Backgrounder: US-Mexico border
The first US-Mexico border fence was built to keep out ticks – but since then American border angst has gone from strength to strength. Two experts consider the historical foundations of Donald Trump’s divisive policy
The first federally funded border fence was built by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1911 to stop ticks travelling across the border on the bodies of cattle. The Texas fever tick had spread a disease among cattle in the northern ranges of the US. After a successful eradication campaign, officials worried the tick might reappear. As a safety measure, the USDA built 45 miles of barbed wire fence in segments along the southern California border.
The structures on the US-Mexican border have changed over time, from barbed wire to the big, pillared fences we see in the news today. Fences have grown taller and gone deeper into the earth. For more than a century, growing fences have transformed what was once an open range into a highly contested and racialised landscape of power, difference, and exclusion.
However, they have never fully worked. The first fences built for people, for example, were almost immediately dismantled by border-crossers. Even more recent fences have been damaged repeatedly. People have cut through, climbed over and tunnelled under. Fences have also diverted migrants through harsh landscapes, resulting in increasing numbers of migrant deaths along the US-Mexico border – a much bigger problem, I would argue, than unauthorised migration.
Border fences built to stop people date back to the 1940s, but outright violent efforts to police human migration date back to the 1970s, when the US hired a contractor to design an impenetrable razor-sharp fence for urban areas along the border. Massive fence construction took off in the early 90s, when President Bill Clinton launched Operation Gatekeeper in Southern California and Operation Hold the Line in south-west Texas. Those operations increased patrols and led to the construction of metal walls stretching for several miles along parts of the US-Mexico border.
After 9/11, George W Bush, who had been thinking of starting a guest-worker programme with Mexico, drastically changed course and eventually signed the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which called for 700 miles of fencing. Apart from the promises made by Donald Trump to build a wall, that was the last big effort to build up the border. Something like 654 miles of fences already exist today; all of it was built under previous administrations and has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
Originally Trump wanted to close the border entirely, which would have represented a marked change. But in recent months, he has claimed the US only needs fences in areas that are easy to cross, and the natural environment will prevent people from crossing along the remainder of the border. This is a continuation of a method that started in the 1990s called ‘prevention through deterrence’, and is what has led to a huge increase in migrant deaths. It’s not new, though. After learning from ‘ border experts’ that patrol efforts are likely to be hindered by opaque walls, Trump has also abandoned the large wall prototypes his technicians were experimenting with. He is arguing now for a steel fence – much like the one that already exists along part of the border.
All of which is to say that Donald Trump is not that different from previous politicians, and certainly not original – he is just louder.
Around 650 miles of fences already exist today; all of it was built under previous administrations and has nothing to do with Trump PROFESSOR MARY E MENDOZA
The US was already constructing parts of a wall along the border with Mexico at the time of the First World War. But those patrolling this border in California and Texas were focusing on stopping Chinese immigrants rather than Mexicans. US agricultural producers needed Mexican labour – and the early border structures were anyway not very effective. As the walls became higher, tunnels were dug deeper.
In the 1950s, there was a renewed emphasis on immigration from Mexico in Operation Wetback (‘wetback’ being a derogatory term for those who had swum the Rio Grande river to reach the US). This was part of a broader attempt to regularise the use of Mexican labour.
However, the operation was also designed by political leaders to appease anti-migrant opinion in the US. Well-publicised raids by Border Patrol task forces on farms, restaurants and Mexican community centres were part of a governmental show of force, accompanied by military rhetoric about ‘all-out war’ against illegal migration. Many migrants were forcibly deported.
These actions are all part of a much bigger tension within US history – about how far it has been a nation of immigrants. That is a damaging, offensive myth implicitly denying three of the most significant – and racialised – stories in the peopling of the United States: removal, slavery and deportation.
It is more useful to think of the United States as a nation of settlers, wedded to the notion of replacing native peoples on the land and reproducing white-only or white-dominated communities. Slavery, mass incarceration, mass deportation, English-only laws, immigration restrictions and now a border wall are all tactics in the deep arsenal of the settler state. The nation of immigrants myth – the notion of the poor disembarking at Ellis Island in New York and melding into America – is designed, through its singularity, to deny the full story of the peopling of the United States.
The myth overlooks the vitality and importance of native and indigenous peoples and polities on the lands now claimed by the United States. This is crucially important to note when, for example, it is the Tohono O’odham Nation (with reservation lands along the southern Arizona/Sonora border) who, by opposing construction on its land, pose one of the most significant threats to the federal government’s drive, led by President Trump, to build a border wall.
The nation of immigrants myth denies the history of enslavement that produced the vast majority of the African-American population. African-Americans did not arrive as immigrants. We arrived enslaved, and ever since, from the plantation to the prison, have fought to make America fulfil its promises of democracy and equality for all.
The dispute over the Mexican border has also revealed a continuing belief that Latinx immigrants (people of Latin American descent) do not assimilate. However, these communities assimilate as much as the limitations of the settler state allow. They have always lived uneasily, between knowledge of how important their contribution to the US economy has been and fear of the anti-immigrant mood that has regularly resurfaced in US opinion and politics.
Slavery, mass incarceration, mass deportation and now a border wall are all tactics in the arsenal of the settler state PROF KELLY LYTLE HERNÁNDEZ