The University of ManchesterNatalie Dietrich JonesPhD Development Policy and ManagementThe ma(r)king of complex border geographies and their negotiation by undocumented migrants: The case of Barbados2013ABSTRACTUsing Barbados as a case study, this thesis examines the relationship between agency, undocumentedness and borders. The relationship between these three concepts has been debated in a well-established European and North American literature; however, there is no similar body of work for the Caribbean, a space which since its genesis has been shaped by b/ordering practices. Through a stratified view of the border, it explored the discursive and non-discursive (material) factors which constrained migrants’ existence, and migrants’ agentic response to these constraints. The timing of fieldwork meant that the location’s geography, as well as migrants’ narratives, was marked by a recent amnesty exercise. In addition to ‘talk’ the research also relied on text, in the form of government and other legal documents relating to the management of migration. The research is therefore based on a combination of narrative and critical discourse analysis, espousing the methodological eclecticism that is encouraged in critical realist methodology. The study makes an important contribution to the field of border studies, based on its exploration of the relationship between a complex border ontology and migrant agency. The principal finding is that borders create complex geographies, which operate at varying spatial scales. The thesis thus provides an enhanced theorization of border(s), in particular as it relates to conceptualizations of space, suspect status, governmentality, and agency.

This dissertation examines the paradoxes involved in offering medical aid to undocumented migrants in Berlin, Germany. Coinciding with the end of guestworker programs in the 1970s, undocumented migrants have increasingly filled gaps in the German labor market. Political pressures following reunification, along with border militarization in the wake of European Union expansion, have resulted in restrictions on legal entry. However, neoliberal reforms in the labor market and a rapidly aging population have resulted in high demand for undocumented workers in particular sectors of the economy. At the same time, soaring unemployment and nationalist sentiments have made immigration unpopular, with political parties negatively predisposed to assuring the rights of migrant workers. One such right is access to health care services in a nation with a traditionally universal system of coverage. Undocumented migrants are officially denied "medical citizenship" and must rely upon humanitarian aid provided by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).This study examines the experiences of multiple stakeholders, particularly physicians and NGOs that provide medical aid. It draws upon the anthropology of health policy, a critical approach within medical anthropology. Fieldwork in Berlin during 2004-2006 included participant observation at an outpatient clinic, which yielded case studies of 204 undocumented patients, along with sixty-one interviews. Results indicate that in Germany, certain minimal rights are technically available to migrants; however, they are not assured access to these rights. This underscores the importance of utilizing legal status as a unifying measure of analysis. I argue that the state absolves itself of responsibility by handing off the provision of services to the NGO sector. While laws criminalize the provision of medical aid, they are only selectively enforced, and organizations are recognized for their volunteer work through awards and commendations. These paradoxes allow the state to square the contradiction of condemning yet relying upon undocumented migration. This dissertation presents an ethnographic portrait of the single largest source of medical aid for undocumented migrants in Germany, providing an analysis of patient characteristics and illnesses. Prenatal care highlights the interplay between race, reproduction, and citizenship, and offers a particularly poignant window into the challenges of nation-building in contemporary Germany.

Nearly two decades have passed since the strategic border security paradigm known as “prevention through deterrence” (PTD) took root in the landscape of Southern Arizona. The aim of PTD was to deter illicit migration by strategically amassing border security forces to funnel migrants into increasingly remote and treacherous territory where they would face increased risk. Indeed, risk was to be the prime factor of deterrence. Thousands of undocumented migrants died attempting to overcome those risks in an outcome known as the “funnel effect,” wherein migration patterns shifted to overcome bypass and overcome border security. When speaking about PTD taking root in southern Arizona, I mean that this geography is the locus of the funnel effect and has been since 2001. Southern Arizona represents the longest stretch of border walling in the United States and the highest concentrations of border security personnel and undocumented migration activity since the early 2000s. In this sense, this region is a useful point of focus for evaluating the outcomes and efficacy of the border security apparatus. Here, the PTD strategy has been physically tethered to the landscape as border security infrastructure has literally been dug into the ground. With the hundreds of border security infrastructure and wall projects have also come the hundreds of clandestine trails routed around them used by undocumented migrants, and hundreds of tons of left behind migrant survival materials like backpacks, water bottles, blankets, and rosaries. Over the years while border security has expanded, the evidence associated with migration has shifted in turn reflecting a dialectical engagement between the formal border security apparatus and the informal politics of migrants. While many scholars have studied either border security or the risks faced by migrants, few have looked at their mutual influence over time. This dissertation incorporated a multidisciplinary methodological approach, including ethnography, archival research, archaeology, and GIS technology. These methods allowed me to answer the following questions: What are the social and material effects of border enforcement policy on the ground? How have these changed over the 15 years of concentrated border enforcement in this area, both geographically and in terms of their volume and constitution? What are the stories, the experiences, and the tangible points on the landscape that mark these processes? I viewed the material signature of migration as a form of ruins both literally and metaphorically as they mark the scars of abandonment, loss, and failure. Following Walter Benjamin, I conceived of such ruins as an indictment of the political conditions that led to their formation. In the spirit of Benjamin, I also prioritized this form of marginalized material evidence. Questions of memory and materiality were also entwined with realities of absence and a search for fragmentary traces. I encountered this reality constantly in fieldwork, as when a place known to have been a major clandestine travel corridor for migration was often found completely cleared of all evidence of use. I also routinely walked past coordinates where migrant bodies were recovered, and where no evidence of that tragedy was left. A dialectical approach also highlighted how much more accessible and visible the actions related to the implementation of the United States border security were in relation to those of migrants. Further, the material evidence associated with migration was actively being removed, often as an environmental hazard. Thus, this project also came to encompass questions about the process of historical creation and heritage. Among those who live and work in the borderlands, this contemporary situation was already largely conceptualized in terms of its heritage potential. Will we remember this episode in history as we remember the Berlin Wall, or Japanese internment camps in the United States, as many of the border residents who participated in my project speculated? Certain public land managers along the border anticipated that their heritage future may well be as lands associated with the migration experience, circa the turn of the 21st century. It is acknowledged that this is a dark chapter of history. But, how does one curate history in the making? All of this inextricably links to issues of power. This is the power to decide what is culturally valuable or relevant, as well as the power to define historical narratives as they are made. Border security itself is about maintaining U.S. sovereignty, while defining the value of migrant lives and deaths as the border is secured. This is also a set of values that prioritizes border security over reform to the system that could facilitate labor migration. There is also a hierarchy to what survives between the monumental architecture of border security and the ephemeral tools and structures of clandestine migration. The latter are hidden and actively decaying while the former will stand the test of time. This dissertation analyzes the informal and the fragmentary side by side with the formal and monumental. What do decaying survival materials dropped by undocumented migrants, decaying migrant bodies in the wilderness, and hundreds of miles of clandestine smuggler trails in one of the most highly secured borderlands in one of the most powerful countries in the world say about power here? On a practical level, the accumulated evidence are read as an indictment of border security, revealing that the building of walls and surveillance structures have not stopped migration, though they have led to increasingly imperiled migrant journeys.

This dissertation was carried out to try to understand the role of social capital in the migration of Zimbabwean migrants to Botswana. It describes elements and types of social capital Zimbabwean undocumented migrants used to come to Botswana. Questionnaires and in-depth interviews were used to obtain data from respondents. Though the influence of macro factors initially pushed migrants to migrate, there was evidence of the existence of social networks. Findings showed the use of social networks by Zimbabwean undocumented migrants. Though kinship networks were dominant in the initial migration stages there was a wane in the destination as migrants reverted to friendship networks for flexibility. Linking existed at both the place of origin and destination. Social control, channelling and negative social capital were discovered among migrants. Migrants developed mechanisms to counter the Botswana’s enforcement policy. / Sociology

This thesis provides an ethnography and critical phenomenology of undocumentedness in the Swedish context. By attending to the forces and processes that circumscribe the life-worlds of undocumented persons, as well as the phenomenology and essential experiences of their condition, a complex and multi-layered illustration of what undocumentedness is and means is successively presented. Employing a dual conceptualization of the state, as a juridico-political construct as well as a practiced and embodied set of institutions, the undocumented position emerges as a legal category defined only through omission, produced and reproduced through administrative routine and practice. The health care sector provides empirical examples of state-undocumented interaction where the physical and corporeal presence of the officially absent becomes irrefutable. This research suggests that the Swedish welfare state – universalistic, comprehensive and with digitized administrative routines – becomes a particularly austere environment in which to be undocumented. Drawing on interviews with regional and local health care administrators, NGO-clinics’ representatives and health professionals, as well as extensive participatory observation and interviews with undocumented persons, I argue that the undocumented condition is characterized by simultaneous absence and presence, and a correspondingly paradoxical spatiality. I suggest that the official absence and deportability of undocumented persons deprives them of the capacity to define space and, in an Arendtian sense, appear as themselves to others. There are, however, some opportunities for embodied political protest and dissensus. The paradoxical qualities of the absent-present condition manipulate the undocumented mode of being-in-the-world and I argue that alienation and disorientation are essential experiences of the undocumented situation.

This thesis provides an ethnography and critical phenomenology of undocumentedness in the Swedish context. By attending to the forces and processes that circumscribe the life-worlds of undocumented persons, as well as the phenomenology and essential experiences of their condition, a complex and multi-layered illustration of what undocumentedness is and means is successively presented. Employing a dual conceptualization of the state, as a juridico-political construct as well as a practiced and embodied set of institutions, the undocumented position emerges as a legal category defined only through omission, produced and reproduced through administrative routine and practice. The health care sector provides empirical examples of state-undocumented interaction where the physical and corporeal presence of the officially absent becomes irrefutable. This research suggests that the Swedish welfare state – universalistic, comprehensive and with digitized administrative routines – becomes a particularly austere environment in which to be undocumented. Drawing on interviews with regional and local health care administrators, NGO-clinics’ representatives and health professionals, as well as extensive participatory observation and interviews with undocumented persons, I argue that the undocumented condition is characterized by simultaneous absence and presence, and a correspondingly paradoxical spatiality. I suggest that the official absence and deportability of undocumented persons deprives them of the capacity to define space and, in an Arendtian sense, appear as themselves to others. There are, however, some opportunities for embodied political protest and dissensus. The paradoxical qualities of the absent-present condition manipulate the undocumented mode of being-in-the-world and I argue that alienation and disorientation are essential experiences of the undocumented situation.

This dissertation was carried out to try to understand the role of social capital in the migration of Zimbabwean migrants to Botswana. It describes elements and types of social capital Zimbabwean undocumented migrants used to come to Botswana. Questionnaires and in-depth interviews were used to obtain data from respondents. Though the influence of macro factors initially pushed migrants to migrate, there was evidence of the existence of social networks. Findings showed the use of social networks by Zimbabwean undocumented migrants. Though kinship networks were dominant in the initial migration stages there was a wane in the destination as migrants reverted to friendship networks for flexibility. Linking existed at both the place of origin and destination. Social control, channelling and negative social capital were discovered among migrants. Migrants developed mechanisms to counter the Botswana’s enforcement policy. / Sociology

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Undocumented immigration from Latin America is a heated and divisive topic in United States' politics. Politicians in Washington, D.C. are debating new legislation which would provide a pathway to citizenship for some 11 million undocumented immigrants. While several federal immigration reform bills were debated in the early 2000s, each one failed in either the House of Representatives or in the Senate. The Indianapolis Congregation Action Network (IndyCAN), a grassroots activist group in Indianapolis, is organizing the Latino community through faith and shared political goals. Undocumented Latino immigrants are utilizing IndyCAN as a method to influence progressive policy change. However, anti-immigrant groups challenge these efforts by attempting to define who can be considered an "American" and are attempting to block legislation due to their negative perceptions of Latinos. Debates about citizenship have racial discourses and reveal the embeddedness of race and ethnicity. Despite this, many Latino immigrants are forging their own identities in the United States and are engaging in a political system that refuses to grant them a legal status. Through an enactment of activism called la fe en acción [faith in action], these immigrants ground their political organizing with IndyCAN and attempt to appeal to the religious faith of politicians. I explore issues of race, political engagement, and religion in the lives of Indianapolis’ Latino community. In this case study, I demonstrate that IndyCAN is acting as a vehicle through which undocumented Latino immigrants are engaging in the political process. This political involvement occurs through religious strategies that seem apolitical yet are implicitly an enactment of activism. Ultimately, I reveal how undocumented Latino immigrants in Indianapolis are impacting the political process regardless of their legal status.