Policing borders: unauthorized immigration and the pernicious politics of attrition.

Theodore, Nik

ON APRIL 23, 2010, ARIZONA GOVERNOR JAN BREWER SIGNED THE SUPPORT OUR Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act into law. Better known as SB 1070, this law is the broadest and strictest anti-immigrant law enacted in the United States in decades. The stated purpose of SB 1070 ([section] 1) is "to discourage and deter the unlawful entry and presence of aliens and economic activity by persons unlawfully present in the United States" (State of Arizona, 2010). Its key provisions include: (1) requirements that police officers investigate the immigration status of all individuals they stop, if the officers suspect that they are in the country unlawfully; (2) mandatory detention of individuals who are arrested, even for minor offenses that would normally result in a ticket, if they cannot prove they are authorized to be in the United States; and (3) stipulations that allow law enforcement officers to arrest a person without a warrant if the officer has probable cause to believe that the person has committed an offense that makes him/her removable from the United States (see Garcia, Eig, and Kim, 2010).

SB 1070 has become a lightening rod in the divisive debates over immigration reform in the United States. Amid routine pronouncements from across the political spectrum that the U.S. immigration system is "broken," lawmakers promoting a restrictionist agenda have aggressively sought to enact a range of punitive policies aimed at disrupting everyday life for unauthorized immigrants. They have been able to do so by exploiting vague generalizations concerning the "broken immigration system"--an abstraction around which a (false) consensus has formed. For when people agree to the proposition that the system is broken, they often mean very different things. Some favor a broad legalization program that grants amnesty to undocumented immigrants, while others openly call for stiffer border enforcement and harsher penalties for unauthorized migration. Ironically, there is a crude functionality between the narratives of state failure and systemic breakdown on the one hand, and the upsurge of increasingly punitive anti-immigrant policy-making on the other, which has led Alicia Schmidt Camacho (2010: 5) to question rhetorically,

   What is the political and social logic that allows state failure to
   be universally acknowledged and yet to persist? The "brokenness" of
   the system has installed a peculiar ... form of governmentality
   based in failure. The disorder of immigration enforcement has a
   particular functionality for the U.S. government and its
   institutions of punishment, a functionality that the discourse of
   failure conveniently masks. The exclusion of migrants from the
   protected spaces of citizenship and legal personhood has become not
   the means to an end, resolving the status of the undocumented, but
   an end in itself. By treating unauthorized migrants as threats to
   national security, U.S. law enforcement agents have colluded in
   separating migrants as a distinct class of subjects, divested of
   the normal protections and rights accorded to other members of
   society.

Marked by the taint of illegality and divested of the protections that attend citizenship, unauthorized immigrants find themselves legally excluded from the society to which they contribute, within which they reside, and of which they are a part. In a move designed to banish unauthorized immigrants from the U.S. national territory and its subnational jurisdictions, lawmakers promoting a restrictionist agenda have shifted their focus from national-level policymaking to state and local arenas in the wake of their failed attempts to overhaul the U.S. immigration system in 2005,2006, and 2008. Backed by nativist activists and paleoconservative policy think tanks, restrictionists have crafted state and local "illegal immigrant relief acts" that criminalize the presence of unauthorized immigrants in a jurisdiction and call on local law enforcement authorities to engage in direct or indirect enforcement of immigration laws (Rodriguez, 2008). Based on a distinct spatialization of illegality buttressed by a corresponding logic of expulsion, the so-called illegal immigrant relief acts share a common set of policy objectives aimed at fundamentally disrupting everyday life for unauthorized immigrants by restricting access to employment, housing, health care, and social services. In recent years, a disparate collection of restrictionist, anti-immigrant policy proposals has been unified and codified in what proponents have come to call the "attrition strategy"--the notion that if direct and indirect enforcement measures are effective, unauthorized immigrants will "self-deport" and leave the country (Krikorian, 2005; Vaughan, 2006). As the immigration policy debate has been rescaled in the wake of the congressional immigration-reform impasse, sub-federal anti-immigrant policymaking of this sort has been on the rise (Rodriguez, 2008; Varsanyi, 2010b), guided by the attrition doctrine and enforcement-only approaches to immigration reform.

This article examines this rescaling of immigration policymaking and enforcement in the United States, with a close examination of Arizona's SB 1070. The next section situates SB 1070 and other "illegal immigrant relief acts" within a rescaled immigration policy field. This is followed by a critical examination of the attrition-through-enforcement doctrine and the geographical diffusion of anti-immigrant policies that require local law enforcement officials to divert resources away from public safety and toward immigration enforcement. Finally, the article considers the ways in which the attrition strategy meshes with local policing tactics to produce modes of social control that are based on perverse logics of migrant criminalization and expulsion.

"Enough is enough": Rescaling Immigration Policy

The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the federal government has broad and exclusive powers to regulate immigration and to set immigration policy. Monica Varsanyi (2010a: 6-8) provides a concise history of judicial decisionmaking regarding governmental authority over immigration, tracing how the courts have adjudicated the scope of federal and sub-federal legislative powers (see also Rodriguez et al., 2010). Varsanyi explains that, beginning in the late 1800s, a series of Supreme Court rulings unequivocally established the federal government's plenary powers over immigration policy. In Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889), the Court asserted the federal government's "inherent sovereign powers" over excluding noncitizens from the national territory. Framing immigration as an element of foreign policy, the Court stated that the federal government "is invested with power over all the foreign relations of the country, war, peace, and negotiations and intercourse with other nations; all of which are forbidden to the state governments ..." (629, quoted in Varsanyi, 2010a: 7). Furthermore, in Truax v. Raich (1915: 42), the Court held that "the power to control immigration--to admit or exclude aliens-- is vested solely in the Federal Government," while in De Canus v. Bica (1976: 354), the Court declared that "the power to regulate immigration is unquestionably exclusively a federal power." In the ensuing decades, the federal government's plenary authority over immigration policy has been reaffirmed through cases that have tested the limits of state and local governmental authority over immigration matters. In particular, the courts have found numerous state and local immigration laws to be unconstitutional since these sub-federal initiatives are preempted by the federal government's plenary power over immigration policy.

Although the Supreme Court and lower courts have consistently reaffirmed the federal government's exclusive authority over immigration policy, state and local governments are not prevented from enacting legislation that pertains to immigrants and immigrant incorporation. This crucial distinction between immigration policy and immigrant affairs has emboldened some lawmakers to test the limits of subfederal authority and to pursue immigration-related legislation and locally scaled immigration policy (Varsanyi, 2011). According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (2011), immigration has increasingly been an area of concerted state-level legislative activity. In 2010, every state legislature that was in regular session considered bills pertaining to immigrants and/or immigration, and in the last five years alone, more than 6,000 immigration-related bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the country. Many of these bills could be classified as pro immigrant legislation, such as bills that expand health and education programs for immigrants and their children. But increasingly, anti-immigrant reforms are being pursued (Hincapir, 2009; Luna and Ansley, 2009; Samers, 2001; Varsanyi, 2010a; Walker and Leitner, 2011). State and local governments have enacted numerous "illegal immigration relief acts" that seek, among other things, to impose penalties on landlords who rent living quarters to unauthorized immigrants and on employers who hire undocumented workers.

Varsanyi (2011: 302) sees this rescaling of immigration policy as an attempt "to wrest immigration power ... from the federal government and exercise it at the local scale," a conclusion that is consonant with the increasingly strident pronouncements of anti-immigrant reformers who have argued that the federal government has failed to uphold its responsibility to safeguard U.S. borders and deter unauthorized immigration. In Arizona, State Senator Russell Pearce, the chief sponsor of SB 1070, has argued, "Enough is enough" (Pearce, 2010: 245,246):

   The border can be secured. We have the technology; we have the
   ability to stop this invasion. We must know who is coming and they
   must come in legally so that we can assimilate them into our
   population and protect the sovereignty of our country. We are a
   nation of laws. We have a responsibility to protect our citizens
   and to protect the integrity of our country and the government
   which we live under.

   It will do no good to forgive them because millions more will come
   behind them, and we will be over run to the point that there will
   no longer be a United States of America but, a North American Union
   of open borders. I ask you what form of government will we live
   under? How long will it be before we will be just like Mexico? We
   have already lost our language; everything must be printed in
   Spanish. We have already lost our history since it is no longer
   taught in our schools. And we have lost our borders.

Although he is a newcomer to the national political spotlight, in Arizona Senator Pearce has quickly become a leading critic of U.S. immigration policy, and the sponsor of numerous anti-immigrant legislative bills. In a 2008 interview with National Public Radio, Pearce framed the issue of unauthorized immigration as a threat to national sovereignty, using the type of politically charged rhetoric that has been a hallmark of restrictionist immigration discourses: "I will not back off until we solve the problem of this illegal invasion. Invaders, that's what they are. Invaders on the American sovereignty and it can't be tolerated" (Robbins, 2008). Pearce introduced the bill in January 2010 and it moved quickly through the State Senate, with the Senate approving an early version of the bill in February 2010.

Pearce has characterized SB 1070 as removing the "political handcuffs" from local police so that they can facilitate the removal of unauthorized immigrants from the state (Associated Press, 2010), and the law contains a number of significant measures aimed at expanding the scope for local law enforcement authorities to engage in immigration-enforcement efforts. SB 1070:

* Requires law enforcement authorities (as well as other government officials and agencies) to determine the immigration status of a person if reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States.

* Requires law enforcement authorities to verify a person's immigration status with the federal government.

* Allows a law enforcement officer, without a warrant, to arrest a person if the officer has probable cause to believe that the person has committed any public offense that makes the person removable from the United States.

* Specifies that a person is guilty of trespassing if the person is present on any public or private land in the state and is not carrying his or her alien registration card or has willfully failed to register.

* Specifies that it is unlawful for a motor vehicle occupant to attempt to hire or hire and pick up workers in public spaces, and for a person to enter the motor vehicle to be hired by a motor vehicle occupant and to be transported to work at a different location.

* Stipulates that it is unlawful for a person who is unlawfully present in the United States and who is an unauthorized alien to knowingly apply for work, solicit work in a public place, or perform work as an employee or independent contractor.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law in April 2010, unleashing a firestorm of political controversy. Opponents charged that the new law officially sanctions racial profiling by law enforcement authorities, and that it will lead to rampant civil rights violations by local law enforcement authorities. In its zeal to pass SB 1070, the Arizona legislature enacted a version of the law that suggested that law enforcement authorities would have probable cause to question a person if that person "appeared" to be an undocumented immigrant. In addition, the initial version of the law required police to arrest a suspected unauthorized immigrant if he or she sought police assistance after being the victim of a crime. One week after signing SB 1070 into law, Governor Brewer signed HB 2162, which amended SB 1070 by limiting the use of race as the basis for identifying undocumented immigrants, and by removing the provision of the law that required police to arrest victims of a crime if they are unable to prove they are in the country legally. Although the law was amended to prohibit the investigation of "complaints based on race, color, or national origin," the larger context of the bill's passage makes clear that Arizona legislators are prepared and willing to use racial profiling tactics as instruments of policing and social control. For this and other reasons, the modifications authorized by HB 2162 have done little to quell the concerns of SB 1070's opponents, and the signing of the new law has been met by nationwide demonstrations, several consumer boycotts, and numerous legal challenges. Lawsuits have been filed in court to block various provisions of the law, including a class action lawsuit filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, along with the National Immigration Law Center, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, and other civil rights organizations. A suit brought by the U.S. Justice Department raises several constitutional challenges to SB 1070.

SB 1070 marks a watershed moment in the current immigration debate. Frustrated by the lack of consensus in Congress over how to reform the country's immigration system, Arizona lawmakers have taken matters into their own hands and enacted sweeping anti-immigrant reforms. At the same time, though, SB 1070 is just one of hundreds of state and local immigration laws that have been enacted in recent years, and it is just one of dozens of illegal-immigration relief acts that have been signed into law since 2008. Unifying these anti-immigrant laws is the singular objective of making life in the United States untenable for unauthorized immigrants by restricting access to jobs, housing, social services, health care, and education. In many respects, SB 1070 pushes sub-federal anti-immigrant policymaking to its (il)logical conclusion. It blatantly attempts to disrupt everyday life for unauthorized immigrants so profoundly and fundamentally that they will decide to leave the United States--or at the very least, the State of Arizona. In other words, the objective of laws such as SB 1070 is to make daily life so miserable for unauthorized immigrants that they break their community ties, distance themselves from friends and family, and quit their jobs and pull their children out of school to leave the country. Proponents call this approach to anti-immigrant policymaking the "attrition strategy," and attrition through enforcement is rapidly gaining followers in Washington, D.C., and in state houses and city halls across the United States. To date, SB 1070 is the most prominent example of the attrition doctrine codified into law.

Attrition Through Enforcement

Section 1 of SB 1070 states: "The legislature declares that the intent of this act is to make attrition through enforcement the public policy of all state and local government agencies in Arizona" (Arizona SB 1070, [section] 1). Thus, the attrition strategy has become the law of the land in Arizona. According to proponents of this doctrine, the attrition strategy is premised on the idea that,

By deterring the settlement of new illegals, by increasing deportations to the extent possible, and, most importantly, by increasing the number of illegals already here who give up and deport themselves, the United States can bring about an annual decrease in the illegal-alien population .... The point, in other words, is not merely to curtail illegal immigration, but rather to bring about a steady reduction in the total number of illegal immigrants who are living in the United States. The result would be a shrinking of the illegal population to a manageable nuisance, rather than today's looming crisis (Krikorian, 2005: 1, emphasis added; cf. Kobach, 2008; Vaughan, 2006).

The attrition strategy, in effect, seeks to enlist unauthorized immigrants in their own removal from the United States. Having failed to forge an effective political coalition at the federal level capable of enacting their preferred legislative proposals, restrictionists have resorted to immigration reform by stealth through their attempts to materially degrade conditions of everyday life for immigrants through state and local legislation and administrative agreements. For example, in many parts of the country, local law enforcement authorities have been willing participants in immigration policing though the 287(g) program, which deputizes local officials to enforce federal immigration laws. This rescaling of immigration control has been accompanied by a new politics of immigration at the state and local levels.

Even though immigration policy is ostensibly under federal jurisdiction, state and local elected officials have subverted that plenary power. They have raised their profile and realized significant political gains by demonizing unauthorized immigrants, and Latino immigrants in particular. Leo Chavez (2008) has identified a dominant current running through the immigration reform debate, which he terms the Latino Threat Narrative (see also Santa Ana, 2002). According to this racialized narrative, unlike previous immigrant groups, Latinos are unwilling or unable to integrate into American society and instead favor balkanization through the establishment of immigrant enclaves, while more radical elements within the Mexican diaspora are planning a "reconquest" of portions of the southwestern United States through mass migration (cf. Buchanan, 2006; Chang, 2000; for a critique, see Chavez, 2008). For commentators such as Maria Hsia Chang (2000: 207):

   Today, there are reasons to believe that Chicanos as a group are
   unlike previous immigrants in that they are more likely to remain
   unassimilated and unintegrated, whether by choice or
   circumstance--resulting in the formation of a separate quasi-nation
   within the United States. More than that, there are Chicano
   political activists who intend to marry cultural separateness with
   territorial and political self-determination. The more moderate
   among them aspire to the cultural and political autonomy of "home
   rule." The radicals seek nothing less than secession from the
   United States whether to form their own sovereign state or to
   reunify with Mexico. Those who desire reunification with Mexico are
   irredentists who seek to reclaim Mexico's "lost" territories in the
   American Southwest. Whatever their goals, what animates all of them
   is the dream of Aztlan.

Likewise, in discussing "how civilizations perish," former presidential advisor and current political columnist Patrick Buchanan (2006: 5) contends that large-scale, unauthorized migration is one of "two certain signs that a civilization has begun to die...." With respect to contemporary patterns of migration to the United States, Buchanan (Ibid.) asserts:

   This is not immigration as America knew it, when men and women made
   a conscious choice to turn their backs on their native lands and
   cross the ocean to become Americans. This is an invasion, the
   greatest invasion in history. Nothing of this magnitude has ever
   happened in so short a span of time.... Nearly 90 percent of all
   immigrants now come from continents and countries whose peoples
   have never been assimilated fully into any Western country.

   Against the will of a vast majority of Americans, America is being
   transformed. As our elites nervously avert their gaze or welcome
   the invasion, we are witness to one of the great tragedies in human
   history.

Similarly, paleoconservative commentator William Calhoun (2006) warns of an ongoing immigrant invasion of the United States:

   This is an invasion of America, and there is no other way to see
   it. Mexico, like most other third-world nations, despises the West.
   But they know they cannot defeat it in conventional battle, but
   only invade under the auspices of "reverse colonialism." The West
   contains most of the world's resources, and the third-world hordes
   regularly invade the West to rape and ravish it of its riches. And
   it is not just Mexico that invades, but all of South America,
   Africa, Asia, China and India are coming too.

The political power of these messages, irrespective of their veracity, is given a certain truth-value through their fervent reiteration. Indeed, the sheer repetition of alarmist, anti-immigrant discourses in the media and among political elites has created a new vocabulary that aims to reconcile the public to racialized policing tactics that target immigrant "invaders." At a deeper level, flagrant pronouncements of "illegality" function to deny rights by criminalizing unauthorized immigrants-individually and collectively--while simultaneously reducing the likelihood that rights will be extended, or even maintained, through federal legislative means.

Discursively constructed as "invaders," Latino immigrants are, by definition, illegitimate members of society who pose an amorphous threat to the well being of the nation; therefore, the argument goes, those transgressing, illegitimate bodies should be barred from citizenship and perhaps even denied basic human rights since their very presence in the United States is deemed to be a criminal act (Chavez, 2008). According to Etienne Balibar (1988:17-18,21), such discourses promulgate a form of "neo-racism" that conditions societal responses to immigrants:

   Racism ... inscribes itself in practices (forms of violence,
   contempt, intolerance, humiliation, and exploitation), in
   discourses and representations which are so many intellectual
   elaborations of the phantasm of ... segregation (the need to purify
   the social body, to preserve "one's own" or "our" identity from all
   forms of mixing, inbreeding or invasion) and which are articulated
   around stigmata of otherness (name, skin color, religious
   practices) .... The new racism ... is a racism whose dominant theme
   is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural
   differences.

Justified in terms of repelling an immigrant invasion, the attrition strategy seeks to construct an illegal-immigrant subject who is without rights and potential claims on citizenship in the United States. Moreover, by "implementing policies to force illegals to deport themselves" (Krikorian, 2005: 6), restrictionists hope to institutionalize the attrition-through-enforcement doctrine through public policy, despite their political failures in gaining passage of an overhaul of the federal immigration system. However, it must be stressed that the attrition strategy is fundamentally an immigration policy. Proponents deliberately hide its status as such by masking state-sanctioned deportation as being not the will of the state, but rather the will of the individual. Constitutionally, this is necessary if state and local illegal immigrant relief acts are to stand up to legal challenges that reassert that the federal government has plenary power over immigration policy. Politically, self-deportation is a critical component of the broader restrictionist strategy since, as its proponents openly acknowledge, even during the current period of heightened anti-immigrant sentiment," political support for a new commitment to enforcement might well be undermined if an exodus of biblical proportions were to be televised in every American living room" (Ibid.: 2).

Border Crossings: SB 1070 as Model Legislation

Despite the national controversy that accompanied the passage of SB 1070, expanding the scope of local law enforcement to include immigration control is an idea that certainly is on the move. In the few months since SB 1070 was signed into law, "copycat" bills have been introduced in at least 15 states (Johnson and Hauc, 2011), and other states are considering similar measures (Wessler, 2010). This diffusion of SB 1070 avatars is not the result of some spontaneous upsurge in state-level, anti-immigrant policymaking. Rather, it is part of an organized and well-funded attempt to rewrite immigration policy by a network of policy advocates, including FAIR (the Federation for American Immigration Reform), its legislative arm, State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI), and the Center for Immigration Studies, a self-styled "think tank." (1) SB 1070 was based on model legislation drafted by Kris Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law and an affiliate of FAIR. The model bill was vetted and supported by the American Legislative Exchange Council (Sullivan, 2010), a Washington, D.C.-based association and networking organization of state legislators and private-sector policy advocates whose expressed purpose is to disseminate model legislation that abides by the organization's credo: "Limited Government, Free Markets, Federalism."

State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI) has members in 41 states, including Arizona, where member State Senator Russell Pearce continues to consolidate power. Recently, he was elected president of the Arizona State Senate, and from this position he has continued to push a staunchly anti-immigrant agenda. Like the American Legislative Exchange Council, one of SLLI's core objectives is to disseminate model legislation that institutes stricter immigration controls that are in line with the attrition-through-enforcement doctrine. According to its founder, Pennsylvania State Representative Daryl Metcalf (n.d.; emphasis added):

   State Legislators for Legal Immigration has been formed to serve as
   a unifying force to bring all levels of government together to
   terminate America's illegal alien invasion from the Keystone State
   of Pennsylvania; to every city, community, small town, main street,
   front porch and backyard; across our fruited plains; and from sea
   to shining sea. Once the economic attractions of illegal jobs and
   taxpayer-funded public benefits are severed at the source, these
   illegal invaders will have no choice but to go home on their own.

Arizona has been an important testing ground for a number of SLLI-supported immigration reform proposals. Measures include the Legal Arizona Workers Act (which makes it a state crime for employers to hire undocumented workers), Proposition 200 (which requires applicants for public benefits to show proof of citizenship and makes it a misdemeanor crime for government workers to fail to report anyone who applies for benefits, but is unable to produce proof of citizenship), the state's human-smuggling law (which makes it a crime for unauthorized migrants to smuggle themselves), SB 1070, and, most recently, a birthright-citizenship law (which, in an apparent conflict with the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, would deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrants). In addition, government officials have aggressively pursued 287(g) agreements that allow local law enforcement authorities to engage in immigration control functions in partnership with federal authorities.

Policing the Spaces of Illegality

The notion that local police should become involved in immigration enforcement as "force multipliers" resonates with a dominant narrative in U.S. immigration reform politics, whose centerpiece is a border out of control and where the rule of law no longer governs the border or border crossings. In the current policy debate, restrictionists' demands for broadening the scope of local law enforcement to include policing immigration are justified by fears of a loss of state control over national borders and threats to national sovereignty (cf. Nevins, 2002). And, in part for these reasons, demands to involve local law enforcement authorities in policing unauthorized immigration have grown louder while gaining political salience.

The attrition strategy enlists local law enforcement authorities directly in immigration enforcement. Of course, many police departments have rejected this approach. They actively discourage officers from asking about a person's immigration status so as not to deter immigrants from reporting crimes and cooperating in other investigations. So, too, have many departments resisted the redirection of resources away from ensuring public safety toward the complicated task of determining immigration status. Few have embraced these challenges more vigorously, however, than Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed "Toughest Sheriff in America." An examination of policing tactics in the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office (MCSO) reveals in telling ways how local policing meshes with the attrition strategy.

After winning his first election in 1993, Sheriff Arpaio had a tent-city jail constructed in an area where temperatures can soar well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. He banned cigarettes, hot lunches, coffee, and salt and pepper (Finnegan, 2009), in the process dismissing a research study he had commissioned when it found that the harsh conditions of incarceration he promoted were ineffective at reducing recidivism (cf. Griffin, 2006). Arpaio gave inmates just two meals a day, each at 30 cents per person, while bragging that it costs more to feed the police dogs than it does the inmates (Finnegan, 2009). He requires inmates to wear black-and-white striped uniforms, but added pink underwear and pink socks. Several times he attempted to humiliate prisoners by marching them between facilities wearing just the pink underwear (while also subjecting inmates to strip searches before and after being marched to a new jail), and on several occasions he forced undocumented immigrants to march before news journalists while being shackled together with pink handcuffs (Ibid.).

It is difficult to conceive of a set of policing tactics that does more to drive a wedge between the Sheriff's Department and local communities than those adopted by Sheriff Joe Arpaio. In the name of fighting illegal immigration, Arpaio and his deputies have employed strong-arm tactics that have terrorized Latino residents (Sterling, 2010), creating deep distrust between Latino communities and law enforcement authorities. Furthermore, an analysis of Maricopa County Sheriff's Department records by the East Valley Tribune (2008) reveals that immigration-related policing has been expensive and has resulted in very few major arrests, while it has redirected law enforcement personnel away from investigating nonimmigration-related offenses (see also Waslin, 2010). The findings from the East Valley Tribune investigation include:

* Deputies are failing to meet the county's standard for response times on life-threatening emergencies. In 2006 and 2007, patrol cars arrived late two-thirds of the time on more than 6,000 of the most serious calls for service.

* MCSO's arrest rate has plunged during the past two years, even as the number of criminal investigations has soared.

* The sheriff's "saturation" patrols and "crime suppression/anti-illegal immigration" sweeps in Hispanic neighborhoods are done without any evidence of criminal activity, violating federal regulations that are intended to prevent racial profiling.

* Deputies regularly make traffic stops based only on their suspicion that illegal immigrants are inside vehicles. They figure out probable cause after deciding whom to pull over.

Bernard Harcourt (2007) explains that when racial profiling is used to influence the allocation of law enforcement resources, this policing tactic produces a "ratchet effect" that distorts the demographic composition of carceral populations. When police engage in profiling, targeted social groups become normalized as a deviant population, social norms that presume criminality are established, and the exercise of liberties is curtailed for the targeted group. Group members become seen as a naturalized criminal class and, in the process, face heightened levels of discrimination and the violation of civil rights and civil liberties. Still, Sheriff Arpaio routinely contends that apprehending unauthorized immigrants is an important way to fight crime, and his outreach to the media regularly and flamboyantly highlights the MCSO's efforts to police immigration. However, a review of arrest statistics raises serious doubts about the presumed connection between unauthorized immigration and serious crime. In 2006 and 2007, for example, MCSO deputies arrested 578 unauthorized immigrants in traffic stops, more than 86% of whom faced a single charge--conspiracy to smuggle oneself by paying a human trafficker.

Arpaio's tactics, extreme and ineffective though they are, remain entirely consistent with the attrition-through-enforcement doctrine. At its root, the attrition strategy is a form of banishment, a crude means of social control that, according to Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert (2010), is once again on the rise in the United States. Like many of Sheriff Arpaio's policing tactics, such as chain gangs and parading arrestees before the public, banishment is an outdated, outmoded form of punishment. For Beckett and Herbert (2010: 10, 11,8), banishment is "the legal compulsion to leave specified geographic areas for extended periods of time." It "is a punishment, meted out to those condemned as deviant or criminal [as] ... increasing swathes of urban space are delimited as zones of exclusion from which the undesirable are banned" (see also Eick, 2007; Mitchell, 2003). Both banishment and the complementary strategy of attrition through enforcement attempt to dislocate and exclude already-marginalized persons from a jurisdiction based on a set of ascribed characteristics or behaviors. As Beckett and Herbert have argued in the case of homeless adults, and I argue here with respect to unauthorized immigrants, these crude methods of social control compound the disadvantages faced by already-marginalized populations, which often endure these hardships privately and silently. These means of social control fragment social space, creating insiders and outsiders, those allowed in and those banned, those authorized and those unauthorized, and those who are deemed legitimate and those who are brandished as "illegal."

In a political climate where the dominant narratives in immigration debates concern the breakdown of the rule of law along the U.S.-Mexico border, which is said to have escaped the grip of the state and supposedly threatens national sovereignty, calls to "do something" and to "get tough" are resonating in state houses and city halls across the country. Of course, there is more than a little bit of irony here since, as Peter Andreas (2000: 140-141) has written,

   The unprecedented effort to police the boundary between the United
   States and Mexico ... came at the same time that the two countries
   were embracing a common vision of a border-free North American
   economic space. The retreat of the state in the name of market
   liberalization has been matched by the reassertion of state
   policing in the name of market criminalization .... As a result,
   the border has become more blurred and more sharply demarcated than
   ever before.

But borders are not simply located at the outer limits of the national territory-they are located everywhere there are circuits through which the movement of people and goods occurs. The border that, Andreas says, is "more blurred and more sharply demarcated than ever before" (2000: 141), divides social spaces and affects the lives of untold numbers of U.S. residents. Attrition through enforcement helps to create, maintain, and police this blurred, disarticulated border, and it does so under the cynical guise of the "rule of law" and the defense of national sovereignty. However, there is widespread evidence that border and interior enforcement has done little to substantially reduce the presence of unauthorized immigrants in the United States, while contributing to rising migration-related fatalities and increases in the reliance on, and fees demanded by, human traffickers (Hinkin et al., 2010; Massey et al., 2002; Nevins, 2002). The U.S. immigration system will not be fixed through crude, archaic policing tactics that heap additional hardships upon already-marginalized people. Instead, rather than resorting to the low politics of attrition through enforcement, the challenge ahead is to establish a system for the regularization of unauthorized immigrants and for ensuring their social, economic, and political incorporation.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Unnoticed at first, something essential began to change in the cities when we started walking around with paper cups full of hot milk and coffee.

Entire neighborhoods soon gave you the feeling that you were purchasing a permit to stay with your latte.

Brighton, 1981: Instant coffee in a Styrofoam cup; Brighton, 1983: Italian cappuccino in a gay cafe; Essen, 1981 : Cafe au lait + the radikal magazine at the Rainbow Cafe; Starbucks:Vienna 2004, Pittsburgh 2005, Dusseldorf Central Station 2009; Cafe Coffee Day: Bangalore 2005, Vienna 2008; Barista: Kolkata 2004.There is a guitar on the wall with a sign that says "Play me." [right arrow] Participation/Web 2.0

REFERENCES

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Associated Press 2010 "Thousands Protest Ariz. Immigration Law." April 23.

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NOTE

(1.) These organizations are part of an expansive network of anti-immigrant, nativist organizations that, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, have ties to white supremacist activists and organizations.

Nik Theodore *

* NIK THEODORE, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago (e-mail: [email protected]).