why closed borders are bad for America and the world,"
Brookings, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2015/11/20/fear-
itself-why-closed-borders-are-bad-for-america-and-the-world/
Peaceful borders in the Americas are not an accident of history, but rather the product of two
remarkable trends over the past three decades: sweeping democratization and the spread of economic
integration agreements. Since the 1980s, the region’s militaries have stepped out of power, and
democratic governments prevail in almost all countries in the hemisphere. This has led countries to
manage borders through peaceful negotiations rather than militarization. And these democratic
governments have also sought to tie their economies ever more closely together through trade and
investment preferences: Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay founded the Mercosur customs union
in 1991; the United States, Canada, and Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in
1992; and the United States, Central America, and the Dominican Republic took up the Dominican
Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement in 2005. And now the Trans-Pacific Partnership offers
the possibility of a next generation trade agreement that would include five major economies in the
hemisphere. The degree of trade integration is unprecedented. Economic integration and
democratization have produced many public goods in the Americas, such as increased freedom and
shared prosperity. According to United Nations statistics, merchandise trade in Latin America more than
tripled between 2000 and 2014, and trade flows have nearly doubled for North America over the same
period. As of 2013, 32.5 percent of total U.S. trade takes place with Canada, Mexico, and Brazil, and over
55 percent of imported oil is sourced from other countries in the Americas. The North America Free
Trade Agreement countries are at the forefront of these trends toward peaceful relations among
nations, deep economic integration, and intensified cross-border flows. The degree of trade integration
is unprecedented: Approximately 40 percent of everything Mexico exports to the United States contain
U.S. inputs, and for Canada, 25 percent of exports to the United States depend on inputs from the
United States. But these trends have also produced some public bads, such as borders that are more
vulnerable to penetration by transnational crime and increasingly open to flows of illicit goods and
undocumented migrants. And many experts agree that the majority of illicit goods and undocumented
migrants that enter the United States do so intermingled with growing legal trade at formal border
crossings rather than through the empty spaces in between. Many democratic governments in the
hemisphere, frequently mistrustful of their own security forces, have not made the necessary
investments in secure borders to adapt to a regional environment in which flows of people, goods, and
money have greatly accelerated. Governments also made the mistake of thinking that integration would
only lead to an increase in legal trade, when it was in fact logical to expect that illicit flows would rise as
well. Rather than build more walls, we instead need to adapt our borders to a new paradigm that prizes
ever closer economic integration with our neighbors. This means that the United States and its trade
partners in the Americas need to do better at finding the illicit “signal” within the growing tide of trade
“noise.” This places a premium on collaborative cross-border security. Rather than duplicate efforts by
having custom facilities inspect goods twice as they cross borders, we should have our customs officials
working side by side with their counterparts, trained to common standards, operating under a common
roof. Efforts are already underway to expand the pre-clearance of goods produced by trusted
manufacturers and transported by certified shippers. Projects are now being developed to operate
jointly staffed inspection facilities with Mexico at the Laredo airport in Texas, at San Jeronimo in
Chihuahua and at Otay Mesa in California. As such efforts expand, they will ensure that border security
resources are deployed more effectively and efficiently to keep us safe even as we benefit from a rising
tide of trade. Rather than build more walls, we instead need to adapt our borders to a new paradigm
that prizes ever closer economic integration with our neighbors. But we also need to realize that
improved border security infrastructure needs to be paired with immigration reform. By making it much
harder for people to cross our borders than goods and money, we create incentives for otherwise law-
abiding people to seek out illicit paths to gain access to a brighter future in the United States. Instead, a
well-designed and humane temporary worker program would provide our own homeland security
officials with a much needed break by diverting migrants seeking economic opportunity into legal and
documented ways to access the United States and leave the illicit transit of our borders to those whose
motives are suspect and whose behavior should be closely scrutinized by our intelligence community. By
pioneering these reforms, the United States would be well placed to collaborate with its other neighbors
in the Americas facing similar border dilemmas, such as Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay on the Triple
Frontier, or among the states facing violent cross-border organized crime in the Northern Triangle of
Central America. It could also generate new ideas and best practices for European partners, who are
struggling with a separate but in some ways similar set of border challenges of their own. Improving
border security infrastructure and the U.S. immigration system would allow the United States to
capitalize on the peace it has achieved with its neighbors and with other countries in the hemisphere.
We should work to transform that peace into both higher levels of economic integration and broader
and deeper security against transnational threats from illicit actors.
1NC – War on Terror
The war on Terrorism has created a constant ever expanding zone of exclusion
Violence
A direct parallel, then, can be drawn between Agamben’s notion of the camp as a zone of indistinction
and the logic that informs the United States’ war on terrorism. In addition to the physical emergence of
camp-like structures such as the detainment centres for suspected terrorists, it can be said that the war
on terrorism operates through the sovereign ban in the sense that it blurs the distinction between
inside/ outside, domestic politics/international relations, order/anarchy, trust/fear police/military and
friend/enemy. This section argues that the blurring is brought about by a fundamental change in the
United States’ politics of security. Contrary to the pre-9/11 period, the starting point of post-9/11
security politics is prevention rather than the defence against an actual threat: ‘‘We must adapt the
concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries…To forestall or
prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre-emptively.’’17
The semiotic shift from defence to prevention takes its point of departure in the behavioural
potentialities of states rather than their actual behaviour: ‘‘[T]he United States can no longer solely rely
on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of
today’s threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be unleashed by our adversaries’ choice
of weapons, do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.’’18 Whereas anticipatory
self-defence as it is understood in international law still operates with an image of reactive violence, the
war on terrorism replaces this picture with that of proactive intervention: ‘‘We must deter and defend
against the threat before it is unleashed.’’19 As such, prevention entails a move from danger to risk.20
The aim is no longer to confront a concrete danger, but to intervene before threats have fully emerged.
Thus, preventive security is virtual security: it is one step further away from danger in its potentiality,
but at the same time it is real, for the future increasingly determines present security choices.21
1NC – Border Spectacularization
The spectacular nature of borders promotes immigrant exploitation
Nicholas De Genova, University of Chicago, Spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion,
the obscene of inclusion, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01419870.2013.783710 , May
2013
As the border is effectively everywhere, so also is the spectacle of its enforcement and therefore its
violation, rendering migrant ‘illegality’ ever more unsettlingly ubiquitous. The Border Spectacle relentlessly
augments and embellishes the mundane and diminutive human mobility of ‘unauthorized’ migrants and ‘dubious’ asylum seekers with the
mystique of an obnoxious and unpardonable transgression of the presumably sacrosanct boundary of the state’s space. But the ever-
increasingly militarized spectacle of apprehensions, raids, detentions and deportations always accompanies the banality of a continuous
importation of ‘unauthorized’ migrant labour. All non-citizens, in as much as they are construed as such (whether as migrants or asylum
seekers), are overtly figured in one or another juridical relation to the authority of a territorially defined (‘national’) state. In spite of their
apparent figuration as strictly politico-legal subjects, however, all migrants like all human life, generally are finally apprehensible from the
standpoint of capital as always-already at least potentially the embodiment of labour-power, the commodifiable human capacity for labour .
Nevertheless, within the world social order of capitalism, there is a systemic separation between the
locus of exploitation and the means of direct physical coercion, a separation in other words between the
‘private’ sector of the market and the ‘public’ authority of law and the state. Capital’s domination of
labour requires this bifurcation of social life under the effective hegemony of a relatively durable
distinction between the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’, whereby every state may be best understood to
be a particularization of the global political dimension of the capitallabour relation (Holloway 1994). Hence,
migrants are similarly figured as labour also from the expressly ‘political’ standpoint of state power. (This inclination to see all people as at least
potential labour-power may be most pronouncedly true for parsimonious welfare states, insofar as they perennially devise to ultimately
convert those dependent upon public assistance into properly productive, ‘independent’ citizen-subjects.) The state mediates the capital labour
relation through tactical deployments of law, policy and policing in a manner that ensures the relegation of diverse formations of transnational
human mobility to a variegated juridical spectrum of ‘legalities’ and ‘illegalities’ (for a fuller discussion, see De Genova 2010a). The ‘illegality’ of
‘undesirable’ migrants, then, supplies a crucial feature of their distinctive, if disavowed, desirability as labour for capital. The spectacles of
migrant ‘illegality’, practically and materially enacted through various forms of border and immigration law enforcement, rely significantly upon
a constellation of images and discursive formations, which may be taken to supply the scene of ‘exclusion’. And yet, the more that the Border
Spectacle generates anti-immigrant controversy, the more that the veritable inclusion of those incessantly targeted for exclusion proceeds
apace. The ‘inclusion’ of these deportable migrants, of course, is finally devoted to the subordination of their labour, which can be best
accomplished only to the extent that their incorporation is permanently beleaguered with the kinds of exclusionary and commonly racist
campaigns that ensure that this inclusion is itself, precisely, a form of subjugation. What is at stake, then, is a larger sociopolitical (and legal)
process of inclusion through exclusion, labour importation (whether overt or covert) premised upon protracted deportability. If
the Border
Spectacle supplies a scene of ostensible ‘exclusion’ indeed, if it fashions ‘the’ border as a veritable mise-
en-sce`ne of the larger dramaturgy of migration as a site of transgression and the reaction formations of
(law) ‘enforcement’ it nonetheless conceals (in plain view, as it were) the public secret of a sustained
recruitment of ‘illegal’ migrants as undocumented labour. This we may comprehend to be the obscene
of inclusion.
1NC – Settler Colonialism Root Cause
Settler colonialist states harbor sexual violence- borders allow nations to determine
who comes in and in turn sexual violence is not reported for illegal immigrants
Perera & Pugliese 18 [Suvendrini & Joseph, John Curtin Distinguished Professor and Research
Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Culture & Creative Arts, Research Director, MMCCS
at Macquarie University, Social & Legal Studies, Sexual Violence and the Border: Colonial Genealogies of
US and Australian Immigration Detention Regimes, April 10, 2018]
Some of the ways in which threats to settler-colonial sovereignty and security by such border transgressors
are ‘folded into’ one another are further elaborated in a recent article by Richard Rodriguez, titled ‘Not counting Mexicans and
Indians’. Rodriguez insistently connects the ongoing forms of violence that characterize the US state: violence
against Indigenous peoples since 1492, the racialized punishment of Black and Brown prisoners in US
jails and violence against immigrants at its borders . This violence at the border, Rodriguez further argues, is one
that is ever expanding: Within the past generation, the border has literally become a killing field . It has become a
cemetery for migrants from Mexico and Central America. And yet, in many ways, the border has extended to the entire country . . . For
example, in December 2014, the US Justice Department put forth new racial profiling guidelines that
formally ban racial profiling in the United States. There are, however, two huge exceptions that render
these guidelines The Department of Homeland Security oversees the Immigration and Customs Enforce-
ment (ICE) prisons in the United States, a fact that crystallizes the relation between border security and
settler-colonial sovereignty. In both the US and Australian contexts, regimes of immigration detention must be seen
as predicated on reproducing and attempting to legitimate national sovereignties secured through
violence, subjugation, attempted genocide and the social, political, cultural and economic
extinguishment of their respective Indigenous peoples. To connect practices of immigration detention of
asylum seekers, refugees and the undocumented to the incarceration of racialized prisoners is to bring
into graphic focus the ongoing tensions and contradictions that continue to unsettle the seemingly completed
project of the modular and unitary settler-colonial nation state. Violent practices of immigration detention, when
examined within these two geopolitical contexts, expose those very pressure points of instability that challenge the
authority of the settler-colonial state to determine , once and for all, who may assume residence within its
boundaries. Rodriguez points out that the expandable reach of border violence is imbricated with sexual violence: ‘Much of the
violence committed against undocumented migrants, especially against women and including rape,
largely goes unreported for fear of deportation’ (Rodriguez, 2015). In this article, we want to begin to call attention in
particular to the border as the continuing site where colonial sovereignty is enacted and reproduced
through sexual violence. As we will discuss in detail, in the case of Australia’s offshore immigration detention programme, carried out
on the territories of its former colonial protectorates in Nauru and Papua New Guinea (PNG), sexual violence against refugees and asylum
seekers forms part of the spectacle of ‘deterrence’ intended to enforce the sanctity of Australia’s own ‘sovereign borders’ (Operation Sovereign
Borders is the official title of the programme to halt the arrival of refugee boats). A 2016 report by Amnesty International and Human Rights
Watch has noted that ‘Few other countries go to such lengths to deliberately inflict suffering on people seeking safety and freedom’ (Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch, 2016). Through this deliberate infliction of suffering in the name of protecting the borders, the violence
of settler-colonial sovereignty is reproduced and revindicated.
1NC – Otherization
Borders have a symbolic significance that allows us to classify people as “other”
Furedi 16 (Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, United Kingdom.
He is well known for his work on sociology of fear, education, therapy culture, paranoid parenting and
sociology of knowledge, Spiked, “Can Humanity Live Without Border?” http://www.spiked-
online.com/newsite/article/can-humanity-live-without-borders/18278#.Wza2fPZFzIU, April 25, 2016)
e.g.
So borders are not just physical and geographical realities; they also have a powerful symbolic
significance through which communities gain insights into themselves and the meaning of their
existence. People’s very sense of social reality is often forged, and internalised, through their
engagement with symbolic boundaries. These boundaries – between the ‘self’ and ‘other’ – often
influence people’s sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Today, as in the past, our attitudes towards physical and
spatial borders are influenced by our attitudes towards symbolic borders
Society’s turn away from ‘holding the line’
My view is that contemporary societies, and especially their cultural and political elites, find it difficult
to gain meaning from symbolic borders. Academic literature and much social commentary now
implicitly question the moral status and even the legitimacy of borders. Thinkers frequently highlight the
arbitrary and fluid nature of borders. Numerous social theorists insist that borders have become more
porous. Often influenced by postmodernist theories – particularly those of the French philosopher Gilles
Deleuze – these thinkers depict borders as indeterminate and artificial constructions. The so-called
artificiality of the borders between East and West, between civilized and uncivilized, or between Europe
and Asia, is held up as evidence of the broader meaningless of all physical borders.
The tendency to view borders, and indeed any strongly drawn distinction, in a negative light is
widespread in contemporary popular culture. Being ‘post-border’ or ‘beyond borders’ is now considered
a positive value. Just Google the words ‘without borders’: what you’ll find is not just Médecins Sans
Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) but a bewildering array of organizations that aspire to achieve the
status of being ‘without borders’. Engineers, musicians, chemists, veterinarians, executives, librarians,
builders, plumbers, lawyers, astronomers, creatives, journalists, rabbis, herbalists , acupuncturists,
clowns… these are just some of the occupational groups now flaunting their core value of being ‘without
borders’.
Some see this enthusiasm for being ‘without borders’ as an expression of genuine risk-taking, of a bold
and pioneering desire to explore the unknown. And it would indeed be inspiring if this attempt to go
beyond borders really did represent an endorsement of the enlightened, Kantian notion of
cosmopolitanism and the aspiration to be a ‘citizen of the world’. Unfortunately, however, although
there are numerous contradictory impulses fueling this cultural reaction against borders, the dominant
driver is an anxiety about taking responsibility for the drawing of symbolic distinctions and clear lines.
The reaction against borders runs parallel with a loss of nerve about making moral distinctions,
underpinned by a reluctance to make any big or serious value judgments. One of the most serious
problems afflicting the West today is the unwillingness to ‘hold the line’ – and this now influences even
how nation states behave and conceive of themselves.
Borders are a symbolic way to divide people
e.g.
What these critics of privacy forget is that the separation of the public and private spheres, and the
strengthening of the boundary between them, has been absolutely essential to the emergence of the
modern individual. People’s aspiration for autonomy and identity cannot be entirely resolved in the
public sphere. The private sphere provides a potential space for reflection, and for the development of
personality itself. Intimate relationships require privacy if they are not to disintegrate under the
pressure of public scrutiny. Whatever problems might exist in the private sphere, that sphere is
nonetheless the prerequisite for the exercise of moral autonomy.
Individual autonomy and self-determination, like sovereignty, are cultivated in spaces that are
protected by borders. This border could be either physical or symbolic, protected by law or simply by
custom; but what is important is that it provides the space and the opportunity for the cultivation of
an identity, whether an individual or collective one.
Critics of borders insist that borders are social constructions, and are both artificial and arbitrary. It can
feel difficult to disagree with this point. Anyone looking at a map of the world will be struck by the
arbitrary character of many nations and territories. Many of the frontiers of Africa are drawn in straight
lines, which are testimony to the lack of imagination among old colonising powers. No border is beyond
question. For example, the boundary between children and adults is frequently violated by youngsters
who grow up faster than others. Borders between nations are continually tested, too, by politicians,
armies, internet providers, businesses, smugglers and, of course, migrants.
However, borders are not simply artificial social constructions. They are, as Simmel noted, the physical
or symbolic expressions of a social need. Not everyone can be expected to like a specific border, but
this medium of division, this tool of separation and thus potential connection, expresses the needs
and aspirations of people and of societies. As Simmel observed: ‘Not the state, not the pieces of
property, not the city district, and not the county district limit one another, but rather the inhabitants or
owners exercise reciprocal impact.’ It is through reciprocal human interaction that borders gain
significance. Whether these borders then become impenetrable walls or open doors is determined by
the values and attitudes that prevail in a given society, by what we think and feel at a given time.
1NC – Violent National Belonging
Borders are necessary for a nation’s survival.
e.g.
However one views borders, it is important that we acknowledge that humanity has always been in
the business of drawing lines. Symbolic borders embody values that give people a sense of moral
equilibrium and help them lead their lives. The human imagination often asks us to soar above borders
in order to experience the unknown. But even such flights of imagination have, as their precondition, a
sense of limits, of boundaries that must be overcome. When the Furedi family crossed the Hungarian
border into Austria in November 1956, we were in no doubt that the world needed to ‘hold the line’,
this line we were crossing, which separated two very different ways of life.
Boundaries are necessary for the flourishing of humanity. Simply to reject them on account of their
seemingly arbitrary character is an act of evasion. Western society’s estrangement from borders is not
a progressive step forward – rather it expresses a crisis of nerve in relation to holding the line. Western
society has embraced the evasive tactic of non-judgmentalism. Now it must relearn the value of making
distinctions. It needs to overcome its reluctance to make judgments of value, and stop being afraid to
hold the line. In this context, it is essential to reject the idea that borders between nations are simply an
artificial prop, unworthy things designed merely to keep people out. Borders are essential for the
maintenance of national sovereignty, which is so far the only foundation that humanity has
discovered for the institutionalisation of democratic accountability. Without borders, a citizen
becomes a subject – subject to a power that cannot be realistically held to account.
That the idea of sovereignty has suffered the same fate as autonomy and privacy is not surprising. These
are all interlinked Enlightenment values that presuppose human beings’ capacity to make judgments
about life, behaviour and the future. Those thinkers and commentators who think that people who
desperately cling to the idea of borders are on the moral low ground should think again. For it is their
own reluctance to hold the line and take borders seriously that represents a rejection of modernity’s
fundamental values of sovereignty, autonomy, and the separation of the private and the public.
The current debate about migration, and what, if anything, European borders should mean in the 21st
century, is not simply an outcome of the crises in Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. More fundamentally, it is
founded upon a pre-existing mood of confusion about the meaning of a nation in the context of the
European Union. The fact that Western European borders are losing their meaning is really linked to the
growing disenchantment with what it means to be German, or Dutch, or British. The migrant question is
as intimately bound up with this corrosion of Western European nations’ sense of self as it is with the
disarray in the Middle East and north Africa.
The desire to transcend the limitations of borders is often a daring and worthy one. But in the current
historical context, there is nothing courageous about not taking borders seriously; on the contrary, it
is an expression of a refusal to take responsibility in the face of uncertainty.
The debate about borders in Europe is driven by two contradictory, but very human, passions. The
human aspiration for freedom of mobility is clashing with people’s existential
need for a sense of security. Neither of these sentiments can be ignored, which means Europe
has some very difficult choices to make. The answer to this current crisis lies somewhere in the
reconciliation of the aspiration for freedom of movement with the existential need for spatial and
symbolic security, and in protecting, not demolishing, the Enlightenment ideal of the boundary between
things.
1NC – Economic Benefit
The border system allows us to devalue the lives of immigrants and pass them back
and forth solely for their economic value.
“The Border Patrol’s policy of “prevention through deterrence” has resulted in the purposeful
displacement and diversion of migrants into more treacherous and dangerous zones to cross
such as deserts, rivers, canals, and rugged terrain, which from 1993 to 2008 resulted in more than 5,000
deaths along the US/Mexico border, a doubling in the number of deaths of border crossers. The
flourishing of these companies relies on and ensures the permanent circulation of migrant
bodies from one side of the border to the other and back again, and from one institution to
the next; each time extracting a profit. The death or permanent detention of migrants is not nearly
as profitable or as possible as their optimal circulation through a secured border “environment.”
Migrants are economically forced across the border; if they are caught, they are transported,
incarcerated, and returned close to the Mexican border to try again. Each cycle through brings another
round of profit for these privately contracted companies. Similarly, the ecological securitization of the
border wild lands operates at the level of circulating uncertain populations. Where sovereignty acts on
the territory and discipline on the individual, biopower, Foucault says, acts on the population as a whole
to maximize positive elements in a “transformable framework.”15 In the case of the border environment, we can see this in
the clear and active management of the environment itself and its natural givens, its rivers, marshes, hills, vegetation, etc. to yield certain effects for migrants, both
human and animal. Biopower, Foucault, says, “aims to plan a milieu” as the medium in which circulation takes place.16 This is especially true in the case of the
Environmental Defense Fund, backed by the Weeden Group, who has proposed several ways to “improve” the environment and secure the border. “Clearing the
river corridor to remove dense thickets of nonnative salt cedar,” they say “and replacing them with native vegetation, can improve sight-lines and bolster the Border
Patrol's ability to enforce the law.” “Creating backwater channels (ravine wetlands),” they say, “can help impede illegal border crossings while providing significant
benefit to birds and wildlife.”17 Acting directly on the border environment does not deter or discipline individuals, rather it accepts the uncertainty and inevitability
of their movements, and invests in their optimal and controlled circulation through the milieu. The chosen placement of the wall along the border is another such
biopolitical tactic. It cuts through precarious habitat and the private property of those without the finances to fight it, while carefully building around well-financed
golf courses. The wall cuts through public parks, schools, low-income housing areas, industrial parks, and urban and rural watersheds causing flooding. This is
not merely a matter of environmental devastation, classism, or racism, etc., it is a productive
investment opportunity for new real estate and the gentrification of the built environment. The goal,
Foucault says, is to break up crowds and ensure hygiene, ventilation, and commerce.18 Without direct punishment, or disciplinary action, the wall as a piece of the
The paradox of maintaining
environment shapes the environmental conditions under which water, plants, animals, and people circulate and gather.
an exclusionary territorial-state is revealed in the figure of the citizen who is neither inclusive nor
universal. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, according to Foucault, the state began to accept this failure
but still needed to develop another mode of power to deal with the proliferation of non-citizen subjects. At this
time there emerged a new form of power that was able to act much more indirectly and statistically on what were
previously considered “non-political” phenomena: the physical environment and the population as a whole.
Biopolitical border-dispositifs are thus not simply an expression of state violence but rather the flourishing
of a whole host of governmentalities (gouvernementalités multiples), or practices of government—
economic.
Impact
Impact --- Biopower
Biopower !
Rabinow quoting Foucault 84 (Paul, Prof. of Anthropology at UC Berkeley; 12 November
1984; The Foucault Reader, pg. 258-60; Quoting History of Sexuality vol. I)
For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death. In a formal sense, it derived no doubt from the ancient patria potestas that
granted the father of the Roman family the right to "dispose" of the life of his children and his slaves; just as he had 'given them life, so he could take it away. By the time the right of life and
death was framed by the classical theoreticians, it was in a considerably diminished form; It was no longer considered that this power of the sovereign over his subjects could be exercised in an
absolute and unconditional way, but only in cases where the sovereign's very existence was in jeopardy: a sort of right of rejoinder he was threatened by external enemies who sought to
overthrow him or contest his rights, he could then legitimately wage war, and require his subjects to take part in the defense of the state; without "directly proposing their death," he was
empowered to "expose their life" : in this sense, he wielded an "indirect" power over them of life and death . 1 But if someone dared to rise up against him and transgress his laws, then he
could exercise a direct power over the offender' s life: as punishment, the latter could be put to death. Viewed in this way, the power of life and death was not an absolute privilege: it was
conditioned by the defense of the sovereign, and his own survival. Must we follow Hobbes in seeing it as the transfer to the prince of the natural right possessed by every individual to defend
his life even if this meant the death of others? Or should it be regarded as a specific right that was manifested with the formation of that new juridical being, the sovereign? 2 In any case in its
modern form-relative and limited-as in its ancient and absolute form, the right of life and death is a dissymmetrical one. The sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to
kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the "power of life and death" was in
reality the right to take life or let live . Its symbol, after all, was the sword. Perhaps this juridical form must be referred to a historical type of society in which power was exercised mainly as a
means of deduction (prelevement), a subtraction mechanism, a right to appropriate a portion of the wealth, a tax of products, goods and services, labor and blood, levied on the subjects.
Since
Power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it.
the classical age, the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of
power. "Deduction" has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element
among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it:
a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to
impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of
death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to
define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as
simply the reverse of the right, of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were
never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never
before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death-
and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has now greatly
expanded its limits-now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on
life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting to precise controls and
comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be
defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for
the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as
managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so
many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the
technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that
initiates them and the one that terminates the m are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question
of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole
population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence .
The principle underlying the tactics of battle-that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living-
has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer
the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is
indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it
is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale
phenomena of population.
Biopolitics and Biopower create an us them dichotomy where insiders kill the outsiders
Michalinos Zembylas 10
Michalinos Zembylas is Associate Professor of Education at the Open University of Cyprus. His research
interests are in the areas of educational philosophy and curriculum theory, and his work focuses on
exploring the role of emotion and affect in curriculum and pedagogy. He is particularly interested in how
affective politics intersect with issues of social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education,
and citizenship education.
Biopower is understood in its broadest sense as power over life. In his Homo Sacer (1998, 2002, 2005) trilogy, Agamben offers a reformulation of Foucault’s
formation of biopower. Foucault (1990, 2003, 2007) used the term ‘biopower’ to designate the mechanisms
through which disciplinary strategies (enforced by producing docile bodies within sites such as the prison, the school and the hospital) were
replaced in modern times by a biopolitics whose power was the regulation of the life of populations . In defending society, the state acts
preventively in order to protect the population’s biological well–being, thus it must kill the Other: “If you
want to live, the other must die” (Foucault, 2003, p. 255). In this way, killing is no longer perceived to be
murder but it is justified in the name of security. The politics of security—“the dispositif of security” as
Foucault (p. 242) calls biopower—establishes a binary categorization between ‘us’ and ‘them’, or
between the ‘normal’ (e.g., legitimate citizens) and the ‘abnormal’ (e.g., illegal immigrants, un-qualified
refugees or bogus asylum seekers). The former deserve to live, while the latter are expendable (based
on racial and other kinds of profiling; see Foucault, 2003)
Impact --- Criminalization
Borders create a criminalized refugee subject
Hodge 15 (Paul, Discipline of Geography and Environmental studies, University of
Newcastle, Callaghan NSW; “A grievable life? The criminalization and securing of asylum
seeker bodies in the ‘violent frames’ of Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders; pg. 5)
Drawing on Foucault’s work on governmentality, Walters (2004) highlights the relatively new security
domain of concepts and practices that have emerged in the past few decades. Examining the UK’s White
Paper Secure Borders, Safe Haven and the realities of both the United States’ Homeland Security regime
and the Canadian government’s Securing an Open Society policy, Walters identifies an emergent space
which he argues is ‘‘contributing to a redefinition of the relationship between state, citizenship and
territory’’ (2004, p. 240; see also Gilbert, 2007). Walters draws on Bigo’s (1994) work that focuses on the
way disparate activities and concerns have been institutionalised and aligned under the banner of
security and describes a security continuum which has stretched the concepts and practices constituting
terrorism to include regulation of asylum rights and migration flows. This ‘‘transfer of illegitimacy’’
means that issues of migration that might previously have fallen under the discursive and institutional
ambit of human rights frameworks and citizenship are reconstituted in the security domain (Bigo, 1994,
p. 164). This transfer and forming of criminalised subjects are defining features of the Australian
coalition government’s border protection policy. By reconstituting the plight and bodies of asylum
seekers as security issues, clandestine practices and acts of degradation become necessary and
defensible. In the stretching security continuum of OSB the range of practices enacted are essential to
minimising the risk and uncertainty posed by the (newly reconstituted) threat of asylum seeker mobility.
OSB mobilises a series of techniques which engage this transfer of illegitimacy through the forming of
criminalised subjects. Persistent use of the language of illegality, the practicing of offshore detention,
militarised governing of mobility and state-sanctioned silence, and war waging, each constitute attempts
by the coalition government to control the contingency of circulation. By focusing on these necessary
practices, I aim to set the ground for a further discussion on the governing reality materialized by OSB
and the ‘violent frames’ formed through this reality. CRIMINALIZATION OF ASYLUM SEEKER BODIES The
criminalization of asylum seeker bodies has taken a number of forms since the coalition government
came to power in 2013. As opposition spokesperson on border protection Scott Morrison was parochial in his support of ‘strong borders’. Now in government, as federal
Immigration Minister, he has maintained his obdurate style. In Morrison’s weekly updates on OSB, he has persistently and methodically adopted the language of illegality when referring to
asylum seekers. Calling ‘‘a spade a spade’’, Morrison makes no apology for refraining from ‘‘politically correct language’’ (Morrison, 22 October 2013). The policy document itself, Operation
Sovereign Borders (Australian Government, 2013), refers to ‘illegal arrivals’ on nine separate occasions. In government communications Morrison has instructed departmental and detention
centre staff to refer publicly to asylum seekers as ‘illegal arrivals’ or ‘illegal maritime arrivals’. Those in detention, or in the community on bridging visas (see further below), face the same
treatment. Morrison uses terms such as ‘detainees’, ‘irregular migrants’ and ‘residual population’. The latter has been adopted to describe those currently in onshore detention including
asylum seekers in the community on bridging visas who are a ‘residual cohort’ created by the previous government’s immigration policies (Morrison, 1 November, 2013). While this language of
illegality has been a feature of the new approach to border protection, the latest iteration of the coalition government’s forming of criminal subjects is the disciplining of onshore asylum
seekers through the Code of Behaviour which applies to more than 20,000 asylum seekers living in the Australian community (Australian Government, 2014). Targeting ‘‘anti-social and
disruptive’’ activities, the Code of Behaviour was released in March 2014 (Australian Government, 2014, p. 1). The code describes how ‘‘illegal maritime arrivals’’ are expected to behave,
provides definitions of unacceptable behaviour, outlines what will happen if the Code of Behaviour is not signed, and lists the penalties and consequences of breaching the code. ‘‘Illegal
maritime arrivals’’ must not ‘‘harass, intimidate or bully’’ (Australian Government, 2014, p. 3). They must not ‘‘engage in any anti-social behaviour or disruptive activities that are inconsiderate,
disrespectful or threaten the peaceful enjoyment of other members in the community’’ (Australian Government, 2014, p. 3). Those not conforming to the code risk having social services
removed, being returned to immigration detention or offshore processing centres and having their visas cancelled (Australian Government, 2014). While Morrison argues his reference to
‘illegal arrivals’ refers to the mode of entry, it is the framing effect of this language of illegality and onshore disciplining that marks the asylum seeker’s imputed criminal intent. First, the terms
used imply a failure to conform to desirable and legitimate forms of migration (Gill, 2009). ‘Irregular migrants’ have not respected the legal channels of migration and thus have ‘jumped the
There is a distinctly rigid ‘‘imagined geography of migration’’ (Gill, 2009, p. 1) being mobilised by the
queue’.
coalition government that works to erase the untenable circumstances that has led people to embark on
their difficult journeys in the first place. A life threatening escape is reduced to a criminal deed and
contrasted with a fictional orderly line of the permissible. Second, the Code of Behaviour, while
signaling a disciplining of ‘‘suspicious bodies’’ (Mountz et al., 2012, p. 526) extends the grounds of
illegality by recasting potential acts of nuisance to that of criminal status. It represents both an effort to
control and manage this residual population not under-24 hour surveillance while signalling an overt
attempt to demarcate this group out in the wider population—the legitimate citizen who irritates with
impunity, and the ‘illegitimate’ non-citizen who fears to irritate. The code is an attempt to spread the
‘‘highly mobile illegal identity’’ to those bodies out of reach of government marking them as always
already ‘‘detainable subjects’’ (Mountz, 2011, p. 527). The institutionalisation of the language of
illegality, as in the decree to staff by Morrison, adds legitimacy to their use as departmental agencies
reinscribe criminality and sanction the emergence of criminal subjects. The presence and mobility of
asylum seekers in the wider community are portrayed as never far from ‘‘transgressing ‘our’ values,
‘our’ way of life’’ (Walters, 2004, p. 247; see also Anderson, 2013). As in the case of Britain’s border
protection policies, rather than asylum seekers being considered as leading vulnerable lives thus
requiring care and compassion, it is Australian citizens who are ‘‘subjectified as potential victims’’ at the
hands of ‘‘unknowable’’ threats (Walters, 2004, p. 248 see also Jordan and Brown, 2007).
Impact --- Zones of Exception
Borderlands are permanent zones of exception where the State propogates violence
as it wills
Jones 08 Reece Jones is a contemporary artist living in London. Jones was brought up in Norfolk,
England. After graduating from Loughborough School of Art and Design he gained an MA from the Royal
Academy Schools in 2002 Welcome to my website. Here you will find information about my current and
past research projects, my publications, and the courses I teach in the Department of Geography and
Environment at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. I will be the Editor-in-Chief of the
journal Geopolitics beginning in August. I also edit the Routledge Geopolitics Book Series with Klaus
Dodds.
Agamben argues that a state of exception occurs during a time of emergency, when a sovereign authority
suspends legal protections to individuals while wielding the violent power of the state against them .
Agamben's earlier work argues that the state of exception is often manifested in the particular space of a camp,
such as Nazi death camps during World War II, or contemporary American military installations such as
Guanta¨namo Bay, Cuba. However, Agamben (2005) also suggests a more ominous formulation in which the state of
exception is not limited to the camp, but, rather, is all-encompassing , where every individual is at risk of
being stripped of (their) legal protections and could be taken outside of the law at any moment . As CIA
black sites, extraordinary renditions, and the use of ènhanced interrogation' tactics suggest, this
permanent state of exception may already be the rule (Paglen, 2007). Indeed, Edkins and Pin-Fat (2004, page 9) argue:
``[w]e have all become homines sacri or bare life in the face of a biopolitics that technologizes,
administers, and depoliticizes, and thereby renders the political and power relations irrelevant .'' However,
despite the evident expansion of sovereign power in the last decade, the notion that it is now an all-encompassing reality in which the state of
exception could be enacted at any time, anywhere, and against anyone fails to adequately grasp how it is actually practiced. Sovereign
power operates as a few particular agents of the state make the decision to target a few particular
individuals for the exception, a process that occurs in a few particular places much more frequently than
others. Therefore, a crucial task for understanding the state of exception is to identify the agents, the
targets, and the spaces where the practice of sovereign power occurs. In this paper I argue that
borderlands are one of those spaces. I analyze how the tactics employed by the government of India to establish its sovereign
authority along its border with Bangladesh have transformed the densely populated farmland into a space where there is a permanent state of
exception.(3) The 4096 km border was not marked on the ground and did not follow any major preexisting political or physical boundaries
when it was first created in the 1947 partition of British India (J Chatterji, 1999; S Chatterji, 1947). Along the over 2200 km section of the border
between the Indian state of West Bengal and Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), it divides a population that speaks the same language and
has similar cultural traditions.(4) Nevertheless, over the intervening sixty years, the border was surveyed and marked with stones, security
forces were deployed, and, by the end of 2008, large sections were fenced by India (Jones, 2009; Kabir, 2005; Sullivan, 2007). After engaging
with Agamben's theorization of the state of exception in section 2, the paper demonstrates how the securitization process in the Bengal
borderlands created an exceptional space out of ordinary farmland as increasingly aggressive state interventions attempted to bring order to
the area. Then, in the second half of the paper, I investigate contemporary security practices by drawing on interviews with borderland
residents and data on violence at the border. I identify the border
security forces as the agents of exception, the `petty
sovereigns' that make the decision on life and death every day (Butler, 2004) and I argue that at the
intersection of the state of exception at the border and the exclusionary narratives of the `global war on
terror' Muslims, specifically, are targeted for state-sanctioned violence.
Sovereign power and Zones of Exception cannot be destroyed, they have no single focal
point and exist in all of society
Dodds.
This expansion of sovereign power has led some theorists to suggest that the state of exception is increasingly a global fact (Edkins and Pin-Fat,
2004). It is evident that many
sovereign states have expanded their ability to conduct surveillance and
security operations within their territory while simultaneously decreasing oversight by the public and
the courts (Gregory, 2004; Gregory and Pred, 2007; Singh, 2006). However, the claim of an all-encompassing state of
exception is not helpful for theorizing sovereign power because it creates an impasse (Connolly,
2004). An all-encompassing sovereign power is potentially everywhere, but also at any given moment
nowhere. Beyond the unique space of the camp, the places where sovereign power actually operates
are indistinct and unpredictable. Without being able to locate where sovereign power is, who is
carrying it out, and what actions are triggering the decision on violence, it is impossible to properly
analyze its practice. Furthermore, the claim that we are all already living in an all-encompassing state of
exception seems to overlook the reality that there is not a single sovereign in the world. Rather, the
territory of the world is partitioned between many sovereign authorities who employ differential
tactics to manage particular populations (Butler, 2004; Elden, 2007). Consequently, political borders, where these sovereignty
practices rub up against each other, emerge as key sites to respatialize and locate the state of exception (Salter, 2006; 2008).
Impact --- Securitization
Borders are where security is performed and creating them, upholding them reifies
securitization
Dodds.
Nevertheless, political borders are crucially important symbolic spaces because the narratives that
legitimate sovereign power are predicated on claiming tight linkages between the territory, the people,
and the state (DeCaroli, 2007; Murphy, 1996). Although the border represents the margins of the sovereign's
authority, it is not marginal to it; instead, the performance of sovereignty at the border creates, reproduces, and
expands the claim to authority over that territory . This idea of a sovereign state as a closed container with strictly regulated
borders that prevent all unauthorized movement is rarely, if ever, actually practiced. Instead, unmarked , fluid borders display the
cracks and fissures in the narrative of the sovereign state and become spaces that require substantial
security and patrolling to create the perception of absolute sovereign authority (Kaiser and Nikiforova, 2006; Van
Schendel, 2005). Security is performed at the border by building barriers, conducting patrols, and
establishing checkpoints. When the reification of the border is challenged, authority is imposed by force
through searches, interrogations, detentions, and death. The state of exception, therefore, beyond its
manifestation in the form of the camp, is most obvious today at the margins of the sovereign state
political system in the borderlands, a space that is fundamental to both the sovereignty and the security
of the state. It is not surprising, then, that, as the affective fear generated by the discourse of the global war on terror allowed for a
consolidation of power, many sovereign states initiated or expanded border security projects (Andreas and Biesticker, 2003; Jones, 2009; Kabir,
2005)
Impact --- Ecological Collapse
State Sovereignty supported by borders cannot solve ecological collapse.
Mick Smith 11 Mick Smith is associate professor and Queen's National Scholar in the Department of
Philosophy and the School of Environmental Studies at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. He is
author of An Ethics of Place: Radical Ecology, Postmodernity, and Social Theory
I want to argue that it is indeed dangerous for an ecological politics toappeal to the principle of (state)
sovereignty. First, because it is so heavilyimplicated in the normalisation of what might be counted as
the biopoliticalmanagement of populations, something that unfortunately informs thosevarieties of
ecological modernisation that reduce politics to a means ofattaining economic/ecological efficiency.
Second because it is linked directly tothe declaration of the kinds of ‘states of emergency’ and anti-
politicaltechnocratic solutions that Lovelock and others envisage. In other words, farfrom providing an
alternative to either of these positions it is the exercise of theprinciple of sovereignty that makes them
possible. This is because there is avery real sense in which the principle of sovereignty is, ultimately, not
apolitical but an anti-political concept. This, counter-intuitive claim, whichcertainly requires elaboration,
emerges from a Schmittian understanding of theprinciple of sovereignty and the kinds of critical analysis
recently developed onthis basis by Giorgio Agamben. And while Agamben’s work lacks a verynecessary
ecological dimension it remains extremely pertinent to any ecologicalpolitics (Smith 2008
When States claim Sovereignty they also inevitably claim control over and ability to
deplete the enviroment
This is clearly not sufficient for a radical ecological critique of sovereigntyand still begs certain questions
even where more traditional political analysesare concerned, since a nation’s claim to sovereign power
is always already aclaim to power over ecological communities, mountain ranges, minerals etc.and not
just people. Agamben’s analysis of biopolitical sovereignty thusremains more relevant to an
understanding of the limits placed on ecologicalpolitics than on nature as such. That said, I would
strongly suggest thatsovereign power over nature might actually be understood in terms of
thereduction of non-human beings to ‘standing reserve’ in a Heideggerian sense.And in this sense the
whole point of environmental ethics and radical ecology hasalways been to deny the claims of human
sovereignty over the world. It should108M. Smith also be noted that this claim is made more plausible
because the reduction ofpeople to bare life also ultimately leads to their treatment as a
‘human’resource, for example, as a source of information to be extracted by any meansnecessary.
State based attempts to solve the environment end up doing more harm than good
Alongside this increasingly ‘normal’ situation the state still retains its‘exceptional’ sovereign power to
decide upon a state of emergency. If cybernetic managerialism reflects the apolitical optimism of
ecological modernisation (there is no ecological crisis) then the state of emergency as the introduction
of a ‘survival footing’ reflects Lovelock’s pessimistic state unilateralism. The ecologically motivated
incursions he posits, the giant sun-shade in space, the massive expansion of nuclear power, and so on,
are, in this sense, the environmental equivalents of the supposedly ‘humane’ militarism ofthose
‘technically advanced nations’ which, to paraphrase Lovelock (2006, p.151 – see above) woke up to their
‘responsibility’ to wage war on global terrorism. If Agamben is right, the ecological result too would be
the same, the decisionistic suppression of political liberties in the name of survival. Interestingly,
Lovelock (2006, p. 153), against the advice of other Gaians, explicitly uses militaristic metaphors
speaking of a war against our ‘Earthly enemy’, and the possible need for ‘rationing’, ‘restrictions’, a ‘call
to service’, and ‘our’ suffering ‘for a while a loss of freedom’. From this perspective,the state’s
recognition of ecological crises willcertainly not lead it to encourage an ecological politics.Quite the
contrary, it willbe co-extensive with the imposition of emergency measures and potentiallydisastrous
technological, even militaristic ‘fixes’. Those who suffer most fromthe situation will, ironically, be those
most likely to find themselves reduced tobare-life. The case of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans
provides a recentecological example of the localised exclusion of ethics and politics as the statefocused
on populationcontrolwhile the protection of property (capital) took110M. Smith priority. As Agamben
argues, it is always indicative of the retention ofsovereign power that the state maintains its monopoly
on the legal use ofviolence, justified as a response to exceptional circumstances (even includingthe
ability to decide what does or does not count as violence, as for example, inlabelling many forms of
environmental activism eco-‘terrorism’).
Impact --- Bare Life
The creation of Bare life allows torture and killings
Violence
As noted earlier, a second aspect in which the transformation of life into bare life is visible in the war on
terrorism concerns the status and treatment of detained suspects of terrorism. Although many of the
detainees have been taken into American custody during the armed conflict in Afghanistan, they are not
granted the prisoner of war status in the way it is required by the Geneva Conventions. Speaking of
unlawful combatants, the United States successfully keeps their detainment outside the realm of
international regulation. In a parallel movement, the fate of the detainees is also kept outside the jurisdiction of the national American
criminal justice system as a result of the extra-territorial location of the Guantanamo base where many detainees are held. While the
suffering of these detainees obviously is not comparable to the atrocities faced by inhabitants of the
concentration camps, it is nevertheless possible to detect the juridico-political structure of the state of
exception (the camp) in detainment centres such as the Guantanamo base, as detainees are stripped
from all legal rights, while they remain subjected to the power exercised over them .28 However, the
biopolitical production of bare life does not just take place in the camp or the immediate conflict in
Afghanistan. In fact, the production of homo sacer is made possible through bureaucratic techniques of
risk management, enabled by new laws such as the Patriot Act, that apply well beyond the theatres of
military conflict. These techniques of bureaucratic surveillance subject life to statistical methods by
which norms of behaviour are identified within the population according to the laws of probability.29 In
risk management, the subject is not encountered as a unique person with some sort of indispensable
inner singularity, but as an aggregate of risk factors, a modulation that can be managed and tamed
through continuous monitoring. As Rose argues, risk management …is not a question of instituting a
regime in which each person is permanently under the alien gaze of the eye of power exercising
individualizing surveillance
Impact --- Exploitation
Borders allow the U.S. government to exploit immigrants
Mark G.E. Kelly, Western Sydney University Associate Professor, International Biopolitics: Foucault,
Globalization, Imperialism—Borders, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41802469?
seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents, June 2010
The first point against the existence of a global biopolitics, is the continued existence of borders between states. While territorial borders have
arguably declined in importance, this belies their displacement in favour of what William Walters has appropriately dubbed the ‘biopolitical
border’. Biopolitics as it has historically existed has always had its border. On Foucault’s account this is necessitated by the clear contradiction
between biopolitics and thanatopolitics: the former tries to extend and maximise life, while directing it, where the latter either allows it to
continue without direction or destroys it. To deal with this contradiction, where both are in operation, a principle of demarcation must exist to
determine who is covered by which technology. This principle is what Foucault calls ‘state racism’.9 Thanatopolitics must be deployable against
enemies of the state both inside (for example, criminals) and outside its borders. State racism is the device by which these elements are
differentiated from the population cared for by biopower. The use of the term ‘racism’ here is a mark of Foucault’s genealogy of this exclusion,
through Western discourses of ‘race war’. Foucault’s point is that those outside the population are declared to be of a different ‘race’, and
those inside who are deemed to be its enemies are declared to be an unhealthy element of the ‘race’. Even though the explicit vocabulary of
race is today taboo in official discourses, insisting on the term ‘racism’ reminds us that the functional distinctions remain. The international
dimension of state racism occurs at the border of the biopolity. The biopolitical border is different to the border as ordiInternational Biopolitics
5 narily conceived, which is as a territorial division between the land of one state and the land of another. The biopolitical border divides not
land, but populations. The biopolitical border increasingly replaces the older, ‘geopolitical’ border, particularly within the European
‘Schengenland’:10 biopolitical borders between the old nation-states remain, while the old territorial borders cease to operate as barriers to
the movement of people. This displacement is a new one: even after the birth of biopolitics, the territorial boundary was long the primary
means of separating populations.11 States remain territorial, of course, and as such the biopolitical border to an extent incorporates the
territorial border: the territorial border can operate as a place where people are filtered as to what population they belong to, but the
biopolitical border extends elsewhere, both within the territory of the state and outside it. People cross territorial borders, without being
allowed to join the population associated with the territory into which they cross, just as they are allowed to leave that territory without being
assumed to have left the population. Illegal migrants are in precisely this position of having crossed territorial
borders without being able to surmount the biopolitical border: once they have penetrated the national
territory, they find themselves biopolitically excluded, albeit to different extents in different territories ; in
some places they may be able to access health care, to send their children to school, to obtain drivers’ licences, but they never enjoy
the full range of protections of the legal resident . Legal immigrants may face obstacles too: they may be on limited visas,
which restrict their access to welfare provisions. Today more than ever there are a range of interstitial states between inclusion and exclusion, a
many-layered, highly selective biopolitical border. Doubtless, the notion of a population is something of an abstraction—we cannot always
clearly assign an individual to one population or another—but the degrees of biopolitical inclusion are precisely mapped out in policy, states
and institutions going to the trouble of clearly defining whom they will help and under what circumstances, classifying different kinds of
residence and citizenship. These rules follow particular exclusionary principles, which can be analysed. The biopolitical border is permeable
broadly on the basis of advantage to the inside: while not perfect in this regard, it operates to allow what is advantageous to pass through it
inwards, and reject or even expel (deport) what is disadvantageous. This principle of selection has of course been noted by thinkers who do not
make use of the notion 6 M.G.E. Kelly of biopolitics in making them, albeit most notable among these are two French philosophers, Étienne
Balibar and Robert Castel, who were close to and clearly influenced by Foucault. The granting of asylum to refugees is something of an
exception to this principle of biopolitical advantage, but refugee
policy may certainly be understood as a form of self-
interestedness by states: the international conventions that govern asylum were agreed on because
they at the time suited the signatories ; refugees, moreover, are generally accepted only from countries
to whose regimes the recipient nation is hostile, demographically weakening those countries and
facilitating opposition exile groups.12 If there is, on the other hand, any indication that refugees are bringing about any
degradation of the stability and wellbeing of the recipient population, this is taken as a contraindication to the current asylum regime.
Ultimately, politicians do not argue that we ought to allow refugees in for humanitarian reasons despite their burdening the population with
various problems; even refugee advocates typically claim that the
population ultimately benefits from refugees. Allowing
any and all economically active people into Western countries regardless of their background and skill-
set is indeed itself seen by some as good for the population, because their youth and high-birth rates
fend off the demographic catastrophe promised by the declining birth-rate of the rich countries . The
population benefits from getting full-grown workers, without having to support them economically
through a non-productive childhood.
Impact --- Xenophobia
Borders lead to xenophobia- they are abstract but justify discourse and practices that
uphold territoriality
Paasi 11 [ Anssi , Professor in Geography at the University of Oulu, Political Geography,Interventions
on rethinking ‘the border’ in border studies,
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6adb/13b6502c6207b9335b8ee74acd68fe232c10.pdf, 2011]
These two overlapping landscapes link abstract ideas of border to society and show the site of borders in
discourses/practices that are exploited to both mobilize and fix territoriality, security, identities,
emotions, social memories, the past-present-future-axis, and national socialization. These landscapes ultimately
operate in the same direction: to strengthen state space as a “bounded unit”, however porous it is, or whether it has sharp physical borders or
fuzzy borders. It
is crucial to reflect the forms of borders and bordering practices in various contexts, but it is
equally important to scrutinize how the state operates in this regard . Territorial control of all kinds of flows, (national)
ideologies and socialization e the key mediators in how borders bring institutional practices and discourses into everyday lives and civil society e
demand careful consideration of the historical and contemporary functions of states (O’Dowd, 2010). This does not mean that the state is some
superior agent among the complicated forms, tactics and manifestations of territorial power. Power can be seen as an increasingly complex
phenomenon that exists in networked, topological and territorial social relations (Allen, 2009). As political geographers our major challenge to
theorize and study empirically these complexes. Such work can have major political relevance and contains a progressive element since
understanding the relations between such complexities and bordering may help us to fight nationalism
and xenophobia.
Impact --- Border Violence
Borders create systems of violence against immigrants
Nail 13(Thomas Nail, postdoctoral lecturer in the Philosophy Department at the University of Denver-
Abstract. This paper argues that borders and violence against migrants no longer takes place exclusively
at the geographical space between two sovereign territories. Instead border violence today has become
much more normalized and diffused into society itself. An entire privatized industry now capitalizes on
the cycle of transporting, incarcerating, hiring, and releasing non- status migrants. Similarly, however,
resistance to this violence is also shifting from the older confrontation with sovereignty and the
demands for rights to the larger aim of making the non- status migrant or nomad the new figure of
political belonging and solidarity: demanding equality for an regardless of status.
Introduction. In the present political climate of terror and securitization it has become increasingly
apparent that borders no longer exist as phenomena taking place largely in the geographical space
between two sovereign territories.1 As local police enforcement, social service providers, private
companies, airports, and individuals begin to increasingly monitor and strategically report non-status
persons, “the border” today has become something much more multiple and polymorphic. Borders
function not only in order to exclude some and include others (although this does occur), but primarily
to effect a specific stabilized circulation of desired social and economic effects: profit, property, racial
division, etc. Similarly, the exceptional border violence and detention that once took place mostly along
or between territorial borders, has today become increasingly diffused into society itself. The violence of
the border is now, more than ever, directed against a highly malleable and unspecified enemy:
migratory life in general.2 Following this transformation, this paper argues three theses. First, that the
structure of systemic border violence today should be conceived not only as the effect of the operative
paradox of state sovereignty, as Giorgio Agamben argues, but increasingly as a function of micropolitical
borders that create and sustain a diffuse social violence against migrants across multiple sectors of
society. For many migrants, all of society increasingly functions “like a border,” where surveillance is a
constant. In particular, I argue we can see this kind of increasing social border violence operative in the
highly profitable cycle of forced migration, incarceration, work, and deportation exemplified in the
case of the U.S.-Mexico border wall. Second, I argue that this transformation of contemporary borders
requires a shift in strategies of resistance: from bare life and the confrontation with sovereignty, as
Agamben argues, to the concept of a radically inclusive solidarity beyond nations, states, and
corporations. It is not enough to simply reject sovereignty or borders as such in favor of differential
“forms-of-life.”
I do not mean to suggest that border violence and enforcement used to exist only at the territorial
border and today it does not. Rather, I am arguing that it is a matter of degree. Border enforcement
today is vastly more socially diffused and integrated into daily life than it has been in the past. I think
this calls for a new focus in our political analysis of borders.
Turns Case --- I-Law
Creation of zones of exception allow the US to bypass i-law
Violence
In terms of its effects on the contours of the global order, the prevention doctrine lays the basis for the
United States’ exemption from international law and other norms that govern conduct in international
society. In this sense, prevention invalidates the law without declaring international law openly
obsolete. Faced with a non-localisable and open-ended threat, the war on terrorism effectively
institutionalises a permanent state of exception in which the United States reserves for itself the right to
act unilaterally, while simultaneously demanding compliance with the law from the other states. As
Hardt and Negri argue: ‘‘Here therefore, is born, in the name of the exceptionality of the intervention, a
form of right that is really a right of the police [that] is inscribed in the deployment of prevention,
repression, and rhetorical force aimed at the reconstruction of the social equilibrium.’’24 As such, the
war on terrorism replaces the current order with a smooth, infinite space of endless surveillance,
detection and prevention. Prevention produces American sovereignty, but it is also produces bare life,
life that is abandoned in the process of constituting global American sovereignty.
Turns Case --- Subsumes us all
The Biopolitical Power of exclusion gradually moves beyond the camp, excompassing us
all
Diken 02 Bulent Diken is a Danish philosopher and sociologist who teaches at Lancaster University. He
has studied urban planning at the Aarhus School of Architecture.
Agamben’s Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life can be read as a treatise on the construction of
geo-political space. Its primary claim is that the concentration camp is the hidden matrix of the modern,
its nomos (Agamben 1998: 166). The camp was originally an exceptional, excluded space, entrenched
and surrounded with secrecy. However, the production of “bare life” (life stripped of form and value) is
gradually extended beyond the walls of the 2 concentration camp today as the inside/outside
distinctions disappear. The argument is not that contemporary spaces are characterized by the cruelty
of the German camps (although camplike structures such as detention centers in airports are spreading
quickly) but that the logic of the camp tends to be generalized throughout the entire society (Agamben
1998: 20, 174-5). Carl Schmitt argued that the “nomos of the earth” is constituted through linking
localization (Ortung) and order (Ordnung) to each other: order is conceptualized in spatial terms, as
homes, towns and nations; on the outside, disorder reigns. Agamben agrees, but insists on an ambiguity:
in the “state of exception” the link between localization and order breaks down, which has been the
case since ancient Greece. The concentration camp, however, emerged when the unlocalizable (the
state of exception) was granted a permanent and visible localization, signaling the advent of “the
political space of modernity itself” (Agamben 1998: 20, 174). “To an order without localization (the state
of exception, in which law is suspended) there now corresponds a localization without order (the camp
as permanent space of exception)” (Agamben 1998: 175). The location of the “unlaw” (state of
exception) within law transforms society into an unbounded and dislocated biopolitical space.
Sovereignty is no longer exercised in potensia. The camp signals that the state of exception has become
the rule, illuminating how sovereignty works and how a political space is constructed and delimited. In
short, the camp illustrates a logic writ large; in Kierkegaard’s words, later appropriated by Schmitt: the
exception explains the general as well as itself (Agamben 1998: 16; 1999: 48)
Defense --- The Wall
Physical borders like the wall have no actual impact on immigration and just increase
the number of deaths of migrants.
“The Crossroads of Power: Michel Foucault and the US/Mexico Border Wall”
http://mysite.du.edu/~tnail2/Thomas_Nail/Research._files/The%20Crossroads%20of%20Power%20–
%20Michel%20Foucault%20and%20the%20US%3AMexico%20Border%20Wall.pdf , February 2013) e.g.
In examining this constellation, the second section of this paper argues that we can see the coexistence
of at least three different types of political strategy operating at the US/Mexico border wall. Several
common features characterize the first group of political strategies I want to look at : juridical
suspension, binary exclusion, territorial rule, and the physical punishment of “invasive”
migrants. The common features of these strategies are also the features that Foucault uses to define
the concept of sovereign power. Let us thus begin by examining to what degree this first set of
strategies is deployed at the US/Mexico border wall. The Secure Fence Act of 2006 authorized the
Department of Homeland Security to “maintain operational control over the entire international land
and maritime borders of the United States... [including the use of] unmanned aerial vehicles, ground-
based sensors, satellites, radar coverage, and cameras; and physical infrastructure enhancements to
prevent unlawful entry by aliens into the United States.”22 More than just legal discourse, this was
actually the strategic result of the SFA, and the DHS succeeded in accomplishing all of the above except
of course for “preventing all unlawful entry by aliens.”23 The political strategies of the DHS literally
took “all actions the Secretary determines necessary and appropriate... [in] the prevention of all
unlawful entries into the United States.” [my italics]24 In order to build the wall the secretary of
Homeland Security used the unlimited power of this act to waive over 30 environmental regulations
including the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the
Clean Air Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act. Despite such unprecedented juridical
suspensions, however, the Government Accountability Office’s own 2009 report found that the wall has
been breeched 3,363 times and concluded that the office found no way to determine whether the fence
is helping to halt illegal immigration.25 What has the wall accomplished strategically then? For
one, the creation of the US/Mexico border wall is responsible for the dramatic rise in migrant
deaths. The more walls emerge along the border the more migrants both human and animal
are forced to cross the border at more remote wilderness areas where food and water are
scarce. The risk of human migrant death was thus 1.5 times higher in 2009 than in 2004 and 17 times
greater in 2009 than 1921 To be clear, this is not a normative claim for the imperative of struggle against
the border wall. Although one might make such a claim. Rather my own method, following Foucault in
this paper, is to provide a descriptive analysis of the crossroads of power and the tactics deployed
such that if one wants to resist, these would be the tactics and crossroads one would want to struggle
against. This non-normative notion of tactical analysis for conditional struggle is further developed in
Foucault.
Alt
Alt – Critical Cartography
The alt is critical cartography. Linking geography to politics allows for a historical
understanding of the impacts of borders and paves the way for social
movements against them.
Crampton and Krygier ’06 Jeremy W. Crampton is a Professor of Geography and
Director of the Committee on Social Theory at the University of Kentucky Department of
Geography, John B. Krygier is a Professor of Geology and Geography and the Director of
Environmental Studies at Ohio Wesleyan University “An Introduction to Critical
Cartography” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 4 (1), 11-33.
This paper provides a brief introduction to critical cartography. We define critical cartography as a one-
two of new mapping practices and theoretical critique. Critical cartography challenges academic
cartography by linking geographic knowledge with power, and thus is political. Although
contemporary critical cartography rose to prominence in the 1990s, we argue that it can only be
understood in the historical context of the development of the cartographic discipline more generally.
We sketch some of the history of this development, and show that critiques have continually
accompanied the discipline. In the post-war period cartography underwent a significant solidification as
a science, while at the same time other mapping practices (particularly artistic experimentation with
spatial representation) were occurring. Coupled with the resurgence of theoretical critiques during the
1990s, these developments serve to question the relevance of the discipline of cartography at a time
when mapping is increasingly prevalent and vital.
Mapping is becoming decentralized due to technology. Now is the time to

harness it for a social movement
Crampton and Krygier ’06
In the last few years cartography has been slipping from the control of the powerful elites that have
exercised dominance over it for several hundred years. These elites—the great map houses of the
west, the state, and to a lesser extent academics—have been challenged by two important
developments. First, the actual business of mapmaking, of collecting spatial data and mapping it out, is
passing out of the hands of the experts. The ability to make a map, even a stunning interactive 3D map,
is now available to anyone with a home computer and an internet connection. Cartography’s latest
“technological transition” (Monmonier 1985; Perkins 2003) is not so much a question of new mapping
software but a mixture of “open source” collaborative tools, mobile mapping applications, and
geotagging. While this trend has been apparent to industry insiders for some time, a more social
theoretic critique, which we argue is a political one, situates maps within specific relations of power
and not as neutral scientific documents. One might expect a critique of the politics of mapping to
weaken the power of the map and to work against a transition putting maps into more people’s hands.
But just the opposite has happened. If the map is a specific set of power-knowledge claims, then not
only the state but others could make competing and equally powerful claims.
Critiques of mapping function as indictments of a capitalist system of alienation
Crampton and Krygier ’06
For example, a number of artists have explored how maps are political and how mapping can be a
political act. Such an appropriation of the politics of representation has long historical roots, from the
avant-garde artistic movements at the turn of the century (George Braque, Paul Cezanne) to the
Situationists and “psychogeographers” of the 1950s and 1960s. These latter groups sought to radically
transform urban space by subverting cartography as part of a project of political resistance (Harmon
2004). Their “subversive cartographies,” by assuming that cartography was always already political,
created different arrangements of space (such as the famous 1929 surrealist map of the world,
reproduced in Pinder (1996, 2005). As with the Frankfort School, part of their critique was that modern
society’s basis in consumer capitalism caused deep alienation. Guy Debord’s book The Society of the
Spectacle acts as something of a guide by emphasizing that everything has become represented and
thus devalued, everything is a media spectacle (Debord 1967/1994). This work has produced a
tremendous legacy, aided by the infusion of mapping technology in the late 1980s which set the stage
for an explosion in “locative art” and psychogeographical mapping (Casey 2002; Cosgrove 1999, 2005;
Harmon 2004). More recently the artists Malene Rrdam and Anna Mara Bogadottir used a map of
Copenhagen to navigate the streets of New York City. Lee Walton averaged all the coordinates on a
tourist map of San Francisco to come up with a single “Average Point of Interest” where he installed a
bronze plaque (kanarinka 2006b). These map events question the commensurability of Euclidean space,
a basic assumption of much GIS. Euclidean space is a key component of the scientization and
regularization of space, for example it is assumed in “interoperability” where one dataset is
commensurable with another. Critiques of Euclidean space which point to its idiosyncrasies, localness or
its contingent nature show that not all knowledge can be “scientized.”
Alt – Anarchy
Anarchy brings escape from the state of exception—this solves for extinction
Michael Mcconkey, McGill University Ph.D., Anarchy, Sovereignty, and the State of Exception,
http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=2&sid=e95488ec-10d4-497b-b99d-
fcb6a2b31550%40sessionmgr104&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d
%3d#AN=84548196&db=aqh, 2013
The travails of market failure, the tragedy of the commons, and the scrounge of free riders are
rehearsed often enough that, given the extinction crisis event hypothesized here, we should expect
market responses powered by narrow, short-term self-interest simply to pile one negative externality
atop another as we fade into extinction. No one is either charged or uniquely empowered to take the problem in hand and focus
on finding a solution. Is this oft-repeated truism a realistic or probable outcome in the market.' Let us assume a minority in the know. We may
even assume it is a small minority). But, whatever its size, we are now discussing those who firmly believe that the existing conditions are
carrying us toward an extinction event. Recall, too, that, we have agreed for the sake of argument that these people are objectively correct in
their assessment. Consider the options available to this dispersed group, who are convinced that certain common human practices are carrying
us toward extinction. Three obvious approaches present themselves for this minority: coercion, education, and solution. Coercion
would
be the approach of sovereignty, which we have already ruled out on grounds of disutility arising from
corruption via rent seeking. On a smaller scale, no doubt, some people may resort to various actions,
from civil disobedience to sabotage and even terrorism. However, the minority that carries out such
actions will be resisted and suppressed by the majority, which is both understandable and in several
instances the correct stance on the part of the majority insofar as the free use of its liberty and property
is denied by the concerned minority's actions. Hence, this approach is both impractical and ethically
suspect from the start. Education avoids such ethical quandaries but is not necessarily any more
practical. We have already posited the approaching extinction event as sufficiently imminent to warrant
dramatic action by the minority in the know. However, the minority's education of a majority is a long,
slow process, unlikely to bring results soon enough to avert the imminent extinction. Moreover, there is no
guarantee and only a modest expectation of ever making any progress in changing the majority's consciousness. So although education may be
superior to coercion, it too is not a promising approach in our posited scenario. The third approach is to find a solution, a practical alternative to
the specific human actions that are creating the encroaching event. If the majority cannot be effectively forced or persuaded to change their
practices, they can be induced to do so by the creation of alternative practices that serve their self-interest. One thinks of how the hunting of
whales to extinction and the relentless deforestation of much of the world were dramatically slowed and, in the short term, even arrested, not
by sanctimonious appeals to cut back on energy consumption, but by the innovation of a different fuel source. The discovery that oil, formerly a
nuisance that damaged the quality and value of farmland, could be made into kerosene and provide a fuel source that was less expensive,
ended excessive whaling and deforestation not through force or persuasion, but by serving the self-interest of those whose preferences were
driving the activity and its ecological impacts.' With this example as a guide, it
is evident that anyone who believes in the
imminence of the extinction event would be fully motivated to invest entirely in the search for a
solution. After all, the situation is not one in which inadequate investment in seeking a solution leads
simply and solely to distressing financial outcomes; rather, it leads to extinction . Moreover, successful solution
seeking leads to widespread adoption of the solution in the free market. For the minority in the know, the option is either not to find the
solution and go extinct or to find it and get rich. As Adam Smith noted in a famous passage about the virtues of the Invisible Hand, altruism is
not superior to self-interest as a motive for the pursuit of such a solution. It is entirely irrelevant whether one is motivated to invest in such a
solution for humanitarian purposes or in selfish hopes of the payoff that will come if humanity survives as a result: if the solution is found,
everyone wins, and every investment increases the resources with which to find the solution. Free riding among the minority in the know would
be masochistic and have to be explained by self-destructive psychological impulses—which would be equally sabotaging and counterproductive
under Schmittian sovereignty. Aside from self-destructive masochism, free riding provides no advantage. Aspiring free riders among the
minority in the know would not benefit from not investing in the search for a solution, regardless of the outcome. If a solution were found and
the world survived, they would not cash in on that solution (other than by continuing to live), and if it were not found, the species would go
extinct, and they would not enjoy free-rider benefits from others' investment because they would be dead. So, however small the number of
true believers, they would be maximally motivated. Moreover,
the direr the event threat, the more highly motivated the
believers would be to go all-out to find the solution. After all, they can't take it with them. Juxtaposed to
this market-based solution, the sovereignty option is revealed as additionally counterproductive . As long as
some of the minority in the know believe they have practical resort to coercion, they will be tempted to forgo investment in solution seeking.
Only the anarchist option of forbidding all exercise of state sovereignty closes off the coercive option
and directs all the efforts and resources of all true believers into the creative and productive option of
investing in the search for solutions. There might be merit here in anticipating a couple of potential
objections from the reader, which in fact one of the reviewers for this article did raise . The reviewer put the
objection this way: "The author [wants] to deal with the most difficult case? If the world were held hostage by a mad bomber or under control
of the government of the United States, it seems the author would simply say, 'We just need a solution to create benefits for those at risk.' . . .
But is it that easy? If it were, why haven't the solutions already emerged? The author gives no in-depth argument about why someone would be
able to quickly find a solution to [the] most difficult problems." First, contrary to the extreme claims of some global-warming alarmists, it is not
clear that we do face or have faced such an extinction threat, so the case has hardly been tested, but even if
we were facing it (to the
degree that global warming might be perceived as being such a threat), the whole point of the argument
here is that as long as the state provides the attractive (if inherently ineffectual) coercion option,
solution finding is all too likely to be distorted by the temptation of a Schmittian state of exception as
the more direct path to a resolution. So, for example, if all the resources and creativity put into lobbying, protesting, rent seeking,
and dinner-table arguments on behalf of the solar-power energy industry had in fact been put into actual solarpower research and innovation,
who knows how much closer that option would be today to providing a market-viable alternative to fossil fuels? As for the mad bomber
scenario: it is not a harder case, but rather an easier one because, by definition, holding the world hostage entails the world's already knowing
about the threat. Therefore, neither a knowledge problem nor a collective-action problem exists. My scenario here has been the much more
challenging one in which only a small minority knows and understands the actual situation of an existential threat. Finally, the reviewer is quite
right that I do not and cannot provide any assurance that such an existential threat will be resolved quickly—or indeed resolved at all. My
argument offers no guarantee, no existential "get out of jail free" card. It merely claims that in
light of the alternatives—the self-
defeating coercion of sovereignty and the overly time-constrained educational option—marshaling the
resources of the convinced minority in the know through market-coordinated seeking of a solution
offers the best prospect of success were we to face an imminent existential threat.
Alt – Nomadic Solidarity
Instead, we advocate for a movement of universal inclusion, regardless of status
In this second section I will argue that this biopolitical transformation of contemporary border violence
requires a similar shift in strategies of resistance. Rather than only demanding that the sovereign
recognize the rights and political agency of those excluded from the political process (by transforming
migrants into citizens), what is required is that the figure of the non-status migrant itself
become the basis for a new political organization based on the universal inclusion of
everyone regardless of status. If the citizen is the subject of the territorially sovereign state and the
migrant is the one who moves from one state to another, then it is the nomad or the non-status migrant
who moves between the two, and expresses the possibility of a new politics beyond the state. But what
does it mean for those who are deemed politically “illegal” to organize a movement for the universal
inclusion of all persons regardless of status? Such an organization could not be understood in terms of
strict identity or party politics (status) since the figure of such a movement has no requisite racial,
professional, or party identity. Anyone who is committed to building a world where status is no longer a
condition for political equality and where political agency is no longer based on territorial sovereignty
could be considered (to some degree) as struggling toward a political nomadism.24 But such a political
movement would certainly be highly heterogeneous; composed of all kinds of people from many
different backgrounds and other struggles. Without a single and centrally guiding axis of struggle how
would such a political solidarity be possible? In the remainder of this section I argue that we can locate
a theory of nomadic solidarity between highly heterogeneous groups without a fixed identity or party
in Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy. This is crucial for understanding what solidarity without
status might mean. Before developing the concept of nomadic solidarity found in Deleuze and
Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, I want to first distinguish this concept from four other common theories
of solidarity that it is not. (1) Nomadic solidarity is not a matter of charity. Charity presumes an unequal
distribution of power and wealth, such that those who have them may temporally alleviate the suffering
of those who do not without radically changing the conditions under which such inequality existed in the
first place. (2) Nomadic solidarity is not altruism. Altruism is based on an identification with the needs,
interests, and character of a particular group or person. As such, altruism also fails to understand or
change the conditions under which a particular group or person has suffered injustice. (3) Nomadic
solidarity is also not a universal principle of duty. If it were, duty would risk overriding all other
heterogeneous political conditions under a single condition: duty itself. Political commitment would be
more like servitude than like free engagement and belief in a cause. (4) Finally, nomadic solidarity is not
a matter of allies fighting toward the same teleological objective. This is the case because the goal of
nomadic solidarity is not entirely determined in advance, but also because the goal of such solidarity is
continually under construction by multiple heterogeneous groups, such that there is no single goal of
such a movement. Negative definitions out of the way, the remainder of this section offers a positive
account of universal solidarity by drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomadism found in Mille
plateaux (1980).
The alternative is a system of Nomadic Solidarity

Nomadism Defined in its most basic terms, nomadism, for Deleuze and Guattari, is a “mode of
unlimited distribution without division. ” Nomadism is fundamentally a theory of universal political
relation between highly heterogenous persons and groups without fixed political status. The figure of
the nomad is thus singular in the sense that it lives and resides in some specific location and yet belongs
universally wherever it is and no matter who it is. But what is it precisely about the concept of
nomadism that allows us to theorize the inclusive and mobile connection between heterogeneous
political groups? Deleuze and Guattari define the origins of the word nomad following the work of French historian
Emmanuel Laroche in Histoire de la racine "Nem" en grec ancien (1949). There Laroche argues that the Greek origins of the root
“νεμ” signified a “mode of distribution” (moyen de distribution), not an allocation of parceled out or delimited land (partage).
“The idea [that nomos meant] law is a product of fifth and sixth-century Greek thought,” that breaks from the “original Homeric
root νεμω meaning, ‘I distribute’ or ‘I arrange’”25 Even “the [retroactively] proposed translations ‘cut-up earth, plot of land, a
piece’ are not suitable in all cases to the Homeric poems and assume an ancient νεμω ‘I divide’ that we should reject. The
pasture in archaic times is generally an unlimited space (espace illimité); this can be a forest, meadow, rivers, a mountain
side.”26 “The nomos,” Deleuze says, thus “designated first of all an occupied space, but one without precise limits (for
example, the expanse around a town).”27 Rather than parceling out a closed space delimited by roads, borders,
and walls, assigning to each person a share of property (partage), and regulating the communication
between shares through a juridical apparatus, the original meaning of nomos, according to Laroche and
Deleuze and Guattari, does the opposite. Nomadism “distributes people in an open space that is
indefinite (indéfini) and noncommunicating” without division, borders, or polis .28 It is marked
instead by “traits” that are effaced and displaced within a trajectory: points of relay, water, food,
shelter, etc. Nomadic distributions have no division or border, but that does not mean that nomad
space is not distributed or consistent. Rather, it is precisely because of the fact that the nomos defines a
concretely occupied but non-limited, indefinite space that it offers us a way to think of the connection
between heterogeneous persons and groups without opposition. If there are no distinct divisions
(status, for example) or delimited “pieces” (des morceaux), then there can be no mutual
exclusion. But how is solidarity actually constructed between such unlimited distributions? While it
must be admitted that Deleuze and Guattari rarely mention the word solidarity, I want to highlight a
particularly illuminating passage and a footnote from the “Treatise on Nomadology” chapter of A Thousand
Plateaus where they do.29 Here, they directly connect the concept of solidarity to its nomadic origins and its role
in the creation of a “collective body” (le corps collectif) opposed to the State, Family, or Party body. The nomadic
origins of the concept of solidarity, according to Deleuze and Guattari, are found in Ibn Khaldun’s concept of
asabiyah. In his book, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, Khaldun defines the Bedouin nomads not
primarily by their ethnic, geographical, state, or familial genealogy, but by their mode of life and group
solidarity that brings various heterogeneous persons and families together. What is interesting is that,
for Khaldun, solidarity is not defined by any pregiven, genealogical, or even static criteria for
inclusion/exclusion, but rather by contingent relationships “between persons who . . . share a feeling of
solidarity without any outside prodding.”30 “By taking their special place within the group [solidarity],
they participate to some extent in the common descent to which that particular group [solidarity]
belongs.”31 Not only is the only condition for group solidarity, according to Khaldun, “a commitment” to
a particular group solidarity, but this mutual solidarity then creates a new common line of descent
(similarly open to solidarity with other groups). Thus Khaldun can claim that "genealogy is something
that is of no use to know and that it does no harm not to know . . . [because] when common descent is
no longer clear and has become a matter of scientific knowledge, it can no longer move the imagination
and is denied the affection caused by [solidarity]. It has become useless.”32 Even state political power is
useless without solidarity behind it.33 The most primary form of social belonging is thus, according to
Khaldun, neither sedentary (state) nor genealogical (Family), but rather contingent and mobile
(Nomadic). What Deleuze and Guattari find so compelling in the nomadic origins of Khaldun’s theory of
solidarity is that each nomadic Bedouin family acts not as a hierarchical or unidirectional condition of
genealogical descent, an arranged matrimonial alliance between families, or even a state-bureaucratic
descent, but rather as a contingent “band vector or point of relay expressing the power (puissance) or
strength (vertu) of the solidarity” that holds them together.34 Families are thus assembled primarily
through relations of mutual, horizontal solidarity and have nothing to do “with the monopoly of an
organic power (pouvoir) nor with local representation, but [with] the potential (puissance) of a vortical
body in a nomad space.”35 It would thus be a mistake to understand nomadic solidarity as simply a
matter of merely unlimited space, a line of flight from, or internal transformation of state power. Rather,
I am arguing, following Khaldun, that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomadism is a matter of
belonging and unity among heterogeneous relays. It is a form of belonging that does not rely at all on
the status or identity of the individual but with their ability to take collective action with others.
Accordingly, Khaldun defines nomadic (badiya) solidarity (asabiyah) according to two axes of belonging:
the group (the condition of a common descent) and relations of solidarity (the concrete practices of
mutual support and relay between groups). There are thus two important points I want to highlight in
this theory of nomadic solidarity. First, just as the original meaning of the word nomos, according to
Laroche, meant “to distribute in an open and unlimited space like the steppe or countryside,” and not
“to rule, or divide into pieces or static categories,” so we should also apply this notion of nomos to
political relationships between people. Instead of defining political participation and belonging by one’s
categorical status (place of birth, financial assets, color of one’s skin), we should instead define it by how
and to what degree one already participates in political life where one is. Second, just as nomadic
solidarity, according to Khaldun, is based primarily on one’s commitment to a group or community
without the forced belonging or exclusions of family, state, or other external prodding, then so should
we consider the figure of the nomad to be a flexible enough figure such that anyone could find
themselves in such an inclusive struggle. Anyone regardless of status, identity, or division can act
in nomadic solidarity with anyone else. They do not need to share the same goals,
backgrounds, territories, or states; they only need to be able to affirm and believe that their
struggles are the same struggle. But what exactly does a political movement based on the figure of
the nomad look like? Beginning from within the dominant paradigm of states and citizenship, how might
one go about building a migrant justice movement that demands more than the rights of the citizen but
the unlimited belonging of the nomad?
The No One is Illegal Movement organizes politics around the figure of the nomad and
the theory of nomadic solidarity
In the final section of this paper I argue that we can locate a practical articulation of this new form of
migrant resistance and solidarity in the Canadian migrant justice organization No One Is Illegal.
Beyond the defense of migrant rights, which the group also fights for, the aim of No One Is Illegal,
Toronto is to organize a movement to build a new politics based on the figure of the nomad. The group
does not rally, as many migrant justice groups do, around national identity, patriotism, and citizenship.
Rather, their ultimate goal is not to include non-status and irregular migrants into the Canadian
nation-state (although this is certainly important in some situations); their main goal is to organize the
people of Toronto, not as citizens, but as nomadic denizens or living occupants of the city to make
Toronto safe and accommodating for everyone regardless of status. This kind of activism poses a
direct threat to the daily biopolitical management of migrants. No One Is Illegal is a migrant justice
movement that began in 2006 to (1) ensure that all city residents, including people without full immigration status, can access
essential services (housing, health, education, social services, emergency services) without fear of being detained or deported;
(2) ensure that municipal funds and city police are not used to support federal immigration enforcement; and (3) ensure that
residents of the city are not required to provide proof of immigration status to obtain services, and if such information was
discovered, that it could not be shared with federal immigration enforcement: “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT). Additionally, the
Toronto-based migrant justice group, No One is Illegal calls for the regularization of all non-status persons,36 the end to
deportations, the end to the dentition of migrants, and refugees, and the abolition of security certificates.37 Most of the day
to day labor of this movement is broken up into four committees (Health for All, Education not Deportation, Food for All,
Shelter|Sanctuary|Status, and Legal), who work with other community organizations to try and get clinics, schools, food banks,
and women’s shelters to (1) provide access to anyone regardless of status, (2) train front-line staff to adhere to this
commitment and be sensitive to non-status issues, and (3) radicalize service providers and users toward larger actions against
forced migration and “Status For All”
Alt – Reorientation
Reorientation on the perception of borders is key-- Borders are not static lines but are
a series of practices, this is the only way to avoid the shackles of territorialist ideas
and the proliferation of borders.
Parker & Vaughan-Williams et al. 09 [ Noel & Nick et al. , Associate Professor in Political Theory
and the History of Ideas at the University of Copenhagen & Professor of International Security and Head
of the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, Geopolitics, Lines in
the Sand? Towards an Agenda for Critical Border Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/14650040903081297,
18 Aug 2009. ]
1. Border epistemology • The seductive charm of the border. Jacques Derrida’s work has shown us a notion of the border underpinning a
significant part of our knowledge.4 As Derrida argues, Western metaphysics has been conditioned by borders that it struggles to uphold even
as it averts its gaze from the inevitably contingent, indeterminate character. It is contingency obscured by the violence that underpins and is
expressed in the border. The juxta- posing of binary oppositions which borders legitimise posits, that is to say, the ground on which we can
‘know’ anything.
This is the epistemological seduction of the idea of a border: a craving for the distinctions
of borders, for the sense of certainty, comfort and security that they offer. • Is an alternative epistemology
possible? Can an epistemology be defined that is founded on uncertainty and able to sidestep the charm of the fixed border? How would we
examine borders under such a dispensa- tion, in which their fixity was precisely bracketed out? What critical resources are there for identifying
an alternative epistemological register of this kind? • What alternative topologies can be described? What alternative topologies are available
to an inside/outside way of thinking? The
privilege accorded in Western thought to binary oppositions has
prioritised a particular spatial and temporal topology: that of inside/outside .5 This framing, within
which undecidability, indistinction and indeterminacy are obscured, has come to dominate our
understandings of the concept of the border . So could some alternative topology disassociate the study of borders from the
idea of territory? Conversely, to what extent is indeterminacy the very complement to the possibility of determination? Is it, alternatively,
possible to conceive of ‘the border’ within a more relational understanding of difference? Topologies
of the ‘margin’, the
‘threshold’ and ‘limes’ all figured in our discussions . How might these or others underpin alternative border
imaginaries? • Theorising borders as experiences. A rich tradition of empirical casework on particular border sites has not so
far been cashed out in a theorization of the phenomenological dimension of border studies. This prompts various questions: How do we
experience border-crossing? Alter- natively, what does it feel like to exist as a border – as, for example, unwelcome
migrants and minority groups are forced to do ? In what ways does a shift from a geopolitical to a biopolitical horizon enable
different interrogation of border/body experiences? To what extent are border experiences determined by national
and/or racial predicates? 2. Border ontology Borders as foundations. How is some notion of ‘the border’ seemingly a fundamental
element of any imagined world? The metaphor of drawing a line in the sand raises a series of questions about the connections between borders
as foundational acts. But who, or what then makes borders? How is this ground both established and reproduced? How do borders function as
a ground upon which entities are predicated? In what ways is the work that borders do as foundations linked to violence, force, and the
deployment of a logic of exceptionalism à la Giorgio Agamben?6 Is it possible to identify a new non- or de-territorial nomos of the earth à la
Carl Schmitt?7 Alternative ontological registers . What new descriptive ontologies might be constructed for thinking about the
changing and indeterminate nature of borders as problematised above? Might concepts such as threshold, (en)folding the margin, the soglia
(space in-between), and the ‘event’ (à la Alain Badiou) provide new ontologies for the border? 3. The Space-Time of borders Border spatialities.
How do borders open/foreclose different political and ethical possibilities? How do different conceptions of space produced by alternative
border imaginaries lead to different modes of theory/practice? What does it mean to transgress a border (e.g., in ‘illegal’ migration) and how
does transgression produce the very border that is seemingly transgressed? Border temporalities. How do borders change? How do borders
enable transformative practices? As foundations, how do borders (re)establish origins? What is the ‘time-print’ of the border? How do pre-
emptive practices vis-à-vis what arises beyond the border, such as are characteristic of EU enlargement, globalisation and imperialism,
Marginality. Centre–periphery
disrupt/proliferate the familiar temporal registers within which borders have been conceptualised?
and core–margin relations are enduring tropes in the experience of borders and border regions, so to
consider the border in a space of marginality might reverse and reopen its meaning. Ask where and how the
margin is located and one might conceive the margin as a locus of strategic potentiality/possibility, where the very possibility of transgression
and resistance resides. By way of cashing out some of the promise implicit in these research questions, the group has also begun to formulate a
provisional range of research inquiries on, amongst other things: how
borders create, or depend upon time frames; how
the relations around urban centres are imagined; modelling system-closure and non-closure; the
relationships between different disciplines’ approach to borders; the phenomenology of crossing, not
(being able to undertake) crossing, or remaining upon the border; the organisation of an ‘off-shore’
space of Europe; discourses’ ambivalent challenge to/confirmation of the border; the genealogy of the
border; the border and ‘the political’; subjectivities and the border; and border violences. Our agenda for
border studies, whilst openly theoretical and philosophical in outlook, is driven by seismic changes in the nature and location of the border
and their ethical-political implications. Hence, rather
than treating the concept of the border as a territorially fixed,
static, line (as paradigmatically depicted by Mercator’s map), we begin thinking of it in terms of a series of practices.
This move entails a more political, sociologi- cal, and actor-oriented outlook on how divisions between
entities appear, or are produced and sustained. The shift in focus also brings a sense of the dynamism of
borders and bordering practices, for both are increasingly mobile – just as are the goods, services and people that they seek to
control. Furthermore, it frees the study of borders from the epistemological, ontological, and methodological
shackles of an ultra-modernistic, ‘territorialist’ Western geopolitical imagination. On the one hand, there clearly remain
examples of stubbornly territorial border sites in global politics (such as the US-Mexico border in domestic American politics, the straight lines
on the African continent, and the sharpening outer edges of EU territory). On the other hand, by
thinking within the ambit of the
‘modern’ geopolitical imagination that produced these lines in the first instance, border studies
scholars run the risk of being blinkered to the proliferation and diversification of borders outside or
beyond that imagination. Without problematising this imagination the danger is that the study of
borders will therefore continue to lag behind the increasing spatial and temporal sophistication of bordering practices in
global politics.
Alt – Replace Immigration
Replace current immigration reform with a form following that of Canadian
Migrant Organization No One is Illegal
Rather, I argue, borders must become democratized and fortified against the forces of capital on the
one hand and directed toward economic and social solidarity on the other. What is required to
accomplish this is, in part, a new theory of solidarity no longer based on the figure of the citizen (defined
by the nation-state) or the migrant (defined by the movement from one nation state to another) but on
the figure of the nomad (or non-status migrant; who never stops moving and is not at all defined by the
nation or the state). Third, I argue that we can locate a practical articulation of this new form
of migrant resistance and solidarity in the Canadian migrant justice organization No One Is
Illegal. The goals of this organization are not only to defend the “rights” of migrants in Canada though
legal means, but also to build solidarity among more nomadic and irregular migrants. In particular, No
One Is Illegal proposes to build a new politics based on the figure of the nomadic migrant instead of
the citizen; that is, to reorganize society such that everyone, regardless of status, has full political
standing (access to services, political agency, protections, liberties, etc.). Concretely, this effort in
Toronto, Montréal, and Ottawa is creating a network of social service providers, migrants, and others
sufficient to extend services and sanctuary to people regardless of status as well as help them protect
themselves from Federal immigration enforcement in daily life. Far from demonstrating that non-
status migrants exemplify a form of depoliticized bare life, this paper argues that their distinctly
political efforts, along with others, to democratize their cities against the forces of capital and border
enforcement at every level must be central to any theory of inclusive resistance and solidarity
happening today against the politics of exception and border violence.
Alt – Abolish Borders
Need abolition of borders, not immigration reform
Graeber 11 associate professor of anthropology at yale, interview with readysteadybook, Sept 16,
2011, https://libcom.org/library/david-graeber-interview-readysteadybook
DG: I don't really think such base/superstructure distinctions mean much, to be honest. You might think
it strange, but I really think such distinctions are not really materialist. They're idealist. Let me explain.
Look at it in terms of action. What reality consists of -- and this is in the best spirit of Marx, of course --
are processes and actions. We are all busy making things, producing the world we live in, every day. But
if you look at the world that way, a base/superstructure model doesn't really make any sense. It only
makes sense if you look at products of action: here are some people and they're making fishcakes, or
pottery, so that's material, here are some people and they're making laws, or poetry, and that's ideal.
But of course the process of making laws (or poetry) is just as material as the process of making
fishcakes. There have to be buildings to make laws in, and someone has to clean them, and paper and
transport and funky wigs and all sorts of other things. And likewise the process of making fishcakes
obviously involves people thinking about all sorts of things. It's only if you imagine products that float
apart from the processes that you can say one is more material, or less cerebral, than the other. But this
is why I say it's an idealist position: that's what elites always say. They're always claiming that what they
do is somehow higher and purer and more abstract, that it floats above the muck and mire of real
material life. To which I think the only appropriate response is (to use an appropriately earthy
metaphor): bullshit; no, it isn't! The old lady cleaning the bathroom is just as much a part of the process
of making law as anything else. In action, these distinctions have no meaning. Even if you look at the
history of Marxism, you notice something strange. Most Marxists have felt obliged to pay at least lip
service to the base/ superstructure model since it appears in Contribution to a Critique of the Political
Economy and all. But what do they do? (Note: action again). Well, Western Marxists mainly write about
art and literature. It's hard to find a Marxist analysis of a new method of iron production, but easy to
find Marxist analyses of legal systems or essays on the poetry of William Blake. You might say that old
Leninist or Stalinist regimes were more hardcore on this point, but their actions were even more
contradictory. They would insist that the base is determinant and lock up anyone who said otherwise.
Sorry: if you really believe the material base determines ideological production, then you don't go
around locking people up or shooting them because they write a poem you don't like. There would be
no need to. So, in their actions, these regimes acted like extreme idealists, obsessed with the writings of
intellectuals, whereas it was capitalists -- who often claimed to believe in idealist philosophies -- who
acted like they actually believed in material determination, since they assumed that as long as they
controlled the means of production, there was no need to arrest poets: everything else would largely
take care of itself. But perhaps I wander. I guess your real question was much simpler: are we really at a
point where we could just make the state disappear. Would alternative institutions simply arise
immediately and spontaneously or would we have to slowly build them first. There's a lively debate
about that as you might imagine. I don't know. But anarchists are certainly trying to help build
alternatives. Our only proviso is that we don't want to do it through the state, because we think the
state is a form of violence and you can't build freedom at the point of a gun. MT: How can anarchism
stop itself from simply being a reformist movement for just a bit more democracy? Something that
sounds radical, but practically simply posits the small against the large and little more than that? DG:
Funny, in the US, we never get that question. We're the ones accusing others of reformism usually. I
think the answer is: we don't engage with institutions that, as I mentioned, we consider forms of
violence. We won't be coopted. We directly challenge institutions like the IMF and WTO, for example,
but we won't sit down with them and negotiate compromises -- we want them abolished. We don't ask
for immigration reform, we ask for the abolition of borders. We believe in direct action: that is, insofar
as possible, we act as if those institutions, those borders, state authority itself, does not exist. Ultimately
that opens on a dual power strategy: wherever and whenever possible, we try to establish autonomous
enclaves that operate outside the state and capitalism entirely, and we throw all our support to people
in other places who are doing the same thing.
Alt Solvency – Open borders
Open borders key to econ
Caplan and Naik 14, Bryan Caplan Department of Economics, Center for Study of Public Choice, and
Mercatus Center George Mason University, Vipul Naik Ph.D. Mathematics, University of Chicago
Contract researcher, Machine Intelligence Research Institute. May 2014. “A Radical Case for Open
Borders”. http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/caplannaik.pdf
Until the 1920s, the United States retained nearly open borders. Few dispute that mass migration played
a key role in America’s 19th-century economic miracle. Some even argue that near-free migration
19
outweighed, and thus masked, the negative effects of late 19th-century trade restrictions. Synergies
continued in the early 20th century: mass manufacturing industries, such as Detroit's auto industry,
benefited from a large and mobile population, including many recent migrants and children of
20
migrants. Still, by modern standards, migration during the open borders era remained moderate. The
21
peak foreign-born proportion in 1910 was 15%, comparable to 13% today. If the American border were
re-opened, we should expect larger, faster changes – diaspora dynamics notwithstanding.
Transportation is far cheaper and safer, making long-distance migration practical for the poorest and
most remote populations. Communication is vastly better, allowing migrants to keep in touch with
friends and family – and word of opportunities to spread far and wide. Culture has globalized. Hundreds
of millions of prospective migrants are “pre-assimilated” – fluent in English and avid consumers of
American periodicals, television, and movies. The bottom line is that open borders could easily double
the U.S. population in a matter of decades.
Open borders drastically decreases inequality and increases international econ

For all its radicalism, open borders’ main effects are

fairly well-understood. Open borders would
dramatically increase global production. It would drastically reduce global poverty and global inequality.
At the same time, open borders would make the remaining poverty and inequality much more visible for
current residents of the First World. On other important dimensions – especially budgets, politics, and
crime – we should expect no more than moderate changes for good or ill. Let us consider each effect in
turn. Effect on global production. Why does the average American earn so much more than the average
Nigerian? Part of the reason is that the average American worker has better skills. The rest of the
reason, though, is that the American economy makes better use of whatever skills a worker happens to
have. Researchers who disentangle these two effects find the latter accounts for almost all of the global
pay gap: being in America is much more important than being American. Moving unskilled workers from
Mexico to the United States raises their pay by about 150%. Moving unskilled workers from Nigeria to
22
the United States raises their pay by over 1000%. The productivity gain is most visible in agriculture or
manufacturing: An unskilled Mexican farmer grows far more food in America than in Mexico. But the
gain is equally real in services. A Mexican barber produces more economic value in America because
affluent Americans are willing to pay much more for haircuts than poor Mexicans. Once you grasp the
massive effect of location on worker productivity, the economic case for open borders swiftly follows.
Global living standards depend on global production. 6 7 Immigration restrictions trap labor in
unproductive locations, stunting output. Open borders, in contrast, let everyone on earth move
wherever their labor is most productive. Making Nigerians stay in Nigeria is as economically senseless as
making farmers plant in Antarctica. Open borders will thus grow the world economy. By how much? The
most serious review of the academic evidence concludes that unrestricted migration would roughly
double global GDP, with estimates of the gain ranging from +67% to +147%.23 In other words, existing
regulations stunt the world’s output at roughly half its free-migration level. These magnitudes are
staggering, but hardly surprising. Labor is the world’s most valuable commodity – yet thanks to strict
immigration regulation, most of it goes to waste. What would this wealth explosion look like?
Destination countries for migrants would experience frenetic economic growth – a First World version of
the sustained booms China and India enjoyed in recent decades. Hundreds of millions of Chinese and
Indians have already moved in response to rising urban wages. China’s urbanization rate rose from 18%
in 1976 to 52% today. Massive migration has turned villages to towns and towns to megacities. By 2025,
China will have a billion people living in cities, with 23 cities of over five million and 221 cities of over 1
24
million (compared to 35 such cities in Europe). India's 2001 census estimated that 191 million people –
25
19% of the country – were long-distance internal migrants. India's urban population will soar from 340
26
million in 2008 to 590 million in 2030.
Immigration key to solving global poverty and inequality

Effect on global poverty and inequality. Rural-to-urban migration within China, India, and other low-
income countries hasn’t just been a key pillar of expanding per-capita output. Migration-fueled growth
has also sharply reduced global poverty and global inequality. Sala-i-Martin (2006) uses international
41
data to construct the World Income Distribution for 1970-2000. During this period, the share of the
world living in poverty drastically fell. Raising the poverty line naturally raises measured poverty, but the
42 43
fact of decline is robust. Subsequent research confirms that these beneficent trends are continuing.
Open borders could well cast the decisive blow against human poverty, even if the estimate of the
impact of open borders on global production is significantly overstated.44 Migration-fueled economic
growth around the world has also steadily reduced global inequality. From 1970-2000, the World
45
Income Distribution became more equal by eight distinct metrics. How is this possible given the sharp
rise in inequality within countries? Simple: In the modern world, about two-thirds of global inequality
46
reflects inequality between countries rather within them. Economically speaking, open borders is
familiar rural-to-urban migration writ large. When poor people relocate from low-productivity to high-
productivity areas, they simultaneously enrich the world, escape poverty, and equalize the income
distribution. The key difference: Open borders will lead to larger, quicker progress than traditional rural-
to-urban migration because international gaps dwarf intranational gaps. Due to diaspora dynamics, we
should not expect international inequality to vanish overnight. But given the enormity of the wage gains
migrants experience, progress will start strong and steadily accelerate.
Immigrants lower crime rates

Effect on crime. Empirical work on migration and crime focuses on receiving countries. The big result:
open borders may well decrease crime rates in many receiving countries, and is at any rate unlikely to
cause crime rates to rise sharply. In the U.S., the foreign- born have one-fifth the native incarceration
rate.50 This is not just a reflection of American criminality. Japan has one of the lowest crime rates in
the world, but its immigrants are even more law-abiding than the rest of the population.51 While many
blame South Africa’s crime woes on the end of apartheid’s internal migration restrictions, the evidence
52
suggests otherwise. Its homicide rate, though high, has dropped steadily post-1994. 14 What about
crime in sending countries? Open borders is a powerful lifeline for the potential victims of genocide,
ethnic cleansing, and other war crimes. Imagine how many victims of the Holocaust would have survived
if the United States had open borders during the 1930s. Safety, like development, is ultimately about
people, not places. Rising per-capita income also gives potential criminals more to lose. Research is
scarce, but there are good reasons to expect migration to reduce non-migrants’ victimization risk.
Open borders increase global production

Predictions about the effects of open borders are far from certain. No major country has experienced
anything close to open borders for almost a century, making extrapolation difficult. One effect, however,
is clear: Open borders will drastically increase global production. This transformation of the world
economy makes other large changes highly likely: Sharp reductions in global poverty and inequality,
combined with greater visibility of the poverty and inequality that remain. The effects on other
dimensions – budgets, crime, and politics – are less clear, but standard estimates of the global effects
range from mildly negative to mildly positive. Even if you take strong issue with some of our empirics,
the overall conclusion that open borders would be a boon to the world is hard to dispute. Does this
mean that countries are morally obliged to open their borders? In this section, we argue that every
prominent moral view yields the same answer: Yes. Utilitarianism, efficiency, egalitarianism, human
69
capabilities, libertarianism, meritocracy, and Christianity all recommend open borders. For moral
theories like libertarianism that 17 prioritize individual rights, the recommendation is clear-cut. For more
pragmatic theories, the enormous – and pro-poor – economic gains are almost equally decisive.
Doubling GDP can outweigh a lot of sins. Indeed, even moral theories like citizenism that place little or
no weight on foreigners’ well-being endorse open borders when packaged with pro-native taxes and
transfers.
Open borders facilitate economic efficiency

The utilitarian case for open borders is straightforward: Open borders swiftly and reliably enriches
mankind, especially the global poor. Instead of relying on often corrupt government-to-government
transfers, open borders allows everyone on earth to enrich themselves by heading wherever their
talents are most valuable. As long as the rise in global GDP exceeds 50%, it is hard to see any offsetting
harms in the same ballpark. Even in an unlikely scenario where open borders destroys First World
welfare states, the benefits for hundreds of millions of absolutely poor foreigners clearly outweigh the
costs for tens of millions of relatively poor natives. The efficiency case for open borders. Economic
efficiency measures costs and benefits purely by willingness to pay.70 When is relocation efficiency-
enhancing? Whenever it raises a worker’s productivity by more than the material and psychological cost
of moving. The whole point of immigration restrictions, though, is to ban immigration that passes this
efficiency test. Unlike utilitarianism, economic efficiency counts the preferences of the rich and poor
equally; an extra dollar in Haitian hands counts no more than an extra dollar in American hands. The
apostle of economic efficiency will therefore disregard the pro-poor distributional effects of free
migration, and treat the extra visibility 18 of poverty as a serious cost. Still, given the huge effect on
global output, the efficiency case for open borders is solid.
Open borders moral- any objection is xenophobic

Open borders speaks to every major moral outlook. Given the evidence, you would expect the approach
to enjoy widespread support. Yet in practice, support for open borders is rare. The World Values Survey
asked the people of forty eight nations their views on migration. In most countries surveyed, under 10%
81
said, “Let anyone come.” Why is open borders so unpopular? Most of the opposition, in our view,
reflects unthinking xenophobia. Nevertheless, the majority of people the authors consider reasonable
have yet to embrace open borders. Every major moral viewpoint implies open borders given our
empirical claims, so we suspect that reasonable skeptics find our empirics unsatisfactory. In this section,
we try to identify and answer their overarching complaints. Open borders is far out of sample. All of our
claims about the effects of open borders rely on (a) experience with open borders in the distant past, or
(b) experience with relatively high immigration in the recent past. Both forms of evidence are
problematic. Transportation and communication have drastically improved over the past century, so
open borders today could be very different from open borders a century ago. Social changes often have
non-linear effects, so open borders could be bad even though moderate immigration is good. This
critique has a kernel of truth: Each of our forecasts should have wide confidence intervals. For any given
outcome, the true effect of open borders is likely to be far above or below its expected value. To
estimate those expected values, however, we must rely on past experience. We can acknowledge wide
confidence intervals, yet still safely predict that open borders will be better than the status quo, as long
as some key expected values are enormously favorable, and the rest are ambiguous. This is precisely
what the evidence shows. The expected impacts on global production, poverty, and inequality are
enormously favorable. The expected impacts on the budget, crime, and politics are ambiguous. Should
all of these estimates prove too sanguine, though, open borders likely remains a good deal. Suppose
standard estimates of the effect of open borders on global output, poverty, and inequality are
overstated by a factor of five. In absolute terms, that is still a present discounted value of tens of trillions
of dollars. To offset a gain of this scale, the combined budgetary, crime, and political effects 23 of open
borders would have to be horrific.
Block Answers
AT: Perm
Liberal reforms that attempt to humanize or help Immigrants harm them by enshrining
the category of Immigrant into the law and causing a regression towards Identity
Politics.
Michalinos Zembylas 10
Michalinos Zembylas is Associate Professor of Education at the Open University of Cyprus. His research
interests are in the areas of educational philosophy and curriculum theory, and his work focuses on
exploring the role of emotion and affect in curriculum and pedagogy. He is particularly interested in how
affective politics intersect with issues of social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education,
and citizenship education.
First, the categories of ‘immigrants’, ‘refugees’ and ‘asylum seekers’ are rarely contested in liberal and
humanitarian discourses of citizenship education curricula, but rather they are taken for granted (Zembylas, 2008). Yet, these
very concepts in their short life, as Tyler (2006) argues, have worked to erase entire populations from
view through strategies of (mis)recognition. Seeking recognition (on behalf of the Other) is usually
grounded on humanistic representations of ‘the victims’ (e.g., photographic close–ups of faces and first–person accounts). Although
such appeals can be extremely effective in forming compassionate recognition , they are situated “within the language of the law
which they nevertheless contest” (Tyler, 2006, p. 196). In other words, these appeals depend on the same categories
of exclusion/inclusion, us/them as xenophobic discourses . Interestingly, therefore, these dichotomous categories
overlap with those embedded in fearism and work together to reinforce both fear and sympathy toward
immigrants/refugees/asylum seekers. It is for this reason that Agamben does not hesitate to take the position that a failure to
question the foundations of social structures that tolerate such categorizations essentially “maintain a
secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight” (1998, p. 133). Second, liberal/humanitarian
discourses of citizenship “are virtually impossible without recourse to identity politics ” (Butler, 1992, p. 15) and the
preservation of bounded membership within ethnic and citizenship boundaries (Balibar, 2003). Citizenship education that is grounded in perceptions of bounded
membership is still the most prevalent way that citizenship is taught (Knight Abowitz & Harnish, 2006). In particular, Soysal (1994) points out that the feeling
of national belonging takes precedence to whatever precedence one happens to inhabit. Also, research on
ethnic/citizenship identity, xenophobia, and stereotyping in schools highlights notions of belonging and bounded membership (Zembylas, 2009). For example, some
European studies raise concerns about students’ feelings of intolerance toward immigrants (Van Peer, 2006); analyses
of civics education
curricular intent have also shown that different priorities of European countries in relation to national
and European citizenship goals create tensions about insiders and outsiders (Ortloff, 2006; Sutherland, 2002). In other
words, the structures of modern sovereignty such as rights and citizenship are rarely challenged in any
critical way in citizenship education (Knight Abowitz & Harnish, 2006) and the consequences of their limits are not
interrogated in terms of struggling for a new political community that is more inclusive . For example, the
very idea of legality (attached to citizenship) must be opposed (Agamben, 1998) however, this opposition needs to be
translated into material forms that increase the agency of marginalized individuals (Tyler, 2006). By emphasizing identities and differences (grounded in legal
arguments) among social groups, the politics of identity/difference diverts resources from efforts to address the unjust material structures (Eisenberg, 2006) in
which immigrants/refugees/asylum seekers find themselves and undermine the social solidarity upon which a radical politics (Agamben, 1998) can be formed. There
is certainly some form of utopianism in the hint for unbounded notions of belonging and citizenship, pointing to a radicalized global village, which has no concrete
basis in reality. However, ‘undoing’ the rights and privileges of ‘western citizens’ functions as a shift away from ideological concerns (e.g., citizenship rights) toward
issues of unjust material structures and power imbalances. In the next part of the essay, I use Agamben’s theory on biopower to interrogate the ways in which the
figure of the immigrant/refugee/asylum seeker is appropriated by liberal/humanitarian arguments. This move will help to make more visible how the categories of
exclusion/inclusion, us/them work together to reinforce fear and sympathy toward immigrants/ refugees/ asylum seekers.
AT: Framework
We’ll impact turn all their framework standards at the level of national membership
being the condition for border drawing and violent exclusion. Reorient yourself to fix
domestic otherness- failure to do so leads to otherness and violence
Alterity= otherness
Ontology= study of being
Shapiro 97 (Michael, Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, Violent Cartographies,173-180//shree,
https://books.google.com/books?id=tPiXBGw1O6YC&pg=PA173&lpg=PA173&dq=To+claim+membership+in+a+particular+tribe,+ethnicity,
+or+nation-that+is,+Shapiro&source=bl&ots=hCjv4tlRID&sig=uOSgm0pI7GJH2g2KgOMJGLNk-
Ks&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj1xJTA2_7bAhUBB3wKHfwYALQQ6AEISTAJ#v=onepage&q=To%20claim%20membership%20in%20a
%20particular%20tribe%2C%20ethnicity%2C%20or%20nation-that%20is%2C%20Shapiro&f=false)
To claim membership in a particular tribe, ethnicity, or nation—that is, to belong to a “people”—one must claim location
in a particular genealogical and spatial story. Such stories precede any particular action aimed at a future result and provoke much of
the contestation over claims to territory and entitlement and to collective recognition. To the extent that they are part of the reigning structure
of intelligibility, identity stories tend to escape contentiousness within ongoing political and ethical discourses. To produce an ethics responsive
to contestations over identity claims and their related spatial stories, it is necessary to intervene in the dominant practices of intelligibility.
Michel Foucault was calling for such intervention when he noted that the purpose of critical analysis is to question, not deepen, existing
structures of intelligibility. Intelligibility results from aggressive, institutionalized practices that, in producing a given intelligible world, exclude
alternative worlds. “We must,” Foucault said, “make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness, and deny its necessity. We must
think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces?’ Like Foucault, Derrida claimed that a recognition of practices of exclusion
is a necessary condition for evoking an ethical sensibility. His insights into the instability and contentiousness of the context
of an utterance, in his critique of Austin, provides access to what is effectively the protoethics of ethical discourse, the various contextual
commitments that determine the normative implications of statements. To heed this observation, it is necessary to analyze two particular kinds
of contextual commitments that have been silent and often unreflective predicates of ethical discourses. And it is important to do so in
situations in which contending parties have something at stake—that is, by focusing on the ethics of encounter. Accordingly, in what follows,
my approach to “the ethical” locates ethics in a respect for an-Other’s identity performances with special attention to both the temporal or
narrative dimension and the spatial dimension of those performances. Moreover, to produce a critical political approach to the ethics of the
present, it
is necessary to oppose the dominant stories of modernity and the institutionalized, geopolitical versions
of space, which support existing forms of global proprietary control, for both participate unreflectively in a violence of
representation. The ethical sensibility offered in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas provides an important contribution to the ethics-as-
nonviolent encounter thematized in my analysis. Levinas regarded war, the ultimate form of violence, as the suspension of morality; “it renders
morality derisory,” he said. Moreover, Levinas’s thought fits the more general anti Clausewitzian/antirationalist approach to war thematized in
prior chapters, for Levinas regarded a strategically oriented politics—”the art of foreseeing war and of winning it by every means’ which is
“enjoined as the very essence of reason”—as “opposed to morality.” In order to oppose war and promote peace, Levinas enacted a linguistic
war on the governing assumptions of Western philosophy. He argued that philosophy from Plato through Heidegger constructed persons and
peoples within totalizing conceptions of humanity. The ethical regard, he insisted, is one that resists encompassing the Other as part of the
same, that resists recognizing the Other solely within the already spoken codes of a universalizing vision of humankind. However problematic
Levinas’s notion of infinite respect for an alterity that always evades complete comprehension may be (an issue I discuss later), it nevertheless
makes possible a concern with the violence of representation, with discursive control over narratives of space and identity, which is central - to
my analysis. Edward Said emphasized the ethicopolitical significance of systems of discursive control, locating the violence of imperialism in the
control over stories: “The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and
imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.” Indeed, contemporary neoimperialism resides in part in
the dominance of a spatial story that inhibits the recognition of alternatives. A geopolitical imaginary, the map
of nation-states, dominates ethical discourse at a global level. Despite an increasing instability in the geo political map of states, the more
general discourses of “international affairs” and “international relations” continue to dominate both ethical and political problematics.
Accordingly, analyses of global violence are most often constructed within a statecentric, geostrategic cartography, which
organizes the
interpretation of enmities on the basis of an individual and collective national subject and on cross-
boundary antagonisms. And ethical theories aimed at a normative inhibition of these antagonisms continue to presume this same
geopolitical cartography.’° To resist this discursive/representational monopoly, we must challenge the geopolitical map. Although the
interpretation of maps is usually subsumed within a scientific imagination, it is nevertheless the case that “the cartographer’s categories” as J.
B. Harley has put it, “art the basis of the morality of the map.” 11 “Morality” here emerges most significantly from the boundary and naming
practices that construct the map. The nominations and territorialities that maps endorse constitute, among other things, a “topographical
amnesia.” Effacements of older maps in contemporary namings and configurations amount to a non- recognition of older, often violently
displaced practices of identity and space. Among the consequences of this neglected dimension of cartography, which include a morality-
delegating spatial unconscious and a historical amnesia with respect to alternatives, has been a radical circumspection of the kinds of persons
and groups recognized as worthy subjects of moral solicitude. State citizenship has tended to remain the primary basis for the identities
recognized in discourses such as the “ethics of international affairs.” The dominance and persistence of this discursive genre, an “ethics”
predicated on absolute state sovereignty, is evident in a recent analysis that has attempted to be both critical of the ethical limitations of the
sovereignty system and aware that “conflict has increasingly moved away from interstate territorial disputes.” Despite these acknowledged
sensitivities, the analysis proceeds within a discourse that reinstalls the dominance of geopolitical thinking, for it remains within its cartography
and conceptual legacy. Arguing for a humanitarianism that avoids interstate partisanship, the writers go on to reproduce the geopolitical
discourse on war, which grants recognition only to state subjects. Even as they criticize the language of “intervention” as a reaffirmation of a
sovereignty discourse, they refer to the “Persian Gulf War” on the one hand and “insurgencies” on the other. As I noted in chapter i, Bernard
Nietschmann has shown that the map of global warfare changes dramatically when one departs from the language of sovereignty. Challenging
the state-oriented language of war and unmapping the geostrategic cartography of “international relations;’ Nietschmann refers to the
“Third World War,” which is “hidden from view because the fighting is against peoples and countries
that are often not even on the map ”—a war in which “only one side of the fighting has a name.” Focusing on struggles involving
indigenous peoples, Nietschmann proceeds to map 120 armed struggles as part of the “war’ In his mapping, only 4 of the struggles involved
confrontations between states, while 7 involve states against nations. In order to think beyond the confines of the states orientation, it is
therefore necessary to turn to ethical orientations that challenge the spatial predicates of traditional moral thinking and thereby grant
recognition outside of modernity’s dominant political identities. - This must necessarily also take us outside the primary approach that
contemporary philosophy has lent to (Anglo-American) ethical theory. As applied at any level of human interaction, the familiar neo-Kantian
ethical injunction is to seek transcendent values. Applied to the interstate or sovereignty model of global space more specifically, this approach
seeks to achieve a set of universal moral imperatives based on shared values and regulative norms. This dominant tradition has not yielded
guidance for specific global encounters because it fails to acknowledge the historical depth of the identity claims involved in confrontations or
collisions of difference— difference that includes incommensurate practices of space and conflicting narratives of identity. The tradition
depends instead on two highly abstract assumptions. The first is that morality springs from what humanity holds in common, which is thought
to yield the possibility of a shared intuition of what is good. The second is that the values to be apprehended are instantiated in the world and
are capable of being grasped by human consciousness, wherever it exists. As Hegel pointed out in one of his earliest remarks on Kantian moral
reasoning, Kant’s system involves “a conversion of the absoluteness of pure identity. . . into the absoluteness of content.” Because, for Kant,
the form of a concept is what determines its rightness, there remains in his perspective no way to treat “conflicts among specific matters.”17 A
brief account of an encounter between alternative spatial imaginaries helps to situate the alternative ethical frame to be elaborated later. It is
provided by the reflections of the writer Carlos Fuentes after an un anticipated encounter with a Mexican peasant. Lost driving with friends in
the state of Morelos, Mexico, Fuentes stopped in a village and asked an old peasant the name of the village. “Well, that depends;’ answered the
peasant. “We call it the Village Santa Maria in times of peace. We call it Zapata in times of war.” Fuentes’s mediation on this response reveals
the historical depth of forms of otherness that exist relatively unrecognized within modernity. He notes that the peasant that existed within a
narrative trace that tends to be uncoded in the contemporary institutionalized discourses on space: “That old campesino knew what most
people in the West have ignored since the seventeenth century: that there is more than one time in the world, that there is another time
existing alongside, above, underneath the linear time calendars of the West. This man who could live in the time of Zapata or the time of Santa
Maria, depending, was a living heir to a complex culture of many strata in creative tension. Fuentes’s reaction constitutes an ethical moment.
Provoked by an Other, he engages in an ethnographic self-reflection rather than reasserting modernity’s dominant temporal and spatial
imaginaries: he recognizes and Other who cannot be absorbed into the same. His reaction cannot therefore be contained solely within what
constitutes the ethical life of his community. By encountering an alterity that is at once inside and wholly outside of the particular narrative
within which his social and cultural self-construction has been elaborated, he is able to step back from the story of modernity that is continually
recycled within the West’s reigning discourses on time and space: “What we call ‘modernity’ is more often than not this process whereby the
rising industrial and mercantile classes of Europe gave unto themselves the role of universal protagonists of history. Face to face with an
otherness that these “protagonists,” those who have managed to perform the dominant structures of meaning, have suppressed, Fuentes is
able to recover the historical trace of that otherness and, on reflection, to encourage that the encounter must yield more than mere affirmation
for his practices of self. Most significantly, the encounter produces a disruption of the totalizing conceptions that have governed contemporary
societities—fore example, the illusion that they are unproblematically consolidated and that they have quelled recalcitrant subjectivities.
Therefore, in order to elaborate the ethical possibilities toward which Fuentes’s story points, we can consider an approach that assails such
totalizations with the aim of providing an ethics of encounter. Levinas and the Ethics of the Face to Face. Fuentes’s experience and the
conclusions he draws from are elaborately prescripted in the ethical writings of Levinas, for whom the face-to-face encounter and the
experience of the Other as a historical trace are crucial dimensions of an ethical responsibility. To confront Levinas is to be faced with an ethical
tradition quite different from those traditionally applied to issues of global encounter. In Levinas’s ethical thinking and writing, morality is not
an experience of value, as it is for both the Kantian tradition and Alasdair Maclntyre’s post-Kantian concern with an anthropology of ethics, but
a recognition of and vulnerability to alterity. This conception
of vulnerability to alterity is not a moral psychology, as is the case
is a fundamentally ethical condition attached to human subjectivity; it is
with, for example, Adam Smith’s notion of interpersonal sympathy. It
an acceptance of the Other’s absolute exteriority, a recognition that “the other is in no way another myself, participating with me in a
common existence.” According to Levinas, we are responsible to alterity as absolute alterity, as a difference that cannot be
subsumed into the same, into a totalizing conceptual system that comprehends self and Other . For relations
with Others to be ethical they must therefore be nontotalizing. Rejecting ontologies that homogenize humanity , so that self-
recognition is sufficient to constitute the significance of Others, Levinas locates the ethical regard as a recognition of Others as enigmatically
and irreducibly other, as prior to any ontological aim of locating oneself at home in the world: “The relations
with the other... [does] not arise within a totality nor does it establish a totality, integrating me and the
other. Ontologies of integration are egoistically aimed at domesticating alterity to a frame of
understanding that allows for the violent appropriation of the space of the Other : My being in the world or my
‘place in the sun,’ my being at home, have not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man whom I have already oppressed
or starved, or driven out into a third-world; are they not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing? 23 To be regarded ethically, the
Other must remain a stranger “who disturbs the being at home with oneself.” The ethical for Levinas is, in sum, “a non-violent relationship to
the as infinitely other.” we recall the problematic presented in chapter 5, it should be evident within a Levinasian ethical perspective, one
would, for example, accept Ward Just’s perpetually enigmatic Vietnam rather than endorse Norman Schwarzkopf’s domesticated version.
Aff Answers
Borders Good
Pragmatism
We must approach borders with pragmatism – they are inevitable and sometimes
necessary
Agnew No Date (John Agnew – Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, “Borders on the mind: re-framing
border thinking”, Ethics & Global Politics, http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/geog/downloads/856/258.pdf)
Be that as it may, it
is implicit in this understanding that borders can serve a ¶ number of vital socio-political
purposes. One is straightforwardly instrumental: ¶ borders help clearly demarcate institutional and public-
goods based externality¶ fields. If spending on infrastructure projects (education, highways, etc.), for example,¶ must necessarily be
defined territorially, as Michael Mann has argued, and the¶ revenues raised concomitantly, then borders are necessary to define who is
eligible¶ and who is not to share in the benefits of the projects in question. 21 Thus, absent¶ territorial
restrictions on eligibility,
cross-border movements of people would¶ undermine the essentially contractual obligations that
underpin both state infra-¶ structural power and the autonomous role of the state that depends on it. So,
liberal¶ conceptions of borders can be less inchoate than frequently alleged, if understood ¶ solely in
terms of defense of rights in property, but only if refocused on the provision ¶ of public goods rather than
on the protection of private property. 22¶ Less liberal or instrumental in character are the ways in which
borders help focus¶ on the question of political identity. This has four aspects to it. The first and most¶ traditional is the
claim to sovereignty and its realization since the eighteenth century ¶ as a territorial ideal for a people
endowed with self-rule. Typically, all struggles to¶ extend and deepen popular rule, associated usually with such terms as
‘democracy’,¶ have been bound up with the sovereignty ideal. Who shall rule around here? has been¶ the rallying cry across all political
revolutions. Thus, recently, Jeremy Rabkin has¶ defined sovereignty as the ‘authority to establish what law is binding ... in a given¶ territory’. 23
From this viewpoint, laws can only be enforced when the institutional¶ basis to that law is widely accepted. It depends on popular acceptance
and agreement¶ to allow coercion in the absence of compliance. Intuitively, the reach of institutions¶ must begin and it
must end somewhere. This is a fairly conservative understanding of¶ political identity. Beyond it lie several other versions of how
political identity is served¶ by borders.¶ One is that identities themselves, our self-definitions, are inherently
territorial.¶ Contrary to a liberal sense of the isolated self, from this perspective all identities are¶ based on kinship and
extra-kinship ties that bind people together overwhelmingly ¶ through the social power of adjacency.
From clan and tribe to nation, group¶ membership has been the lever of cultural survival. Rather than
merely incidental,¶ borders are intrinsic to group formation and perpetuation. Thus, a self-defined¶ political
progressive such as Tom Nairn can speak openly of a ‘social nature’ that¶ requires ‘belonging’ and ‘can be chosen and self-conscious’, which can
result in¶ people coming to feel ‘more strongly*and less ambivalently*about their clan,¶ football team or nation, than about parents, siblings
and cousins who directly helped¶ to form them’. 24 Many nations today are still actively in pursuit of their very own¶ state with its very own
borders. 25 Kurds rioting in Turkey and Tibetans protesting¶ Chinese rule are only two of a myriad of recent examples. Elsewhere, there is a
revival¶ of spatially complex forms of citizenship, as in Spain and the United Kingdom,¶ where people can simultaneously belong to several
polities differentially embedded¶ within existing states. 26 Of course, this was once quite common all over Europe.
Some degree of borders are necessary – we should focus on the shifting nature of
territorial borders rather than trying to abolish them altogether
Elden 11 (Stuart Elden – professor of political geography at Durham University, “Territory without Borders”, Harvard International Review
(8/21/2011), http://hir.harvard.edu/archives/2843)
What does it mean to speak of ‘territory without borders’? Let me say immediately that this is not the
same as the ‘borderless world’ argument, nor in agreement with the idea that geography no longer
matters. While borders are less important in some places, such as within much of Europe, in others
they continue to be crucial. The US-Mexico border, the external border policing of Europe, and the
Israeli wall in the West Bank are only the most striking examples of the continual importance of borders.
I am not suggesting that we should comprehend the modern world through a lens that understands
globalization as de-territorialization. Indeed, it is the concomitant processes of re-territorialization—the
constant making and remaking of territories—that should perhaps be more of the focus in our empirical
and political studies.¶ Nor am I using the phrase as a way of describing modes of political organizations such as Schengenland, which
seeks to dispense with border controls. Schengenland has indeed been described as a ‘territory without borders’; it would be more accurate to
describe it as an area with uneven borders . While it is true that mobility in Schengenland is much easier for those individuals whose
status is good and whose papers are in order, mobility is restricted and strictly monitored through transnational security and policing for those
who fail to meet these characteristics.
Rejection Fails
An outright rejection of borders fails. Reframing our concepts of borders in terms of
effects is crucial to cultivate a politics attentive to lived experience
Agnew 8
(John, Department of Geography, UCLA, “Borders on the mind: re-framing border thinking” Ethics &
Global Politics Vol. 1, No. 4, 2008)
¶ Fourthly, and finally, policing

borders still has a powerful normative justification in ¶ the defense of that
territorial sovereignty which serves to underpin both liberal and ¶ democratic claims to (Lockean) popular
rule. Now such claims may frequently be¶ empirically fictive, particularly in the case of imperial and large nation-states, but the¶ logic of the
argument is that, absent effective worldwide government, the highest ¶ authority available is that of existing
states .68 How such states police their borders, of¶ course, should be subject to transparent and open regulation. But why it is popularly¶
legitimate to engage in policing functions in the way they are carried out cannot¶ simply be put down to mass docility in the face of an
omnipotent (because it is¶ omniscient) state apparatus. National
populations do worry about their borders ¶ because
their democracy (or other, familiar, politics) depends on it. The border is a¶ continuing marker of a national (or
supranational) political order even as people, in¶ Europe at least, can now cross it for lunch.69 The problem here is that
democratic¶ theory and practice is not yet up to dealing with the complexities of a world in which ¶
territories and flows must necessarily co-exis t. If one can argue, as does Arash¶ Abizadeh, that ‘the demos of democratic
theory is in principle unbounded’, this still¶ begs the question of who is ‘foreigner’ and who is ‘citizen’ in a world that is still¶ practically divided
by borders.70 As Sofia Nasstrom puts the problem succinctly: ‘it
is¶ one thing to argue that globalization has opened the
door to a problem within¶ modern political thought, quite another to argue that globalization is the
origin of¶ this problem’.71 Until political community is redefined in some way as not being coextensive¶ with nation-state, we will be
stuck with much of business as usual.¶ Currently then, given the strong arguments about what borders do and the ¶
problems that they also entail, a more productive ethic than thinking either just with ¶ or just against
them would be to re-frame the discussion in terms of the impacts that ¶ borders have; what they do both
for and to people. From this perspective, we can ¶ both recognize the necessary roles of borders and the
barriers to improved welfare¶ that they create. In the first place, however, this requires re-framing thinking about¶ borders
away from the emphasis on national citizenship towards a model of what¶ Dora Kostakopoulou calls ‘civic registration’.72 Under this model,
the only condition¶ for residence would be demonstrated willingness to live according to democratic rule¶ plus some set requirements for
residency and the absence of a serious criminal¶ record. Such a citizenship model requires a reconceptualization of territorial space¶ as a
‘dwelling space’ for residents and, thus, a move away from the nationalist¶ narratives which cultivate ‘the belief that territory is a form of
property to be owned¶ by a particular national group, either because the latter has established a¶ ‘‘first occupancy’’ claim or because it regards
this territory as a formative part of¶ its identity’.73 In a world in which wars and systematic violations of human rights¶ push millions to seek
asylum across borders every year, this rethinking is¶ imperative.74¶ In the second place, and by way of example, from this viewpoint it is
reasonable ‘to¶ prefer global redistributive justice to open borders. To put it bluntly, it
is better to¶ shift resources to people
rather than permitting people to shift themselves towards ¶ resources’.75 Currently much migration from country-to-
country is the result of the¶ desire to improve economic well-being and enhance the life-chances of offspring. Yet,¶ people often prefer
to stay put, for familial, social, and political reasons, if they can.¶ There seems no good basis, therefore, to
eulogize and institutionalize movement as¶ inherently preferable to staying put. If adequate mechanisms were
developed to¶ stimulate development in situ, many people who currently move would not. Not only¶ people in destination countries associate
their identities with territory.¶ Using
the standard of a decent life, therefore, can lead beyond the present
impasse¶ between the two dominant views of borders towards a perspective that re-frames ¶ borders as
having both negative and positive effects and that focuses on how people ¶ can both benefit from
borders and avoid their most harmful effects. In political vision¶ as in everyday practice, therefore, borders remain as
ambiguously relevant as ever,¶ even as we work to enhance their positive and limit their negative effects.
AT: Open Borders Help Economy
There’s only a risk that open borders damage the economy – massive changes in
inflow are too unpredictable.
Ozimek 17 [Adam Ozimek, economist at Moody's Analytics, covering labor markets and other aspects
of the U.S. economy, 2-26-2017, "Why I Don't Support Open Borders," Forbes,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2017/02/26/why-i-dont-support-open-
borders/#5ed1f7947b61]
I am a big fan of immigration, and I think we can easily absorb significantly more immigrants than we do right now. But I am not a
proponent of open borders, and I thought it would be useful to give a few fairly high level reasons why. The big, fundamental meta
question to me is: why is the U.S. richer than the countries that most immigrants are coming from? It’s a
combination of different levels of physical capital, human capital, technology, social capital, and
institutions. But the last two are extremely vague, and our knowledge of how institutions and social capital emerge and evolve is not great.
A decent amount of immigration only changes these things slowly, but open borders could change them very quickly. Would
these changes be positive or negative? We don’t know, but given that the U.S. as already very rich compared to the rest
of the world the risks are to the downside. That said, if we could do better at directing immigration to parts of the U.S. I think in
some places the risks of massively increasing immigration flows are outweighed by the benefits. Detroit, for example, is not doing nearly as well
as the U.S. overall. Ranked as a country by itself, one would not describe it as doing so well that the risks are mostly to the downside. It’s true
the U.S. overall has undergone successful massive changes in the past, including due to large influxes of immigrants. According to a recent
National Academies report, the
largest period of immigration influx as a share of population since 1790 was in the was
from 1850 to 1860 when net international migration was 9.8 per 1,000 U.S. population. That’s about
triple today’s rates, and would translate to about 3 million immigrants a year. I’m fine with that rate, it seems like a pretty
aggressive expansion, and I'm not sure why we'd want to start with something a lot higher than that . I
think the risks outweigh the rewards for pushing significantly above that. The case against massive
changes in the U.S. is also stronger today than it was in the past. It was easier to support massive radical
changes in previous centuries when we were constantly in the midst of huge fundamental changes like the
end of slavery, the rise of democracy, the industrial revolution, World Wars, and the emergence of the welfare state. In general, when we
questioned the status quo in the past we can say that the status quo was a result of recent massive changes. In the past we also hadn’t gone
very far in terms of well-being compared to previous centuries. But
now, on the other side of two industrial revolutions
and 100 years of productivity growth, we have far much more to lose. We’re in an era of far fewer
massive changes, and the U.S. is a big country that is near the top of the list development-wise. If we’re
going to step outside of modern experience, I’d rather see it done somewhere else first. Some, like the excellent Alex Nowrasteh, say we should
wall off the welfare state from immigrants and natives rather than wall off the country. I think the welfare state is an important source of
upward mobility and a driver of life-time well-being for natives and immigrants. I take his proposal as actually kind of telling about the sort of
radicalism that might be required to potentially sustain open borders. Rather than spend a lot of energy arguing on behalf of things like public
schools, food stamps, Medicaid, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, I’d rather simply point to this proposal and say “See? This kind of bad
solution is what could potentially be required to sustain open borders!”. So that’s my big vague case against open borders! We
don’t
really know enough about what generates the wealth of nations to make massive changes like this. It is
very plausible that the people in a country play a big role in determining the wealth of that country, and the downside risks of
massive changes in the U.S. tend to outweigh the upside risks.
Alt Fails
Alt Fails -- Generic
Deconstruction cannot be confined to one method or the movement will fail
Vaughn-Williams 9 ( Nick, IR MA @ university of Warwick IR PhD @ Aberystwyth, “Border Politics: The Limits
of Sovereign Power” pg 146-47)
Derrida is notoriously hesitant to define deconstruction because any attempt at such a definition would
be ironic. In his ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, Derrida writes: ‘What deconstruction is not? Everything of course! What
is deconstruction? Nothing of course!’70 More accessible accounts of the basic moves of deconstructive thought can be found in
Positions [1981] and Limited Inc. [1988]. Derrida insists that (p.147) a deconstructive strategy or way of reading always
involves a double and simultaneous movement: Deconstruction cannot be restricted or immediately
pass to a neutralization: it must, through a double gesture, double science, a double writing – put into
practice a reversal of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system . It is on that
condition alone that deconstruction will provide the means of intervening in the field of oppositions it
criticizes and that is also a field of non-discursive forces. 71
Alt Fails – Politics Key
Critiquing metaphysical concepts and subjectivity doesn’t alter political realities---
institutional engagement key
Z Al-Mwajeh 5, Indiana University of Pennsylvania The School of Graduate Studies and Research
Department of English, CRITIQUE OF POSTMODERN ETHICS OF ALTERITY VERSUS EMBODIED (MUSLIM)
OTHERS, https://dspace.iup.edu/bitstream/handle/2069/23/Ziad%20Al-Mwajeh.pdf?sequence=1
However, alterity-oriented postmodernism can be described as idealistic in a Platonic sense . Plato’s “Myth of the Cave”
enacts a dialectical ascension or progress toward an ideal republic governed by reason. Plato’s world of matter is preceded and to some extent controlled by
the world of ideas, or by the Logos. Postmodern alterity seems to submit to the Platonic idea-matter dialectics. Thus, the postmodernists critique
metaphysical, linguistic, or symbolic superstructural systems as if fixing the idea translates into fixing
praxis. One implicit assumption is that knowledge translates into ethics. In other words, it seems that postmodernists
do not only consider man ‘good,’ but also assume that the moment one is enlightened about the good, he/she will
automatically choose it by virtue of its being good. I am not particularly opposed to such idealism. On the contrary, the problem with
such idealism is that it underestimates political and economic contexts, pressures, motivations, and even
the desire for power regardless of the consequences , sometimes. Postmodern thought does not problematize
the passage from metaphysics or the moment of knowledge into action. It seems that the moment we
know that our metaphysical or epistemological foundations are other-unfriendly automatically
translates into abandoning those ways in favor of more just arrangements such as alterity ethics . Thus,
postmodernists retain Platonic residues whenever they assume that self-other enduring conflicts are
primarily caused by ideational or metaphysical systems. They, too, become idealists whenever they do not
problematize the assumption that the world of ideas precedes the world of matter—almost in a causal
manner—or whenever they assume their automatic translatability as if fixing the philosophical or
epistemological system would automatically fix the institutions and practices that stem from them . 3
postmodern thinking remains ‘abstract’ and ‘idealized’ by assuming that correcting

In other words,
metaphysical wrongs will guarantee a better world in the realm of matter, or that the realm of matter
can be corrected at the realm of ideas . Moreover, we usually equate utopian thinking with wishful, yet “impractical,” proposals. Sometimes, however,
postmodernism suggests a dystopia, whenever it is associated with the loss of a community based on justice and satisfaction.4 Such loss is usually attributed to different factors such as
technological, capitalist-consumerist developments (Jameson; Baudrillard; Guy Debord). Conservative critics also voice their dissatisfaction with any ‘identity-politics’ postmodernism that
compromises academic protocols and research methods by replacing them with personal, experiential, racial, gendered, and any other minority distinctive constituency. That is, it is no longer
a question of whether what one says submits to academic and logical standards of conviction and verification as much as it is a matter of “who” says it that makes the difference (Jeffery
Wallen’s Closed Encounters highlights such issues). Even minority and non-conservative critics such as Rey Chow sound uneasy toward making race, gender, and sexual orientation a priori
authoritative positions. In Ethics after Idealism, she shows that the desire to do justice to minority voices can be abused by both parties, mainstream and minority subjects. I think what she is
uneasy about is postmodern performativity. Minority and mainstream, although they have valuable and referential descriptive values, can be performed and played out. In academia, being a
female or coming from a previously colonized region invests the person with powers and rights, sometimes at the expense of critical and academic norms.5
Cedes the Political
ALT FAILS – even an active refusal cedes the political
Redfield 5 [Peter, Ph.D. Anthropology at UC Berkeley, professor of Anthropology at UNC Chapel Hill,
“Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis,” Cultural Anthropology 20(3)] ***MSF = Medecins Sans Frontieres
(Doctors Without Borders)
Here the context of MSF’s

“ethic of refusal” comes most sharply into focus.¶ The group’s insistence on a politics of
witnessing combined with its abstention¶ from taking a directly political role stems from an
unwillingness to accept the extended state of emergency within which it generally operates . Simply to
denounce¶ situations would achieve no immediate humanitarian ends and to endorse political¶ agendas would potentially sacrifice the present
needs of a population for the hope¶ of future conditions. But to
maintain formal neutrality at all times without protest ¶
would mimic the classic limitations of the Red Cross movement that the founders¶ of MSF originally
rejected. Confronted with such a range of unsatisfying options¶ while still being committed to humanitarian values, MSF’s ideological
strategy¶ is to claim a position of “refusal” in the form of action taken with an outspoken, ¶ troubled
conscience.
The practical application of this approach varies according to the situation. ¶ In

truly exceptional circumstances MSF has
found itself forced out or has chosen to withdraw . For example, during the highly televised Ethiopian famine of¶
1984–85, the French section was forced to leave after accusing the regime of using both famine and
relief aid to effect a forced resettlement policy . During the¶ dark Rwandan spring a decade later, MSF publicly
proclaimed its helplessness¶ with a bitter, angry refrain: “you can’t stop genocide with doctors.” The
French¶ section both denounced the political complicity of its national government and¶ issued its first call for some form of military
intervention to halt the slaughter.¶ Upset at the flagrant manipulation of aid by the perpetrators of genocide in the¶ aftermath, MSF–
France subsequently pulled out of the Rwandan refugee camps ¶ in Zaire and Tanzania at the end of 1994
and then condemned the new Rwandan ¶ regime for the forcible repatriation and massacre of Hutu refugees. Although
other¶ MSF sections followed different strategic lines of action amid heated debate, they¶ all eventually withdrew from the
camps by the end of 1995, publicly protesting¶ the continuing political situation within them. Most recently and poignantly, the
organization withdrew from Afghanistan following the murder of five members of ¶ a team from MSF–
Holland in 2004. After more than two decades of continuous¶ presence, the organization felt that the altered political
circumstances of U.S.-led¶ coalition efforts to administer a post-Taliban reconstruction had eliminated
the¶ “humanitarian space” necessary for its operations .
Entrenched in Whiteness
Critical geography cannot effectively combat race – whiteness is too inscribed in the
study
Price 2010 [Patricia L. Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies, Florida International
University, At the crossroads: critical race theory and critical geographies of race in Progress in Human
Geography 34(2) page 156 ]
Critical geographic studies of whiteness are not, however, without their own critics. Alastair Bonnett (1996), for instance, makes the
(problematic) assertion that the tendency to focus on blackness or whiteness is a particularly ‘American obsession’ that does not reflect the
subtler reality of race in other places. Yet there is very little intentionally comparative critical geographic research on race, such that Bonnett’s
claim is difficult to substantiate empirically. What
is perhaps more troubling – and easier to document – is the
remarkably persistent whiteness of geography’s practitioners. According to some, the popularity of
white studies in geography may in fact simply reflect the whiteness of geographers, and as such
constitute a zone of racial solipsism, or worse, a comfort zone rather than a space of truly critical
engagement with racism (let alone anti-racism; Pulido, 2002; Mahtani, 2006). The prominence of white
studies in geographic studies of race may in fact not simply reflect but also unwittingly act to reinforce
white dominance in geography (Nash, 2003).
Perm
Perm – Activism
Permutation solves – uniting conceptual reflection and political activism is crucial to
any coherent understanding of borders – the alternative’s demand to postpone action
in favor of theoretical purity destroys the possibility of successful ontological analysis.
Brambilla 12 [Chiara Brambilla, PhD in Anthropology and Epistemology of Complexity, Research
Fellow in Anthropology and Geography at the Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of
Bergamo, “Constructing a Relational Space between ‘Theory’ and ‘Activism’ , or (Re)thinking Borders”,
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, Vol 11, No 2, 2012,
https://aisberg.unibg.it/retrieve/handle/10446/28892/115443/ACMEBrambilla2012.pdf]
When I was asked to prepare a statement for the roundtable entitled “Frontière Phalanstère? Crossing the Borders between ‘Theory’ and
‘Activism’”2 , I started asking myself some questions, and precisely: Can borders between “theory” and “activism” be crossed? How to do that?
How to construct a relational space between “theory” and “activism”? In other words, I focused on finding the best possible
way to convene a dialogue between theory and activism by referring the two spheres of interest to a common
topic, that is: borders. The very fact that I relate theory to activism with specific regard to the borders field is relevant indeed in order to
reflect upon possible critical answers to the “how-questions” posed above. The goal of this paper is to serve as a vehicle for building
and facilitating greater sustained dialogue bridging scholars with activists, launching , on the one hand,
opportunities for dialogue on the intersections between theory and activism at a more general level, as feminist,
queer, anti-racist and transnational studies have already been contributing a great deal by looking at various social movements and theoretical
perspectives built in and through activist practice. On the other hand, in this short paper I want to develop
a relational space
between theory and activism on the basis of their common attention to the field of borders. The focus on
borders allows me to describe my personal experience of border crossing between theory and activism by highlighting the ongoing interactions
between the two domains that are far from being strictly separated spheres. From my viewpoint, it
is useful indeed to refer to
experiences for making the relational space between theory and activism emerge, deconstructing in this
way the still dominant binary oppositions. In my opinion such oppositions are (re)produced even in critical
and radical discourses within a number of fields where scholars/activists/people are much worried
about defining what makes respectively a “true activist” and a “true scholar”, as if an absolute ontology
of activism and theory could exist. However, this tendency doesn’t take into account what emerges from
the variety of practices our experience is built on: any definition of “true activism” and “true theory” is
questioned in practice (and as practice) and experiences show the liquidity of the boundaries between who
should be a true activist and who should be a true academic. This point motivates my choice to highlight in the title the
crucial role of (re)thinking borders for constructing such a productive relational space. In order to cross borders between theory and activism, it
is first of all important to be aware borders exist, but this does not mean that they are closed borders and intersections are not possible
between the different domains they create. Borders can be read not only as a di-vision (space of meaning-breaking) but as a
space animated by multiple relations, perceptions and perspectives, making it a pluri-vision (zone of plural
cultural production and meaning-making) (Brambilla, 2009). That is to say, a space where we should insist on constructing
fruitful exchanges and no longer deny the value of difference , working on it and valorizing the
complexity and vitality of borders perceived as a space of difference , connectivity, reflexivity as well as mediation,
mobility, and relation. My experience could help in contextualizing these reflections on the ontology of borders with reference to the relational
space between theory and activism. When I decided to study social sciences and anthropology, mainly focusing on borders issues in Africa and
reconstructing the genealogy of the Euro-African borderland from the colonial times to the present post-colonial era, my decision was due first
of all to my critical “location” as a citizen as well as to my active involvement in associations and movements. In this sense, I would say that my
decision to become an academic in the field of social sciences concentrating my attention on the issues here above can be considered as a first
example of crossing the border between activism and theory. My personal decision had indeed political meaning as well. Yet, the fact to be a
social scientist investigating borders and issues related to them in a critical way has been an important
intellectual tool to reinforce my actions being critically and actively involved with borders and
“contemporary borderlanders”. Furthermore, I would say that the fact to be a scholar has been crucial to create
wider opportunities for my ‘political actions’. Following this, although the ontology of borders seems to be at a first glance a
strictly theoretical matter, I argue that it should be regarded as the crux of the possibility to create a dialogue between theory and activism as
well. This is due to the fact that the peculiar looking glass we use for thinking borders strongly influences, at the same time, the actions they are
concerned with. In this way, the theoretical and conceptual reflection on the ontology of borders – meaning
intellectual work focused on the “why-and-how-ness” of borders – aims to seek change (Parker et al., 2009)
and in such a sense it cannot be considered as opposite to activism: the two are somehow symbiotic and
cyclically related. To put it differently, I can argue that a precise theoretical perspective is able to generate a
number of activities; it activates us while helping us to critically interrogate ourselves and understand
the issues at stake. Accordingly, it is important to point to the relation between the different dimensions of
borders, conceiving them as multi-dimensional sites of negotiation, contestation and struggle, as well as
human-made processes that are discursively constructed . In this way, I attempt here to highlight the potential of this
approach in conceptual thinking about borders to favor a dialogue between border theory and activism, by assuming the multi-
dimensionality of the border concept in the scholarly discussion (in theory) as a useful tool to
(re)orientate related material border practices (in action) as well3 . In this light, if we aim to discuss border
theory and action, as well as measure the possibility and potentiality of encounters between the two domains, we might need to
renovate our terms of analysis in the field of research, politics, social movements and cultural practice.
This involves, as van Houtum (2010, 120) points out, keeping our distance from a contemporary “methodological
state-borderology” that contributes to negating the “ontological multidimensionality” of borders as a
first crucial key to opening the dialogue between theory and activism. Following these insights, what emerges
are domains of knowledge and action where border theory and activism can be more productively
related. I refer in particular to the sphere of contemporary migration and the politics of mobility. I wish to highlight a major theme that
deserves special attention in dialogue between border theory and activism when related to the topic of transnational migration as a field of
knowledge and action: border experiences and the way they are represented. In this regard, I can state that critical
border scholars
and activists share the urgency to overcome the most widespread kind of border representation in modern
times, namely the Western Euclidean map. Such a map has greatly contributed to diffusing the idea of borders as divisive and closed lines,
communicating an invasive representation of migrants by contributing at the same time to the institutionalization of an external, fortress-like
border regime denying the possibility of grasping the complexity of borders as human-made processes. As a result, both border scholars and
activists are engaged in searching for new forms of representing border experiences able to highlight a plurality of borderscapes (Kumar
Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, 2007), evidence of the complexities of infinite and contingent border variations, while serving as an index that can
make room for the invisible, emotional, and life geographies often denied by the modern representational eye, which tends to standardize and
essentialize borders. Borderscapes also reflect “local politics” of borders, understood as framing of social arenas and political landscapes and
strategies of accommodation, adaptation and contestation – challenging the top-down control of borders. An intersectional angle of
vision bringing together border theory and activism highlights the limits of dichotomous formulations
and closed borders, pointing out a variety of social interactions – embracing the experiences, policies and representations that enliven borders
– which in turn define the meanings acquired by borderscapes. In light of these considerations, borders are not only
viewed as geopolitical and territorial entities, but, by “humanizing” borders, they are also revealed as
political, symbolic, cultural-anthropological and epistemological constructions. From this perspective we derive
the centrality of border experience and its anthropological dimension, one that, by referring to border experiences is useful to further
demonstrate how bridging the worlds of border theory and activism has the potential to enrich both political and intellectual landscape. In this
regard, it is important to note that the
anthropological dimension has been excluded in most analysis of borders,
since borders are often considered as institutions, while their function as multi-dimensional phenomena
is left aside. However, as Das and Poole (2004) point out, anthropology should represent an important vantage point for rethinking
international relations, order and sovereignty, which are given meaning by borders. In this way, anthropology could help us take into
consideration the persistent exclusion of marginalized social actors who are not part of the group of dominant actors making up the border,
even if they are actively involved in its everyday functioning (Donnan and Haller, 2000). Moreover, the anthropological method – ethnography –
privileges field experience, thereby often grasping realms of the social that are ignored by formal institutional narratives. Following this,
ethnography can be regarded as a crucial intersectional domain inhabited by border theorists and activists, where it might be developed as a
kind of praxis, as a necessary foundation for bridging the gap between knowledge and action. In this sense, I refer to the concept of praxis
elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu in Theory of Practice (1977), where praxis differs from daily practice and expresses the unity of
theory and practice, not because it is necessary to perform action but because it is fundamental to understanding
social reality4 . Within this framework, I wish to make reference to some recent experiences of mine, which, on the one hand, describe in practice the idea of praxis I just
mentioned and, on the other hand, can be regarded as meaningful accounts of crossing the border between theory and activism. I have recently been involved as a scholar in an action-
research project in Zingonia, a place, located in the Province of Bergamo, that can be regarded as a Euro-African borderscape in the heart of the Northern Italian Region called Lombardy.
Zingonia was founded in the 1960s by the entrepreneur Renzo Zingone to become a model industrial town. The industrial areas were almost all constructed in the early years, but the
population increase was not as expected and the project was scaled down at the beginning of the 1970s. The obvious imbalance led to a degradation of the area. This caused a fall in real-
estate prices that, together with the high number of firms and their strong demand for labor, attracted many migrants to Zingonia. At first, they came from the southern part of Italy in the
1970s and later, in the 1980s, the number of foreign migrants (mostly from Senegal) greatly increased as well. Nowadays foreign workers – mainly from Africa – have gradually taken the place
of Italians and constitute approximately 70 per cent of the total population of Zingonia by transforming it into an “exception-town” in Italy. This has greatly contributed to the spread of an
image of Zingonia as a deprived suburban neighborhood conquered by migrants, a dangerous place to be avoided. The present dominant political orientation in Italy as well as national and
local media debate have contributed in diffusing such a negative idea of Zingonia that is regarded by public opinion as a ghetto5 . However, it is worth pointing out that civil society and certain
citizens who live in Zingonia and in the surrounding towns have re-acted to this negative representation of the town. A number of demonstrations and events have been organized by a local
movement of activists called “Rete Bassa” (Bottom Network) to protest against such stereotyping of Zingonia as a ghetto. The idea to develop an action-research project in Zingonia and my
involvement in it are closely connected to the activist practices of Rete Bassa. My knowledge of local African communities – based on my training in African Studies as well as on my previous
ethnographical field experiences in Africa – has been a crucial tool to facilitate the active involvement of migrants (this means to help them moving towards the right to have rights) in the
“actions” supported by Rete Bassa and to improve the relationships between migrants and Italians in the area, which are crucial to struggle against the negative image of Zingonia. Thus, in
order to carry out the action-research, I have been in the field using my intellectual knowledge and tools for working not on migrants but with them, with the aim of opening up new possible
pathways towards novel forms of political participation and belonging. In this regard, I wish to point out how this experience of mine in Zingonia, like many others both in Italy and in Africa,
could be very useful to express the way in which I am continuously crossing the border between theory and activism in practice, by moving beyond critical reflections on borders and migration
and becoming critically and actively involved with these issues in my human experience. This doesn’t express the viewpoint of a “true activist” or a “true scholar”” but my experience
contributes to describe the way in which I’m crossing the border between activism and theory in my day-to-day life, being aware of the epistemological and political value of the very act of
crossing the border and of critically approaching the relational space between the two domains both from the intellectual and the practical standpoint. In light of these reflections, the crisis of
the traditional approach to borders, regarded as essentialized objects producing spatial as well as temporal fixity (at both epistemological and political levels) – what Mezzadra (2004) has
scholars and activists should be able

called the “metaborder” – reveals the need to re-think the reified rigidity of borders between theory and activism. Thu s,
to make their own cross-border movements towards the angle of vision of the ‘others’ (Newman and Paasi,
1998). In this way, the complexity of what we define as “borders” might really be understood, and it
would be interesting to explore new possible orientations within the framework of cross-border
dialogues able to grasp the complex link between the polysemic conceptual representation of borders
and a number of pressing questions of our time , such as transnational migration. This would help to prioritize the subjective
practices, desires, expectations and behaviors of contemporary new borderlanders by recovering a migrant agency that should be consequently
regarded at the very heart of both critical contemporary political and epistemological reflection. I conclude by pointing out how a
new
analytic lens crossing borders between theory and activism can be conceived as a helpful instrument for
recovering the notion of the human condition as presented by the philosopher Hannah Arendt (1998[1958]). This notion of the
human condition is based primarily on the idea of human action (praxis) as the most important activity within what she calls vita activa. What is
worth pointing out is that the concept of vita activa, in opposition to vita contemplativa, does not create in
itself a hierarchy between theôria and praxis, but expresses rather a synthesis of the two , one which is
crucial in reinstating the life of public and political action to the apex of human goods and goals. From my
viewpoint, (re)thinking borders to construct a relational space between theory and activism can greatly
contribute to this as well. (Re)thinking borders enables us to give voice to those inhabiting hidden
geographies and the geographies of exclusion, showing that they are not marginal , nor can we say that they are inert
peripheral spaces of exception. On the contrary, they are located at the very heart of critical contemporary
political, social and epistemological reflection. Giving voice to them means to take the chance to bring back the
human condition to its original political value, as shown by Arendt. It is a relevant chance indeed. Theorists and
activists should take it and cross the border!
Perm – Politics
Permutation solves – detailed policy reform on immigration is a necessary step
towards ethical open borders.
Rennix 17 [BRIANNA RENNIX, Senior Editor of Current Affairs, “WHAT WOULD HUMANE
IMMIGRATION POLICY LOOK LIKE?” Dec 10, 2017, https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/12/what-would-
humane-immigration-policy-actually-look-like]
In a previous article, “Can We Have Humane Immigration Policy?” I outlined what I believe to be a fundamental hurdle to real immigration
reform: namely, the fact that Democrats have very few clear, long-term ideas of what “reform” should even look
like. The right has a very straightforward restrictionist agenda, and from this have derived a set of policies that they believe (rightly or
wrongly) will be effective in restricting immigration. In its worst iteration, this restrictionism is pure, ethnostate-style
xenophobia; in its “best” iteration, it reduces individuals to a number that symbolizes their economic
value, and allows immigration only when it stands to benefit native-born, “real” Americans. The left , by
contrast, vaguely believes that immigration is an inherently Good Thing, but has no clear idea of how much
immigration is desirable, or how it ought to be regulated. Democrats have historically very often
defaulted to the “admitting immigrants based chiefly on their economic usefulness” position , partly because
it has seemed superficially reasonable to them, partly because they hoped to compromise with Republicans, and partly for lack of any better
ideas. Now that “points-based immigration” has been touted by the Trump administration, thankfully, more people are finally beginning to
understand what an ugly and inadequate idea it actually is. But what scheme of immigration regulation should the left
actually pursue, then? In my view, we’ve dithered on this question long enough, and made far too many inhumane concessions in the
process: now that we have arrived at a moment where favoring immigration and opposing Trump are becoming increasingly merged in the
public imagination, it’s time to go big or go home. Our position should be simple, and ambitious. In the long term—and I don’t think we should
hide the ball about this—our
goal should be to ensure that anybody who wants to come to the U.S. and live and
work peaceably should be allowed to do so . If an immigrant has been in the U.S. for some period of time
and want to settle here permanently, they should be able to do that, too. I do not think being pro-free
movement or pro-open borders as a general matter means committing to the position that a region can
never restrict immigration under any circumstances. Almost every argument adduced for limiting
immigration to wealthy countries is utterly specious —the U.S., in particular, is the world’s third-largest
country geographically and its 179th-most densely populated, so the idea that we “can’t” take more
people is a ludicrously transparent lie —but nevertheless, every region does have some genuine resource
constraints. There may be situations of political unrest, natural disaster, or economic crisis that are so
serious that admitting more population is actually dangerous . For example, Lebanon is currently hosting 172 Syrian
refugees for every 1000 of its citizens: that means that a full 30% of its population are refugees. This is a pretty big burden for any small state to
shoulder, and the situation cannot possibly go on indefinitely, especially if Lebanon finds itself spiraling towards governmental collapse, or
under attack by a neighboring country. Though it’s hard to imagine how an exactly parallel situation could ever arise in the U.S., due to its sheer
size, there may, someday, be other disaster scenarios that would qualify in the U.S. context. The point is, we
should treat
immigration restrictions as time-limited responses to specific, articulable conditions, not as a default
mode. To the extent that immigration might need to be restricted or regulated more closely in certain
emergency circumstances, our concern must be to admit immigrants primarily on the basis of need , and
the direness of the situation they will face if returned, not according to factors like nationality, wealth, education, or ability, which is how our
U.S. system presently operates. All this, however, is the long game. We
certainly can’t arrive at a more open immigration
system overnight, and I think that there’s a hierarchy of intermediary policy goals that would alleviate
some of the most unconscionable effects of our present system, while laying the groundwork for a
future immigration system that looks entirely different. Here, I’ll outline several policy changes that would benefit
immigrants who are already present in the U.S., and individuals who face serious dangers in their home countries. (Stay tuned for part three,
which will deal with visa allotments, employment-based immigration, and admissions more generally.) FIDDLY LEGISLATIVE FIXES Given
how messed-up our immigration system is on a large scale, it’s worth asking how much time we ought to
devote to tinkering with the finer points of laws that we would be better off scrapping wholesale . Some
people might say that these kinds of small fixes are a waste of energy , like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
But I disagree. In a disaster of this scale, you want some of your people making repairs to the leaky
lifeboats, and other people working to contact bigger rescue vessels, because who knows which
avenue will prove more successful before the whole mess slides into the sea. What I mean by “fiddly
legislative fixes” are legal changes that wouldn’t result in any immediate, sweeping changes to what
categories of people are eligible for immigration relief: rather, they might slightly alter the boundaries of
those categories, and also ensure that people who are eligible for immigration relief aren’t barred from
getting it for reasons that are totally outside their control. The only area of immigration law with which I have any minute
familiarity is asylum law, and there are certainly a number of small procedural changes in this field that could
make a huge difference to an asylum-seeker’s chances of success. F or example, Congress passed a catastrophically bad
immigration bill in 1996 which, among many other things, included a requirement that all asylum applicants file their applications within one
year of their last entry to the United States. (Supposedly, this rule is supposed to “prevent fraud,” because fraudsters are notoriously bad at
reading calendars, or something.) Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, a lot of people with asylum claims don’t manage to file on time. Most
people in deportation proceedings don’t have attorneys; many of them are traumatized; some of them may be sitting in immigration detention
on the day of the deadline; their first-ever court hearings after entering the U.S. may even end up being scheduled past their one-year
anniversary; the application form is absurdly complicated and the questions are all in English; etc., etc. You can try to file late, of course, but
your application won’t be accepted unless you can prove some very specific extenuating circumstances. According to a 2010 study, nearly
one in five failed asylum applications were rejected by the court solely because they were filed after the
one-year deadline. Changing this rule would give a lot more immigrants access to the asylum process,
and save asylum lawyers a lot of time wasted writing one-year deadline memos. N o doubt there are
numerous other boring, wonkish policy changes of this kind that could be slipped into larger bills with
comparatively little fanfare. A more ambitious but indispensible short-term goal, which would have
huge implications for the success of immigrants’ legal cases, is getting guaranteed access to lawyers for
immigrants in deportation proceedings. Because immigration is a “civil,” not a “criminal” offense, people in immigration
proceedings aren’t entitled to a lawyer. This is despite the fact that deportation is effectively a penalty of exile, which is at least as severe as
incarceration, and in some cases (for example, when the individual is being deported back to life-threatening violence) even more severe. There
are even restrictions on when federal legal aid funding can be used to aid non-citizens in immigration proceedings, which means that the sorts
of legal organizations that would typically try to provide pro bono assistance to immigrants are significantly hampered in their ability to do so.
My impression, based on my conversations with friends and family, is that the
fact that immigrants have no guaranteed
access to legal representation is not widely known, even among liberals. The Democratic position should clearly be
that if deportation is on the table as a possible outcome, all immigrants should be guaranteed a lawyer. In the lead-up to this larger goal of
universal representation, if
we can even manage to secure mandatory lawyers for certain classes of especially
vulnerable immigrants—such as minor children and people with diagnosed PTSD and other forms of
mental illness—that would already make a significant difference. There have been a number of bills
before Congress proposing exactly this, but they have rarely made it past the committee stage. The
Democratic Party needs to start publicizing this as a major problem in our justice system , highlighting
especially that the vast majority of people in deportation proceedings have not committed any crimes, beyond simply existing in our country
without a specific piece of paper. It is also vitally, urgently important that Democrats begin calling for legislation to end expedited removal, a
process under which immigrants who cannot affirmatively prove that they have been in the country continuously for the past two years may be
immediately deported from the U.S. with no opportunity to appeal their deportation in front of a judge. This egregious practice—another
unfortunate legacy of the 1996 immigration “reform” legislation signed by Bill Clinton—regularly results in the deportation of, among others,
asylum-seekers and U.S. citizens.
Working within the current political system is both inevitable and necessary – only
concrete strategic demands on the state like the aff can rally political momentum
towards the end goals of the alternative.
Rennix 17 [BRIANNA RENNIX, Senior Editor of Current Affairs, “CAN WE HAVE HUMANE IMMIGRATION
POLICY?,” Oct 30, 2017, CURRENT AFFAIRS, https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/can-we-have-
humane-immigration-policy]
But justbecause things are dismal now doesn’t absolve us of our responsibility to plan for the future .
How would we change our immigration system, if we ever had a competent Democratic leadership ?
We hear a lot of talk about “comprehensive immigration reform,” but not much about what the
substance of the reforms would be. Historically, “comprehensive immigration reform” as advertised by Democratic
lawmakers, has entailed beefed-up border security, status for Dreamers , and some squishily-defined
“amnesty” (which may or may not include a “path to citizenship”) for certain other undocumented people who are currently present in the
U.S. Up till this point, we’ve done a remarkable job with the border security piece, and made virtually no progress with the other two goals. It’s
very clear that we must decisively abandon this bargaining model. Increased militarization of the border and more enforcement in the interior
is in no sense a reasonable trade-off for “amnesty” for undocumented people who entered after an arbitrary cutoff date. That vague promise of
“amnesty,” moreover, is just kicking the can down the road. Every single day, hundreds of people are crossing our land borders without
documentation; every day, hundreds more are overstaying their visas. That’s the reality. So long as factors like violence, poverty, and family
separation exist, people will continue trying to come to the U.S., and everyone who arrives after the amnesty cut-off date will be in the same
situation as the undocumented population now. We need real reforms that won’t need to be redone again in ten years, that address the reality
of how immigration flows actually work. To do this, we need to think strategically about the problems in our current
system, how to humanely fix those problems, and how to rally voters and legislators to care about the
issue. This means getting left-leaning voters to understand why the “enforcement plus amnesty” model of reform, which sounds superficially
reasonable to the uninformed, is actually a very bad idea. In a forthcoming series on the Current Affairs website, I’ll be putting forth
ideas about some concrete immigration policy proposals that I think the left should consider rallying
behind. Here, I want to talk more generally about how we might change the public conversation around immigration. My belief is that any
immigration strategy that aims to be durable in the long term must make genuine attempts to win over at least some groups of presently
immigration-anxious voters. This means taking seriously—up to a point—the instinctive objections that some people have to less restrictive
immigration policies. There are, of course, a number of people who object to immigration for purely racist reasons, or because of totally
irrational and baseless fears. There are also people who object to immigration for motives that are reasonable, or at any rate sound reasonable.
Some of these people can be swayed, and we must attempt to sway them: not by making political concessions to their fears, but through good
old-fashioned persuasion, and appeals to human decency. GETTING ON THE SAME PAGE: what is the actual purpose of regulating immigration?
To many people, the idea that the government would regulate immigration is self-evident: of course you would need to make sure people
weren’t just wandering in and out of the country whenever they pleased! To immigrants and immigration advocates who see on a daily basis
what “regulation” looks like up close, feelings about this general mandate are much more troubled. But it’s certainly true that there’s little point
in romanticizing the long millennia of human history when borders were effectively nonexistent. We are a pretty bloody species, and our annals
are filled with tales of invasion, and migrations that morphed into invasions, and the subjugation of people with fewer resources, or more
scruples, by enemies with bigger weapons who gave fewer damns. At the same time, to the extent that these atrocities happened more
frequently in the past, it’s difficult to say that this was because there were fewer borders: there were a hell of a lot of other factors in play. In
reality, it seems far more plausible that the ability to closely police borders and control migratory flows are a result, not the cause, of a nation’s
surplus wealth and internal stability. The intensity of regulation and monitoring of immigration that we see now in the United States is certainly
unprecedented in our history. Nonetheless, borders
are not going away anytime in the near future, and so we
must deal with them. They are not all bad, necessarily. We can posit two reasonably humane purposes
for the existence of regulated borders. One is purely administrative: borders define the particular unit of geographical space that
a national or subnational government is responsible for, and so it’s important to have some idea of who is living in which territory at any given
time. The second purpose is defensive: a border is the logical place where you would repel an aggressor. From these uses, we might posit two
compelling reasons to restrict entry across a border. One would be if the state of internal affairs in your territory was so dire that additional
population might trigger some kind of societal collapse. Another would be if you had convincing reason to believe that the person seeking to
enter your territory intended to physically harm somebody within your borders. Obviously, these are speculative and subjective assessments,
and would always need to be argued over; even in the best of all possible immigration systems, civil liberties watchdog groups would be needed
to keep an eye on how any standards relating to these two purposes were being applied. But what’s
the point of talking about
the purposes of borders in such an idealized and abstract way, you might ask ? After all, there’s little
immediate prospect of our throwing out our existing immigration system in its entirety and creating a
new one from whole cloth. Nonetheless, it’s important to rhetorically highlight the legitimate goals of immigration regulation. The
reasons why many people believe that immigration regulation is obviously necessary are tied to fears, which, if they were plausible—and in
some contexts they are—would be legitimate reasons to restrict immigration. Armed invasions, terrorist massacres, and sudden economic
collapse are all be very bad outcomes, and if there were ready means of preventing them, any sensible polity would do so. This is why appeals
for a “strong border” sound inherently reasonable to many people. One task of anybody seeking to craft better
immigration policies, therefore, is to treat these public fears both seriously and realistically . This will
then give us more credibility when we attempt to demonstrate that the vast majority of our current
immigration policies are actually geared towards restricting the movements of peaceable people ,
forcibly removing people from their homes, and ripping people away from their families and shipping
them across the globe. When it comes to the thornier problem of how to deal with would-be immigrants who seem as if they might be
dangerous, or who, having entered the country, have committed some kind of violent crime , it’s much better to direct the debate
towards figuring what policies would actually be practically effective in averting future violence —and
publicly acknowledging the fact that violence in countries besides the U.S. is something we must care
about, from both a moral and a global security perspective —rather than getting sidetracked into metaphysical questions
about whether the person has the “right” to be in the U.S. or not.
Perm – State
Permutation solves – anti-borders politics must contingently engage the state – the
alternative’s pure anti-visible autonomy fails to make effective interim demands.
King 16 [Natasha, has been active in campaigning for refugee rights and against border controls for
over a decade. She has taught at the University of Nottingham, and worked as a caseworker with the
British Refugee Council, No Borders: The Politics of Immigration Control and Resistance, pp. 20-1]
As such, a no borders politics cannot only be practices of autonomy. At various points in the history of
autonomy – in the struggle for freedom of movement or for black power, or for gender liberation –
people have been forced to engage with the state in more visible forms of resistance. Often this has
involved a power play with the state; forms of protest that make demands on it for rights or recognition.
And this brings out a key dilemma for a no borders politics: how to navigate between autonomous
practices that potentially escape the state and visible practices that, in contesting the state, also validate
it? But is it the case that all acts of visibility reinforce the state and undermine autonomy? Often
struggles for autonomy have also included demands for visibility within them. Take the black power
movement. Again, for many, this struggle was about autonomy, and included a radical critique of the
state and capitalism. Activities that they 2_SW_805_Introduction-Ch 1.indd 20 6/28/2016 1:59:14 PM INTRODUCTION | 21
implemented, such as pre-school breakfast clubs for children of colour, were about creating other social
structures that aimed to make reliance on a state that was deliberately failing them obsolete (Katsiaficas and
Cleaver 2001). Yet this movement took to the streets often, at the same time demanding to be treated as
equals in US society. In the case of the no borders movement, people carry out all kinds of practices that
enable them to stay invisible and free from controls. Yet, as I show in Chapter 3, at times when life becomes
unsustainable because of the border regime, people have had to come together to make demands on
the state. Furthermore, what is important about these two examples, what is potentially
‘transformative’ about them, is that they directly involved – indeed were led by – those directly affected.
As Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ask, what does it mean when those denied rights
nonetheless act as if they already have them (Butler and Spivak 2007)? This is not a form of protest where the
oppressed are given a voice, but one where they take their voice and make it be heard. Transformation
is different from escape. I define it as a constitutive practice that brings something new into our social world
(Walters 2008). Transformative practices have the potential to change the logic of the state, or what is
understood as politics, or who is understood as a political actor (Johnson 2012). What all this means is that a
no borders politics is not only autonomous practices, nor only visible practices, but a constant
negotiation of these two things; things which are incompatible in theory but often present together in
practice. Often practices of escape bleed into practices of transformation.
Perm – Assemblages
Permutation solves – the alternative’s static characterization of borders oversimplifies
– instead, conceptualize borders as an assemblage that models how different actors
relate to borders in contingent ways.
Sohn 15 [Christophe Sohn, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research, “Navigating borders’
multiplicity: the critical potential of assemblage”, Area, 7 December 2015,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/area.12248/abstract]
In the two last decades, border studies have undergone a dramatic expansion of new perspectives, in large part because they were
recently opened to critical social theory and interdisciplinary research (see Johnson et al. 2011; Parker, Vaughan-Williams et al. 2009; Parker
and Vaughan-Williams 2012, Rumford 2006). This move has been driven by the spreading and multiplication of border
functions, forms and effects at different levels of social and political action and in various spatio-temporal
contexts (for an overview, see notably Newman and Paasi 1998, Newman 2006). The changing nature of borders has been interpreted as a
shift from territorial dividing lines and political institutions towards socio-cultural practices and discourses (Paasi 1999). Appearing more
dispersed, fluid and multifarious, borders, or more precisely bordering practices, have become increasingly
valuable in illustrating the reshaping of both geopolitical affairs and everyday life (Sidaway 2011). Yet, while the ontological
multidimensionality of borders is acknowledged at the conceptual level (see notably Brunet-Jailly 2006, Rumford 2012, Shields 2006), there
remains a tendency to essentialize the discursive constructions that accompany the empirical
apprehension of changing bordering practices and therefore reduce the significance of borders to a
single aspect that is deemed most relevant. In most cases, a border is simplified to a mechanism of division and
exclusion, or a site of encounter and connection, but rarely both simultaneously , as their intrinsic ambivalence or
equivocality would imply (Agnew 2008). The mechanism involved in the promotion of a reduced understanding of the border is akin to a
synecdoche, a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part. As an illustration, let’s consider Balibar’s (2002,
2004) famous claim that ‘borders are everywhere’ (BAE). Indeed, specific
bordering practices that used to be
predominantly performed at the state territorial borders now have diffused inwards and outwards. Faced
with this relative ‘unbundling’ of borders, the BAE approach tends to use the term ‘border’ as a synonym for a type of social control that can
happen virtually anywhere. This observation raises two remarks which reflect the difficulty to grasp the changing significance of borders
without oversimplifying what borders represent or obscuring their roles and significance. First, social control and state
surveillance entail a much wider range of practices then those performed through ‘bordering’. Thus, as
pointed by O’Dowd (2010:1038), the use of the term border as a synonym for certain social controls contributes
to “overextending the metaphor”. Second, borders encompass a wider range of meanings and roles than
merely control, filtering and surveillance practices. Ultimately, the BAE thesis highlights a two-way synecdoche, either in
using the whole (social control) for one of its parts (border) or using a part (social control) for the whole (border). Grounded in the need
to better understand the fluid and manifold nature of borders, this reflection represents a tentative
contribution to the development of new border imaginaries and methodologies, as noted recently by Parker and
Vaughan-Williams (2012). Elaborating on Balibar’s (2002) seminal reflexions on the polysemic nature of borders, the aim of this article is to
assess the critical potential of the concept of assemblage, crafted by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), as a way to better understand such an
ontological multidimensionality. Assemblagesare heterogeneous and open-ended groupings of material and semiotic
elements that do not form a coherent whole but that allow us to explain how different meanings derived
from various actors (and thus not only the state) may interact and endure in a contingent and provisional way. Beyond
the conceptual exegesis, which has been achieved with great clarity by others (see notably Anderson et al. 2012; Bonta and Protevi 2004;
Delanda 2006), the theoretical purchase of assemblage in border work is considered here. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
The first section underlines the multifarious character of borders and seeks to identify how best to understand their multiplicity. Section 2
introduces the concept of assemblage and highlights why such a perspective promises to better represent the multiplicity of borders. In the
third section, I consider the implications of the ontological condition of borders for critically rethinking them as multidimensional entities, with
a particular emphasis on the significance of a border’s identity beyond its diversity and transformation. The last section concludes. The
ontological multiplicity of borders As a political entity, a border, whatever its materiality, always marks a limit between two
territorial and social entities. In this way, it is both a separation between an inside and an outside and an interface between adjacent socio-
spatial systems or categories. On one side, the border engenders a production and a differentiated occupancy of space, to which it associates
dichotomous notions such as inside/outside, inclusion/exclusion, we/them or legitimate/illegitimate. On the other, the border is also an
invitation to passing, transgression and unfamiliarity. Such a line thus conveys a fundamental ambivalence and a source of anxiety and
quietude, fear and desire. According to their closed or open character, borders are part of the practices of differentiation, protection and
control, but also of openness, hybridization and inventiveness. This dual movement, both centripetal and centrifugal, gives borders their Janus-
face character (van Houtum 2012). However, as social constructions, the signification of borders cannot solely be
derived from their forms, roles or supposed functions. As borders “do not have the same meaning for
everyone” (Balibar 2002: 81), the diversity of actors, objects, practices and representations that contribute
to their reproduction must be accounted for. In their book to which this section makes an explicit reference, Andersen,
Klatt and Sandberg (2012) underline the necessity to think in terms of heteronomy and diversity in order to
understand the multiplicity of borders. The reference to heteronomy signifies that a border does not exist in and of
itself (i.e., in an autonomous way), but is instead created through the meaning that is attached to it. The freedom
of action within structures highlighted by the structuration theory implies that depending on the individual, group or organization
considered, a given boundary may be perceived and interpreted in different ways. For example, a wall
circumscribing a territory may signify a protection against external dangers for some, an obstacle or a
symbol of political oppression for others, a scene for artistic expression (e.g., a graffiti board) for others, or an economic
resource for those, like brokers, but also traffickers and smugglers, who know how to bypass it (see notably Jones 2012: 174-
181). Along the heteronomy of the border, Andersen et al. (2012) also stress the importance of the diversity of
actors that contribute to the ways borders are created, shifted, and transformed in everyday life and
therefore to the variety of perceptions, beliefs and claims held at different levels and registers of action.
Such a perspective echoes Rumford’s (2012) emphasis on considering a multiperspectival study of borders and the concept of ‘borderscapes’ as
a gaze “able to grasp the ‘variations’ of borders in space and time” (Brambilla 2015: 25). Fundamentally, the multiplicity of borders
stems from the diversity of practices attached to it and that give strength to a multitude of specific
versions. However, considering the multiplicity of a border from a set of juxtaposed meanings or a motley world of contingent practices does not seem sufficient. As underlined by
Husserl in his reflections on multiplicity as a philosophical concept, it is the relationship between the properties of an object that define a multiplicity (Ierna 2012). It is therefore not the
absence/presence of certain meanings that define the multiplicity of a border, but the ways in which they relate one to each other, the ways in which some gain influence or legitimacy while
others are instead contested or downplayed. Applying relational thinking to the borders’ multiplicity leads us to consider the concept of assemblage. Assemblage theory applied to borders The
use of assemblage is rooted in the work of the French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and in particular the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Despite its complexity and its sometimes perplexing vocabulary, assemblage thinking seems to have gained currency in the social sciences in recent years (see
notably Marcus and Saka 2006; Phillips 2006). In human geography, the concept has proliferated through its application to a wide range of substantive topics and various contexts giving rise to
the notion of ‘assemblage geographies’ (Robbins and Marks 2010) and more broadly what Bonta and Protevi (2004) call a ‘geophilosophy’. Indeed, different socio-spatial formations and
processes such as regions (Allen and Cochrane 2007), places (Dovey 2010), scales (Legg 2009), infrastructures (Bennett 2005), surveillance (Haggerty and Ericson 2000) urban policy-making
(McCann 2011), social movements (McFarlane 2009) or political parties (Page and Dittmer 2015) are apprehended through the concept of assemblage. Presented as part of a broader
‘relational turn’, Anderson and McFarlane (2011) have categorized the three ways according to which assemblage is applied, namely as a broad descriptor of the fit of heterogeneous elements,
an ethos of engagement with the world and experimentation, and a concept that relates to the theoretical elaborations of Deleuze and Guattari. The way I aim to conceptualize borders as
assemblages relates principally to the last concern mentioned above. Thus, my reflection follows the works of Best (2003) and Woodward and Jones III (2005) in their attempts to introduce the
I conceive of the assemblage theory as a

thoughts of Deleuze and Guattari to the field of border studies. Rather than a full-fledged theory ,
conceptual toolbox that is well suited to explore complex systems characterized by non-linearity and far-from-
equilibrium operating trajectories (Bonta and Protevi 2004, Dittmer 2013). Such a theoretical framing also resonates with a
relational view on borders, not in the sense of an opposition between territories and networks, but from a perspective that
goes beyond this dualism and recognizes the contingent co-functioning of various socio-spatial forms and processes in current
bordering dynamics (Paasi 2012). Four main features of assemblage thinking appear to be particularly useful to better
understand the multiplicity of borders, although this should not be seen as an exhaustive presentation. First, and contrary to
the notion of a system or organic whole that generally implies some kind of coherence, relative autonomy and regulation
capacity, the notion of assemblage is much looser and suggests the heterogeneous grouping of different
parts without actually forming a coherent whole (Allen 2011). As discussed previously, borders’ multiplicity
basically signifies that a given border means different things to different people. In its simplest form, the type of
assemblages that interest us here are thus made up of actors (i.e., individuals, organizations, networks) and meaningful expressions. For
Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 88), the two dimensions refer to the ‘machinic assemblage of bodies’ and the ‘collective assemblage of
enunciation’. The first performs a material role, while the second plays an expressive role (linguistic or symbolic). Of course, a
detailed
study of a singular border would require the addition of a variety of components which play a material role, including
physical infrastructure (such as border markers, walls or checkpoints), various resources (money, energy or information), policing procedures and tools (passport and visas) and surveillance
technologies. With the turn to ubiquitous border securitization and control, bordering practices have extended to include various networks of public, private and supranational organisations
including carriers and their transportation systems, as well as non-human actors with their machines, algorithms and databanks (see Amoore 2006; Walters 2006). To this end, we should also
consider the physical locales where bordering practices in their diversity are performed and materialise, and not only along the continuous lines of demarcation. As far as the components
playing an expressive role are concerned, besides notions, beliefs and narratives related to bordering classification and categories, legislation defining what constitutes legitimate mobility and
more broadly a border regime, rituals as expressions of solidarity and legitimacy (oaths, national holidays, official celebration) and symbols (national flags and anthems) referring to a given
territorial identity should also be considered (Paasi 2012). In short, depending on the context, all or part of these components (and sometimes more) may dwell together in a specific
assemblage. Indeed, some components serve both roles simultaneously. For example, a border post that plays a material role in controlling border flows may also perform an expressive role
as it refers to the orderliness of the bureaucratic procedures enforced (Green 2012). The same duality also applies to the physical entities (such as rivers or mountains) that have often been
chosen to materialize a border and make it look ‘natural’ or legitimate. More recently, with the deployment of the biometric border, it is finally the human bodies that have endorsed a
material and expressive role as they have become the carriers of multiple encoded boundaries (Amoore 2006). Second, as an assemblage is an uneven topography of trajectories that cross or
interact with each other according to different temporalities and spatialities (Bennett 2005), the way in which the disparate elements are held together despite their heterogeneity is of crucial
importance. Following Deleuze’s claim that “relations are external to their terms”, entities are affected by their related terms but are not fully determined by them. In other words, the
connections are not defined and made permanent by the roles, functions or properties of the parts they link together. What matters is not the affiliations but rather the alliances, co-
functioning, and symbioses (Deleuze and Parnet 1987). As DeLanda (2006: 11) puts it, these relations of exteriority are contingently obligatory but not logically necessary, as in other relational
thinking. The components of an assemblage are entities in their own right and their relations may become obligatory at a given time in history. This key feature implies that disparate elements
can be attached to an existing assemblage and therefore constitute a larger assemblage. Conversely, components can also be detached from an assemblage and become part of another one.
In this perspective, the above-mentioned flaws associated with the syndrome of border synecdoche are avoided: instead of defining a border by a set of functions or effects (e.g. control and
filtering), thus overextending or shrinking metaphors, we trace how various practices connect and disconnect, placing borders in the process of unfolding and becoming. For example, the
involvement of transport companies in border control appears as the historically contingent connection between preexisting territorial border assemblages and transportation actor-networks
who are themselves distinct assemblages (of flows of people or goods, infrastructure, capital, labour, management capacity, etc.). Their co-functioning is at the origin of new formations always
an assemblage approach privileges processes of transformation over form and

dynamic and open to change. Third,
structure. As stated by Anderson et al. (2012: 177), “an assemblage is both the provisional holding together of a group of entities across
differences and a continuous process of movement and transformation as relations and terms change.” The on-going transformation of an
assemblage relates to what Deleuze and Guattari call territorialisation and de-territorialisation. Territorialisation is the historical process by
which an assemblage stabilizes itself, reinforcing its own identity. In contrast, de-territorialisation relates to the intervention, or appearance, of
the components that destabilize (relative de-territorialisation) or dissipate (absolute de-territorialisation) an assemblage. While de-
territorialisation disturbs established relations and may challenge the very existence of an assemblage, it also conveys ‘lines of flight’,
representing new possibilities of re-territorialisation. Such a perspective allows the border to be envisioned as a singular whole in the making,
or a becoming. Althoughmany borders may seem stable and display enduring effects , thanks notably to the
processes of territorial institutionalisation, and their stylized repetitions of bordering practices, they
are never truly static or fixed.
The de-territorialisation of a border (driven by, for instance, transnational economic flows or cross-border regionalism) should
not be equated with the disappearance of territoriality. Instead, it always leads to new forms of territorialisation, inventive
forms of (re)bordering based on reassembled temporalities and spatialities (Popescu 2012, Woodward and Jones 2005). Similarly, processes of
rebordering (driven by, for instance, border securitization or ‘war on terror’ propaganda) are always accompanied by vectors or paths of de-
territorialisation (lines of flights), allowing the escape from a state apparatus. Human rights associations, critical scholars and
engaged artists, but also traffickers and smugglers, are good examples of counter forces (positive or
negative) that exceed and confound a border assemblage territorialized by a security-led state
apparatus. Ultimately, the two movements of gathering and dispersing are caught up in one another, and everything takes place between the two (Deleuze and Parnet 1987). Lastly,
the difference between actual entities, the emergence of new properties, and the duration of certain arrangements are not derived from external factors, essentialist conditions or divine
orders. Actually, these processes relate to the ontological distinction between the actual and the virtual (Bonta and Protevi 2004). On the one hand, the actual register displays stratified
systems. Their extensive properties are the aspects displayed by self-regulating systems when in a stable or steady state. On the other, the virtual register provides the structure for intensive
morphogenetic processes composing assemblages to occur. Defined by ‘universal singularities’, the structure of the virtual realm is called a ‘possibility space’ or a ‘diagram’ (DeLanda 2006). It
basically shows what an assemblage can do, and its degrees of freedom. The crucial distinction thus lies between the properties of a part, which are known and refer to actualized features, and
its capacities, which represent an open-ended set of potentials that cannot be fully known in advance. Whereas properties are the result of interactions between entities, capacities depend on
the potential interactions with other terms or relations (DeLanda 2006). As historical and circumstantial products, borders are ‘individual singularities’, displaying extensive properties such as
the delineation of a territorial jurisdiction, the crossing capacity of a port of entry or the enforcement of immigration rules. However, borders also entail unexercised capacities that are often
unpredictable. For instance, the opening of state borders inside the EU and their re-territorialisation around region-based cooperative practices has given rise to new properties that were not
initially conceived or planned, notably their role as economic and symbolic resources for cross-border regionalism. In this case, the capacity of the border to exploit differentials in production
costs or become an object of territorial recognition (not for states but for cross-border regions) has been actualized through the interactions between the pre-existing properties of
differentiation and affirmation and the emerging property of interface resulting from the consolidation of EU integration mechanisms (see Sohn 2014: 1704). In light of the above arguments
the use of assemblage appears to be a promising approach toward

and despite the general nature of this kind of conceptual reflection ,
a better grasp of shifting and manifold socio-spatial formations such as borders. In order to highlight the
empirical usefulness of this concept to the multiplicity of borders, the methodological implications of such an approach will be considered in
the last section. Methodological implications for the multiplicity of borders Considering
the multiple meanings of borders
using assemblage leads to question what defines a border’s identity beyond its diversity. The assemblage
perspective suggests that the identity of a border is not of an essential nature but must be framed in relative and provisional terms.
Questioning a border’s identity thus references its durability in relation to on-going transformations; in other words, “the ensemble of
properties that support an invariance” (Badiou 2008: 40). To tackle this within an empirical perspective, one would first need to define the key
dimensions of a border diagram as it informs the (in)stability of an assemblage over time. A diagram is an abstract space where each dimension
is an axis on which the assemblage can change (see Dittmer 2013). These dimensions reflect the capacities of each component. In
the
context of a border assemblage, the dimensions do not refer to universal laws or quantifiable parameters but
instead reference qualitative properties expressing potentials (i.e., what can a border mean?). As such,
they should be seen as open categories, contingently determined as forms of power, territorial
sovereignty, citizenship, nationalism, identity, securitization, etc. Within a diagram, each point represents a particular
possible state of the system. With help of empirical observations, it is possible to trace the trajectories leading towards specific points that
actualize more often. These points are called attractors and are surrounded by their basins of attractions. In complex systems, there can be
more than just one attractor. The assemblage has then multiple states of being (Jones 2009). Per instance, the diagram of the border between
the US and Mexico can be tentatively depicted as displaying two actualized attractors: state securitization and control on the one hand, geo-
economic integration on the other (Andreas and Biersteker 2003).
Impact
Impact Turn – Open Borders Bad
Open borders turn the K – causes more societal backlash and helps elect new Trumps
– prefer gradual reform.
Sixsmith 17 [Ben Sixsmith, 8-27-2017, "An Argument Against Open Borders and Liberal Hubris,"
Quillette, https://quillette.com/2017/08/27/argument-open-borders-liberal-hubris/]
Arguments for open borders are based not merely on economics but on ethics. Open borders advocates tend to be “moral
egalitarians”; that is, they believe in treating human beings symmetrically. The economist Bryan Caplan often asks his readers to imagine how
they would feel if trapped in impoverished and tyrannical states. Well, badly, of course. But how would Bryan Caplan feel as a member of the
underclass within his own society as Nathan Smith imagines? Presumably badly as well. So, what
does this tell us? Not much,
really. Empathy is a fallible guide in politics. Caplan is critical of the in-group bias that leads us to care more about their
countrymen than foreigners. It is the same in-group bias, in a stronger form, that leads us to buy presents for our family and friends rather than
donating to the poor. We have concentric circles of empathy, which means that the less direct our
connections to people the less we are invested in their wellbeing. So, we nest our loyalties; we put our
families first, and then our friends, and then our neighbours; then, perhaps, our countrymen and then
mankind at large. This by no means makes us indifferent to foreigners. We can care about their lives, and try to help them.
But the limits of our loyalties make nations convenient units of humanity , and explain why we put the
interests of our nations first. This is not just true of Europeans and Americans . Arguably, mass migration
helped give us Brexit and Trump, and protests against mass migration policies have erupted across the
world, from Singapore to South Africa. This is not to give blanket cover for anti-immigration sentiment—which can often be
irrational, hysterical and even cruel—but to suggest that humans feel a natural oikophilia that is at odds with the rapid
change produced by mass migration. Immigration is important. As an immigrant myself who is delighted and grateful to have
been accepted by my hosts, I very much appreciate this. It needs rational and humane consideration. But the
respectable extremism of open borders advocates, who, on the basis of dubious projections, would
transform our societies, exposing them to radical division and strife, should concern us; less because their
wishes are likely to be granted than because the seriousness with which they are taken shows that even more moderate liberals are radical on
this matter. We do not have open borders but we are experiencing unprecedented demographic change. What
progressives should
remember is that civilisation is not a science laboratory . The consequences of failed experiments
endure. That is the main virtue of gradual change; we can test new waters and not leap into their
depths.
A rapid move towards open borders creates more violence – human tribalism means
mass migration causes authoritarian power and ethnocentric lashout.
Gallatin 18 [George Gallatin, 2-3-2018, "Why “Open Borders” is a Dangerous Idea," Quillette,
http://quillette.com/2018/02/03/open-borders-dangerous-idea/]
It is my fear that theprimary near-term effect will be surging tribalism. Unlimited mass migration could
cripple liberal Western powers with perpetual ethnic tension, and halt their ability to effectively act on
the world stage. This could cede the century to more unified authoritarian powers such as Russia and
China who have drastically different value systems and views of human dignity. The open borders
philosophy is wrong, because, like the failed ideologies of the past century, it doesn’t account for unpleasant facts about
human nature and society. The truth Communism missed is that human beings prefer self-interest to
compelled altruism. The truth open borders advocates miss is that human societies are tribal. The
fundamental human social skill is the formation of groups that act with shared intentionality. The skill to
coordinate intentions is what enabled our ancestors to form sophisticated social coalitions that outcompeted lower primates. Shared
intentionality is a double-edged sword, though. The ability to form groups around intentions also means the ability to form
breakaway sub-groups around different intentions. Thus, one of our primary evolutionary breakthroughs carried within
it the potential for endless factionalism. The reason why we are still tribal today is because tribalism appears to have
been evolutionarily adaptive—at least for our ancestors. Researchers at McGill University have described it thusly:
“ethnocentrism eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting
humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries” . Despite prevailing moral fashions, we are the products of
this evolutionary competition. This observation has no moral polarity, it is a mere reality. And while it is
undoubtedly noble to argue that we should try to overcome tribalism, it is a very different matter to
argue that it is achievable, or that in doing so we won’t be outcompeted by less noble, more unified
groups. The challenge of heterogeneity is that it pre-loads divisions into society. Sometimes those differences can be
overcome through inter-communal dialogue and good government. But, all too often when intentions differ, and tribes
inevitably rise, differences in religion, language, and custom are the contours around which factions
organize. This is not to say that ethno-racial or cultural difference is the sole cause of factionalism. Human beings don’t, in fact, need much
encouragement to split into camps, hoist flags, and start wiping each other out. Our history is replete with examples of relatively homogenous
societies that unraveled and split. After all, there were no obvious differences in language or ethnicity between the Roundheads and Cavaliers,
or the Kuomintang and the CPC, or the Federalists and Unitarians. Diversity should not be met with fatalism, but should be seen as one of many
significant risk factors that need to be diligently managed. Since
human beings are so quick to form factions, it should be
the goal of government policy to ameliorate division and ward off for as long as possible the demon of
sectarianism. Our current public policies and cultural products seem aimed at doing the exact opposite. I think this is because the
designers of these policies hold at least two mistaken assumptions about diversity and migration. Luxury Diversity Many elite Westerners have
a passionate belief in diversity because they have lived it. Not always in their neighborhoods, but quite often at university. What they fail to
realize is that a top-flight university offers a very narrow type of diversity. For example, in my university class we had over 50 nationalities. It
was a wonderful experience, and I formed abiding friendships with people from all over the world. What I later realized, is that the social
cohesion of my class was greatly assisted by the fact that the admissions office was a border. They had heavily screened the incoming class for
intelligence, socialization, and personality characteristics. The relevant distinction wasn’t between the Tamil Brahmins and Tatar Russians, but
between students and non-students. We were all members of a university created community, enjoying carefully curated luxury diversity. None
of this is surprising, elites have always gotten along. What
the connoisseurs of luxury diversity miss, is that not
everyone is a well-socialized member of the culturally converging global bourgeoisie. People from across
the world differ significantly in behavior and custom. Some of these behaviors and customs are awesome, others, such as
honour killings, are not, (just as the West has traditions that are awesome, and others such as mass shootings, which are horrific). When
migration occurs, we have to be aware that these behaviors and customs come along and can cause considerable strain in the receiving nation.
Time and Integration There is also a faulty assumption that diverse societies become more tolerant and inclusive over time. The
Indian
sub-continent is one of the most diverse places on the planet. This heterogeneity is long-standing and a result of waves
of mass migration onto the sub-continent over tens of thousands of years. Yet after all this civilizational experience with diversity, India still has
xenophobia, with more than 40% of respondents to the World Values Survey stating that they would “not like to live next door to a person of
another race”. Diversity on the sub-continent has not been a strength, but an immense civilizational
challenge. Why our public policies seem intent on replicating these historical patterns in Europe and North America is always left
unexplained. These historical examples are unexplored because some in the West adhere to a frenzied
millenarianism about migration and diversity. They hold that mass migration is not a public policy challenge
to be soberly regulated, but a path to moral redemption and economic utopia. When reality intrudes on
these delusions the advocates mumble while citizens navigate the consequences. History has
demonstrated innumerable times that at-scale diversity doesn’t create utopia but tension. This tension
can sometimes be negotiated, but often leads to societal fragmentation, secession, or the
establishment of sprawling despotisms like the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Mughal empires. This is because
civilizations are staggeringly complex economic, social and political coordination systems that slowly
develop over hundreds of years. When these coordination systems are stressed by rapid change, they
sometimes shudder and break. Of the top ten most diverse countries in the world, every single one has suffered major, lethal
political violence since 2001. Diversity is not some holy sacrament, it is a deadly serious socio-political challenge that needs to be prudently
managed. It
is a mistake to believe that unregulated mass migration will bring about redemption for
guilty Westerners. For whatever economic benefits it may bring, it will also bring tribalism, disunity, and
violence. And for those of you who think this isn’t a major issue or that the worst has passed, please note we are just in the opening act of
this drama.
Impact Turn -- Biopower
Biopower is good
Lemke 05 Thomas Lemke (born 24 September 1963 in Bad Lauterberg) is a German sociologist and
social theorist. He is best known for his work on Governmentality, Biopolitics and his readings of Michel
Foucault. He is currently a Professor of Sociology with specialization in Biotechnologies, Nature and
Society at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) attempt to give biopolitics a positive meaning. By synthesizing
ideas from Italian neo-operaism, with poststructural and Marxist theories, as well as with Deleuzian
vitalism, they claim that the borderline between economics and politics, reproduction and production is
dissolving. Biopolitics signals a new era of capitalist production where life is no longer limited to the
domain of reproduction or subordinated to the working process: “The subjectivity of living labor reveals,
simply and directly in the struggle over the senses of language and technology, that when one speaks of
a collective means of the constitution of a new world, one is speaking of the connection between the
power of life and its political organisation. The political, the social, the economic, and the vital here all
dwell together” (Hardt/Negri 2000: 405-6; see also 22-41). In Hardt and Negri’s account the constitution
of political relations now encompasses the whole life of the individual, which prepares the ground for a
new revolutionary subject: the multitude.2
Biopower is inevitable and the aff’s use of it is good --- their critique allows the private
sector to assert a more destructive form of control --- we need government control
over public goods to push back at neoliberal interests.
Stan LUGER AND Brian WADDELL 17. *Professor and Chair of political science, University of
Northern Colorado. **Associate Professor of political science, University of Connecticut. What American
Government Does. John Hopkins University Press. 362-71.
THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT has become very controversial in the United States. Many Americans
misunderstand what government does generally and underappreciate the specific role that
government plays in guaranteeing America's success as a nation. The US government has improved the lives of
Americans in numerous ways. It provides income, food, education, housing, and health care supports
for many, not just those in poverty. It ensures cleaner air, water, and food. It supplies the vast infrastructure
(roads, bridges, sewage systems, etc .) on which economic growth depends. The government has stabilized the
economic system through these activities and others, including the government's bailout of the largest banks and other institutions
responsible for the 2008 economic meltdown. Without government action, that economic crisis would have led
the world economy into a total collapse.
The government also engages in activities that trouble many Americans, including domestic surveillance and repression and the monitoring and
control of behavior considered to be immoral. The government's national security policies have also spun out of democratic control on many
occasions, leading the nation into unwanted and costly wars and interventions. What
the government does, then, is a
complex mix of activities that includes many things that Americans support wholeheartedly, and
others that elicit concern and criticism. This has been one of our main points in this book. It is distracting and
confusing to paint with a broad brush when speaking of "the government."
The Anti-Government Movement
Still, many
conservative commentators and politicians promote simplistic, anti-government attitudes,
seeking to pit American citizens against their government-over which they still have many types of
democratic checks- while remaining silent about growing private, corporate power. There has been a
long-standing anti-government strain to American culture that has been easily manipulated into
blaming government for many of the ills affecting the nation today. Americans actually embrace
collectivist responses to the many problems they have faced over the course of the twentieth
century and be"' [END PAGE 362] yond, accepting the often generous government contributions to their own success, while at the same
time believing in a libertarian individualism that assumes people are solely responsible for their fates, good or bad. Americans are thus
vulnerable to simplistic arguments about their government, and easily distracted from the larger
issues of power this book has raised.
among the government's many

Americans should be vigilant about possible abuses in the exercise of power. Differentiating
functions allows a clearer focus for such concerns, since not all government powers potentially directly
threaten citizens. In addition, we have noted that concerns about the exercise of power should include both government and the
business system, that is, both public and private power. The exercise of power is necessary and unavoidable in
complex societies. Power is exercised in the public sector by government officials, and in the private sector by
corporate executives. It is simply not true that only government exercises power . Nor is it true that the
"free" market constitutes an arena free of power.
One difference between the two forms of power is that public power is more visible, acknowledged, and easily
criticized, as we can see in the strong criticisms of governmental power prevalent today. This difference is understandable, to an extent,
since government can more directly interfere with one's freedom. Still, for many, a person's life opportunities, and the greater part of an
individual's working life, are controlled by business enterprises that are not directly accountable to the larger public. The
irony in this
hyperawareness of governmental power and lesser concern for private corporate power is that a
key attribute of public power is its potential responsiveness and accountability to democratic
majorities.
The exercise of public, governmental power is more scrutinized, and it is acceptable and expected that
we criticize government, therefore making it more accountable. Governmental power is also just as necessary to our
nation's success as is the economic system. It is not simply some contingent institutional force that can be done away with, in a spasm of anti-
government rage. Both the government and the economic system are inexorably connected in such a way that each is dependent on the other,
in necessary and unavoidable ways, for the other's achievements. There is no free market system without the use of government power. The
so-called free market is simply not a freestanding entity, as many would have it.
This book, by detailing what the government actually does, has been geared to laying the groundwork for a healthier debate about the role of
government in our lives. Everyone likes some parts of what government does while disliking other parts .
But many politicians today have been selling a fantasy that government represents the main
problem that stands in the way of greater happiness for most Americans, and that therefore we must reduce the role of [END PAGE 363]
government to some bare minimum, or even eradicate it altogether. As Grover Norquist says: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply
want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." 1 Such a flippant statement may simply seem
to be hyperbole, but we must remember the amount of influence Norquist has in the Republican Party today. Jeb Bush was the only 2016
Republican presidential candidate not to have signed Norquist's Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which obligates the signer to resist and vote
against any and all tax increases.
Nearly 1,400 elected officials have signed the pledge, including essentially the entire Republican congressional delegation.2 Theantitax
message is one of the most powerful trends in our current politics. It blames government for all our
troubles and, as such, seeks to "starve the beast" so government cannot fulfill its functions capably any longer. Tax cuts are most often
directed at the very wealthy, who thereby gain both more wealth and more political clout. First, this allows them to invest their savings in the
rising amount of government debt (needed to replace the revenues lost to tax cuts), transforming these individuals' tax liabilities (income on
which they otherwise would have to pay taxes) into an investment in government bonds, securities, and the like that pay them dividends. As
Wolfgang Streeck discerns, "Not only is state poverty the investors' wealth; it offers them a golden outlet to invest their wealth profitably."
Second, as major funders of the fiscal instruments that underwrite the government's debt, they become an important constituency of the
modern state. In the eyes of government officials, the wealthy minority competes with and even shoulders aside popular majorities. As the
government's debt accumulates, the creditors' claims on government officials often trump those of common citizens, magnifying what scholars
see as the growing tensions between capitalism and democracy. As Streeck concludes: "The state as debt state serves to perpetuate [and
deepen] patterns of social stratification and the social inequality built into them. At the same time, it subjects itself and its activity to the control
of creditors in the shape of 'markets.' " 3
Reductions in taxes deepen the amount of government debt and increase the leverage of the wealthy over any nation's politics. Such tax cuts
also straightjacket government, reducing its ability to deliver the expected goods to popular majorities. Moreover, hikes
in taxes and fees
paid by the working classes are used to make up for tax reductions on the wealthy . Therefore, the more
many Americans pay, the less they seem to get in return, fueling their increasing distrust and
disgruntlement about the role of government in their lives.
As a result of this process, anti-government voices have become the loudest and most prevalent ones in our politics, so much so that it has
become difficult for many Americans to have a rational and coherent understanding of how necessary and significant the government is to our
nation's success. This book [END PAGE 364] has been about providing some of the tools, understanding, and historical knowledge for interested
citizens to gain a clearer sense of what their government actually does, in order to combat the simplistic thinking that has come to dominate
political debates. The need for such knowledge is manifest, especially at this point in our nation's history, when recent polls have demonstrated
that the public's trust in government is at historic lows.
These polls, however, show something very different from a knee-jerk dislike of government. When asked about specifics, large
majorities of Americans have positive views about much of what the government does, including
ensuring that foods and medicines are safe, dealing with natural disasters, setting rules for
workplace safety, preventing terrorist attacks, protecting the environment, ensuring access to
health care and education, maintaining infrastructure, and strengthening the economy . Of the thirteen
major government functions listed in the polls, Americans gave high marks to ten of them. And even the low marks involved Americans
believing that more should be done with regard to ensuring a basic income for the elderly and helping people get out of poverty. Concerns
about managing the immigration system received the lowest marks.4
Any government is multifaceted, engaging in many diverse and even contradictory functions . As a
result, it is difficult to generalize when we speak of what the government does . It does many things, and, in this
book, we have attempted to come to grips with the most significant functions of the US government. It is essentially meaningless
to pronounce blanket statements about "the government," or "what the government does." We can
only know our own government, or any government, through an understanding of its specific functions.
The polls cited above demonstrate that Americans appreciate many of government's distinct functions, approving much of what the US
government does, while retaining a generalized distrust of "the government" writ large. 5
Impact D – Agamben Misreading
Agamben fails to fully understand Biopower
Lemke 05 Thomas Lemke (born 24 September 1963 in Bad Lauterberg) is a German sociologist and
social theorist. He is best known for his work on Governmentality, Biopolitics and his readings of Michel
Foucault. He is currently a Professor of Sociology with specialization in Biotechnologies, Nature and
Society at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
For Agamben the decision about life and death “no longer appears today as a stable border dividing two
clearly distinct zones” (1998: 122). This sentence allows for two completely different readings. If the
accent is placed on the fi rst part of the phrase that stresses the dissolution of a clear demarcation line,
the border is conceived as a fl exible zone or a mobile line. Or – this is the second interpretation – if the
accent is put on the last part of the phrase, the phrase seems to indicate that there is no longer a
borderline at all, that both domains have become indistinguishable. This is probably the direction that
Agamben takes when he speaks of a “zone of indistinction”, the tendency towards identity of life and
politics (1998: 122 resp. 148). But this leads into a blind alley. Agamben does not comprehend “camp” as
an internally differentiated continuum, but only as a “line” (1998: 122) that separates more or less
clearly between bare life and political existence. As a consequence, he cannot analyse how inside “bare
life” hierarchisations and evaluations become possible, how life can be classifi ed and qualifi ed as higher
or lower, as descending or ascending. Agamben cannot account for these processes since his attention is
fi xed on the establishment of a border – a border that he does not comprehend as a staggered zone but
as a line without extension that reduces the question to an either-or. In other words: Agamben is less
interested in life than in its “bareness”, whereby his account does not focus on the normalisation of life,
but on death as the materialisation of a borderline. For Agamben biopolitics is essentially
“thanatopolitics” (1998: 122; Fitzpatrick 2001: 263-265; Werber 2002: 419). In fact the “ca

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CNDI 2018 – Biopolitical Borders K

borders are used as a biopolitical tactic which contributes to disposability of

Though not a specific topic of their work, the

The concept of borders divides humanity and infringes on global cooperation

Providing asylum absent a structural reconfiguration of citizenship and borders is but a

Asylum programs place refugees in a subhuman context of homo sacer, depriving

Sovereignty constructs subjects to be excluded and included

MacDonald 11 (Keith D., Graduate student in Criminology at the University of Ottawa;

Sexual regulation at the border leads to sexual regulation within

Welfare reform, which substantially ended much

Society’s turn away from ‘holding the line’

Mapping is becoming decentralized due to technology. Now is the time to

The alternative is a system of Nomadic Solidarity

Open borders drastically decreases inequality and increases international econ

For all its radicalism, open borders’ main effects are

Immigration key to solving global poverty and inequality

Immigrants lower crime rates

Open borders increase global production

Open borders facilitate economic efficiency

Open borders moral- any objection is xenophobic

Ontology= study of being

¶ Fourthly, and finally, policing

postmodern thinking remains ‘abstract’ and ‘idealized’ by assuming that correcting

Here the context of MSF’s

The practical application of this approach varies according to the situation. ¶ In

scholars and activists should be able

I conceive of the assemblage theory as a

an assemblage approach privileges processes of transformation over form and

the use of assemblage appears to be a promising approach toward

among the government's many

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