Governed bodies, discarded bodies: Notes for an analysis of contemporary migrations during Covid-19

Abstract

This article presents the results of an ethnographic research conducted in the northern border of Mexico from 2019 to 2021, specifically in the city of Tijuana. The objective of this article is to analyse the role of bodies in border and migration management with special emphasis on the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. To do so, I focus on three situations. First is the case of migrants whose bodies are exploited in the precarious work opportunities they find along Mexico’s northern border. Second, I look at migrants who experience detention and confinement in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention centres in the United States. And third, I analyse the situation of missing migrants whose bodies are sought by family members and numerous collectives in Mexico. Through the analysis of these situations, the article demonstrates that by using ‘bodies’ as a productive category for analysing migration and the containment of migratory movements, we can understand both the resulting negative effects on migrants’ subjectivity and bodies and how migrants respond to and challenge the global migration system.

Introduction

The global pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus deepened and expanded anti-immigrant policies across many countries and borders, thus multiplying their negative effects on migrants and asylum seekers.

When Covid-19 began to spread in Mexico in March 2020, migrants locked up in immigration detention centres openly expressed their fear of contagion due to overcrowding, while complaining about poor treatment and lack of information from INM staff [Spanish acronym for the National Institute of Migration]. This provoked numerous protests and riots in detention centres in different Mexican cities (Melgoza, 2020).

Guatemalan migrant Rolando Barrientos died of asphyxiation at the age of 42 in one of these riots at the migrant detention centre in Tenosique, Tabasco, in southern Mexico. He had travelled with his wife and son to escape gang violence. He had a refugee application pending with COMAR [Mexican Commission for Aid to Refugees], but despite this, the INM held him in detention. ¹

Contradictory accounts of his death surfaced. Migrants charged that officials suppressed the protest and blocked the exit when four migrants started a fire. In response, some migrants broke down doors and managed to escape. Rolando Barrientos had health problems due to diabetes, which is why he left the detention centre so long after protests erupted; the smoke from the ensuing fire asphyxiated him. Months later, the CNDH [National Human Rights Commission] confirmed this version of events in its Recommendation 69/2020, accusing seven INM officials of ‘violation of the right to life’. ²

The Mexican government’s version of what happened was radically different. The Attorney General’s Office charged four Honduran citizens with ‘aggravated homicide by arson’, sentencing them to 13 years in prison. ³

While this was occurring in Mexico at the beginning of the pandemic, the US government reinstituted an old provision of the Public Health Act defined in Title 42, which granted authority to prevent entry and expel persons who constituted a risk of infectious disease transmission (HRW, 2021). Although touted as a health regulation, in practice it was used as one of several immigration control policies, thus facilitating expulsions on hundreds of flights and empowering immigration authorities to disregard due process in asylum cases (Del Monte Madrigal, 2022).

Title 42 meant that the United States stopped accepting all asylum applications as of March 2020. The border was closed to all crossings other than those defined as essential and indispensable; simultaneously, deportation procedures were fast-tracked, both in the United States and Mexico. The Covid pandemic provided national authorities legitimacy and the perfect justification for tightening immigration control policies through declarations of various states of emergency. As a result, control and surveillance of migrants were further militarised, provoking numerous additional effects.

These actions by various governments to intensify migration control contrast with the absence of state measures to protect migrants from the Covid pandemic. Migrant defence organisations in Tijuana reported that it was they who led the humanitarian response during the pandemic, while the state failed to take any significant responsibility (Alma Migrante, Espacio Migrante, and OMADES, 2021).

As Dolores Paris stated, government measures were aimed at forcefully continuing the permanent illegalisation of migrants, even those who had received legal documents such as the Visitor Card for Humanitarian Reasons (Tarjeta de Visitante por Razones Humanitarias, TVRH). Migrants were denied the renewal of these documents with no consideration given to repercussions stemming from the pandemic. ⁴

Consequently, all government measures during the pandemic targeted migrant bodies as objects of their policies, whether to expel or incarcerate them, or deny them any possible legal status.

In this context, the pandemic forced migrants to wait in the midst of uncertainty and disorder. In this article, I hope to demonstrate that behind this apparent chaos lies a social, racial, and class order that exacerbates migrants’ vulnerability. In this exploratory article, I hope to examine the body as a constructive analytical category by highlighting situations in which bodies suffer diverse effects, but simultaneously resist.

I am interested in understanding how bodies are produced and shaped by governmental anti-immigrant policies. I also want to observe how those same bodies respond and design strategies to avoid harm and further their migratory plans. By doing so, there can be greater understanding of how the pandemic helped to reorganise the system of mobility and borders that mainly targeted migrant bodies.

In order to address this series of problems, I start by considering that it is not possible to analyse the totality of bodily experiences by a single theory of power. For this reason, here I draw on a number of concepts and notions from different authors that help to inform immigrants’ current situation.

Following this introduction, I review the methodology used in this article. Next, I discuss the theoretical notions and perspectives I use. Subsequently, I explain three situations experienced by migrants that allow us to link theory with field data. Finally, I discuss how we can understand the bodily resistances and struggles faced by this violent migratory process. I conclude discussing the main insights of the study.

Methodology and reflexivity

In my previous field research, migrant bodies had always been visible. However, I had paid little attention to their importance as a vehicle for broader understanding. This began to change as I became aware of the physical and psychological effects that migrants suffered and expressed upon arrival at Mexico’s northern border. My perspective also changed when I began to think about the effects that I felt each time I visited the shelters or encampments and listened to migrants’ stories. ⁵

The international organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, MSF) has stated that the testimonies of migrants arriving at Mexico’s northern border are very similar to the experiences of other people displaced by war, such as the Syrians in Lebanon. The medical data available to MSF reveal the high levels of violence, abuse, and mistreatment that migrants and refugees suffer in their countries of origin, along the migration route, and in the custody of US and Mexican authorities (Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), 2019).

Several studies have shown that the production of migrant illegality at their destinations and during transit (De Genova, 2002) transforms migrants into a hyper-exploitable yet disposable workforce. Thus, this is not simply a form of exclusion, but rather forms of production of disposable bodies that are shaped by the violence they experience in their countries of origin.

Amarela Varela demonstrates this situation when she explains that Central American migrant women flee from a perverse trinity: femicide violence, state violence, and market violence (Varela Huerta, 2017). Added to this mix is the spectrum of violence migrants experience in the complex physical and human terrain of Mexico’s migratory routes (Vogt, 2018).

In my fieldwork, ⁶ I became increasingly aware of these stories and came to understand that within them, as Scheel (2013) explains, the body is always the protagonist. This awareness was particularly heightened after 2 weeks of visiting the shelters in Tijuana. As many people who work with migrants experience, it is difficult not to be moved by their stories and even more so when we witness the difficulties they face in obtaining legal status.

One day I was talking to a young Mexican mother who was fleeing with her teenage son from the constant violence she was experiencing with her husband and the pressure of local mafias who wanted her son to sell drugs for them. I was moved by her story and even more so when she insisted that all her hopes were pinned on obtaining asylum in the United States, while I was increasingly convinced that this would be impossible. At one point when we were talking, I asked about her son and she told me where he was. Surprisingly, I saw that the young man was the same age and physical build as my son to the point that I could not stop thinking about the similarities. Suddenly, I felt devastated, tired, and exhausted to the point that I had to leave the shelter to get some air.

Ethnography is a way of slowly and deeply approaching diverse social groups. At the same time, ethnography is a discipline that is studied in the midst of many different societies and groups. In this case, the practice of doing research in such contexts evidently provokes multiple effects among fieldworkers (Green, 1999; Jimeno, 2008; Sluka, 1995).

In my case, this episode led me to think about my privilege as a researcher and the enormous fortune of being able to be there as someone who studies these problems. At the same time, it made me think about the way in which the whole migratory order causes multiple impacts to migrant bodies and subjectivities and, more distantly and much less distressingly, to ourselves as researchers.

In this article, I will analyse bodies as a crucial aspect in understanding the governance of migration and how migrants develop responses thereto. To achieve this, the article is based on fieldwork developed in the summer of 2019 and 2021. During that time, I led a team of anthropology graduate students in field visits to different shelters in the city of Tijuana. There we applied more than 30 in-depth interviews and both my students and I established cooperation agreements with the shelters. I supported the work of lawyers and legal activists, translated for French-speaking migrants, and helped hold workshops on asylum and refugee issues.

Conceptual discussion

As I mentioned before, there are innumerable experiences of bodies in contemporary migrations and it would be impossible to account for all of them through a unified theory of power. For this article, I focus on three situations. First is the case of migrants whose bodies are exploited in the precarious work opportunities they find along Mexico’s northern border. Second, I look at migrants who experience arrest and confinement in CBP detention centres in the United States (Customs and Border Protection). And third, I analyse the situation of missing migrants whose bodies are sought by family members and numerous collectives in Mexico.

For this analysis, I revisit an extensive genealogy of authors who deepened discussion on the body as an approach to social theory. This genealogy could start with Marx and his analysis of the body in capitalism. Marx suggested analysing the body not only as a natural and biological aspect of societies but also as an element modelled by social differences. In this perspective, bodies are socially configured and also operate as social forces (Le Breton, 2002: 16).

For Marx, the body is the indispensable condition for conceptualising the notion of labour-power. The material basis for capital’s exploitation is the body. Michel Foucault extends Marx’s ideas to assert that the source of domination in our political systems resides in the body. The living and mortal body is the central object of all politics. Foucault admits no politics without body politics (Preciado, 2020). The body is the epicentre of domination because every governmental act aims to manufacture a body, doing something with it, putting it to work, or excluding it from work, while shaping its production and reproduction.

Foucault studied different systems of power and left several important concepts for us to review. One of them is his analysis of disciplinary power, which, for Sandro Mezzadra, helps enrich Marx’s notion of labour power. As Mezzadra explains:

At stake in this process – as well as in the production of labor power as a commodity – is the ‘worker’s body’, whose ‘physical strength’ is dissected and recombined through the action of disciplinary powers after ‘its integration into a system of production’ (Mezzadra, 2019: 66).

Discipline, then, is a mechanism of power that, as Mezzadra insists, reaches the smallest atoms of the social body, that is, individuals themselves. Whether in the precarious labour market they can access or in the spaces of confinement they must endure when arrested, they are exposed to systematic criminalisation. As a result, De Genova says, ‘. . . this sociopolitical condition of protracted waiting and detainability exposes the operations of a disciplinary form of power that enhances “irregular” migrants’ increasing precarity and serves to enforce the disposability of migrant life’ (De Genova, 2021: 187).

Migrants, their bodies, and their subjectivities are also affected by another variety of power systems, among which is biopolitical power, another of Foucault’s notions, which has now been widely discussed and reformulated by various authors.

For this article, I consider biopolitics to be a form of power that consists of maximising the life potential of the population as well as its economic productivity. As Mbembe explains, biopolitics involves working for the welfare of the population and the bodily and health subjugation of the citizen (Mbembe, 2011).

From Jasbir Puar’s perspective, Michel Foucault’s foundational formulation hinges on all population measures that enable, or inhibit, some form of living: birthrates, fertility, longevity, disease, impairment, toxicity, and productivity (Puar, 2017). In summary and in its original meaning, biopolitics is about the right ‘to make live and to let die’. However, here I agree with Aradau and Tazzioli’s proposal to consider the ‘biopolitics multiple’ as an approach to the heterogeneity of biopolitical technologies deployed to govern migration today. In this sense, it is a matter of understanding the governmentality of migration beyond binary oppositions such as ‘to make live and to let die’, biopolitics/necropolitics, and inclusion/exclusion (Aradau and Tazzioli, 2020). In other words, this means that in the same social reality we can find diverse expressions of power coexisting at the same time. These forms of power are not mutually exclusive but complementary.

We will see this form of biopolitical power clearly expressed in the confinement and detention of migrants, in which entire populations of different origins are subjected to bodily tests, and where the processes of weakening and exhaustion become key. This biopolitical dimension of confinement is then combined with the disciplinary power that produces the necessary correction and the indispensable submission to the law.

An extreme form of biopolitics resides in necropolitics, another form of power and governance that is useful for studying certain situations of migrant bodies, especially in the case of migrants who disappear at borders or along migratory routes. Achille Mbembe developed this notion by extending Foucault’s idea to describe regimes whose sovereignty lies in the power to decide who lives and who dies. It also consists of ‘. . . the ability to define who is important and who is not, who is devoid of value and can be easily replaced and who is not’ (Mbembe, 2011: 46).

However, this whole arsenal of concepts that contributed to thinking about bodies in the contemporary world has been greatly enriched by feminist theorising. By virtue of these debates, we have come to understand that the practices of regulation – such as migration control policies – produce the bodies that govern (Butler, 2005). This means that the body exposes the machinations of the state and reveals the role it plays in migration containment (Hyndman, 2000).

Feminist thought has also contributed to understanding the political nature of bodies. According to Silvey, in this same sense, migrations can be understood as embodied cultural struggles:

Migration is a socially embedded process, such that it reflects and reinforces social organization along the lines of gender, race, class, nation, sexuality, caste, and religion, among other differences (Silvey, 2005: 138).

Feminist thinkers have committed themselves to the analytical centrality of bodies in migration, insisting that ‘the feminist migration research also aims to identify and unpack the power relations embedded’ (Silvey, 2005: 144).

Thus, Mountz (2004) warns that the body is crucial to understanding the power of the state. And Casaglia (2022) advocated for the usefulness of observing the embodiment of migratory control over bodies at the border. Of course, various studies caution that not all bodies are criminalised or excluded in the same way. As Hyndman explains:

The mobility of all persons is subject to the configuration of power-geometry, but conditions of highly restricted mobility, even containment, are more common for those bodies that are criminalized, displaced, and/or construed as a security threat to the state and its citizenry (Hyndman, 2000: 171).

The centrality of body analysis in Latin American feminist theoretical development has also been remarkable in recent years (Sabido, 2011). A whole literature has emerged from this continent. For example, Rita Segato has studied violence against women, many of them migrants, and has emphasised their bodies as a strategic target, as a text and territory of violence. For Segato, this pedagogy of cruelty is evidenced in all those unprecedented forms of bodily destruction that we see in our region, an issue that is expressed in various forms of trafficking and commercialisation of bodies (Segato, 2013).

Perhaps one of the most suggestive contributions comes precisely from indigenous or community feminisms, which have been developing the notion of body-territory (Ulloa, 2021; Zaragocin and Caretta, 2019). As a result of their experiences opposing extractive projects in Latin America, these thinkers have insisted on the ontological unity of the body-territory, insofar as they demand not to be violated either in their territory or their bodies.

Indigenous feminism, in this sense, has made visible the relationship between the body and the territory as a political positioning that responds to ontologies and epistemologies around ‘being’ and ‘being with’ the territory (Ulloa, 2021).

All these arguments are important in thinking about the body as a category to analyse current migrations. In this article, I intend to insist on its importance particularly to understand certain technologies of government, as well as mechanisms of exploitation and control. My invitation is to make a bodily turn in border and migratory studies, research that several authors have already begun and that I intend to develop in the second part of this article.

Strengthening of the state, segmented society, and segregated populations

Upon arriving at Mexico’s northern border, migrants already have extensive experience that has taught them about the effects caused by their bodies. In this sense, they are hyper-aware of their corporeality and their physical presence. They know that a migrant body is read and classified in a matrix of segregation and segmentation: whether at the border or the migratory station; or when they are detained by the police or immigration agents; or when racialised and stigmatised by local populations and xenophobic groups. Migrant bodies are classified and confined.

They are most often bodies dressed in simple clothes. Their attire betrays their condition. As I recorded in my interviews and field observations, migrants know that outside the shelters, on the streets of Tijuana, many predators are poised to take advantage of them. That is why every time they go out, they prepare themselves. Many migrants commented to me that they bathe and dress up as best they can to avoid looking like migrants. It is not surprising, therefore, that one Central American woman and mother mentioned that she dresses their children in Mexican soccer-team jerseys to avoid being identified as foreigner or as undocumented alien. Thus, the body is also part of a performance.

Due to all the preparation, women can go for a walk in poor neighbourhoods of the city without being easily identified as migrants by the police, their main and closest predator. ⁷ Despite all the human rights-education campaigns that the Tijuana police received over the past 10 years and contrary to the government’s publicised humanitarian approach to migrant populations, it was very clear to people at the shelter that they had to make themselves invisible to the police to avoid being levantados [kidnapped; literally, ‘picked up’], detained, extorted, and, as organisations of migrant defenders allege, disappeared.

All migrants are fully aware of what their bodies publicise. They can read their bodily presence and, well before others, are able to read how they are perceived by the local society. Fully aware of their bodies, migrants plan their movements according to their body geography. We might say that their bodies are the spearhead of their strategy for finding a place in local society.

For these reasons, the bodies of migrants of different origins and conditions act in the midst of societies predisposed to reject them at the slightest sign of their state of abjection. Their bodies act but always with restrictions. Given the awareness of the materiality of their bodies, migrants choose and design a wide range of possible strategies. Migrants produce, in this sense, a specific body politics.

To counteract these migrant-body policies, different governments, media, and anti-immigrant groups insist that, as migrant bodies, they pose a threat, more so now during the pandemic. The supposed threat was manifested in the successive migrant ‘caravans’ that tried to reach the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic, about which a narrative was disseminated that harped on an invasion of migrants, the lack of border controls, and the need to use a firm hand against abuses committed by migrants.

This type of discourse leads to the dehumanisation of all migrants, transforming them into bodies that threaten social peace. Current migrations offer us innumerable examples where bodies appear in all their paradoxical varieties. Migrant bodies are thus transformed into the hinge that oscillates between narrow-minded, nationalistic discourses and actions, and the broader practices and ideas of cosmopolitanism.

Exploited bodies

‘Tijuana is a generous city’, I heard a cab driver say for the umpteenth time in my first week in the city, as he took me to my destination. It is a phrase repeated insistently by its inhabitants to emphasise that in this Mexican border city there is plenty of work for anyone who wants to live there. Indeed, work seems to abound in this city where people from different backgrounds come together: those deported from the United States, internally displaced persons, asylum seekers, and migrants who end up staying here. Many of them stay indefinitely in the city, working in low-paying jobs with no social safety net.

Most of the people trapped in Tijuana live in shelters and reception centres. Others live in rented housing together with other people in the most vulnerable areas of the city. In order to survive, migrants must accept a wide range of jobs under exploitative conditions that are made more acute by the migrants’ lack of documents. Car washes, call centres, maquilas, private security companies, and numerous jobs in the entertainment and sex trade figure among the main job opportunities for migrants.

The economy and the migration pattern have changed in recent years, but a common denominator has remained: the social degradation of migrants, the tightening of border and migration controls, and the precarious integration of an illegalised labour power. In other words, with the expansion of globalisation since the 1990s, governments tightened all manner of migratory controls, not to eliminate the arrival of foreigners totally, but to subordinate them to a precarious labour market.

As a result of migration and migratory controls, a working class without rights has emerged. Workers are subjected to subcontracting, temporary work, informality, hourly or piecework, and the constant division of labour power according to national, racial, and gender differences.

In this context, migrants’ labour is exploited through disciplinary and biopolitical power. Disciplinary power targets, disciplines, and monitors individual bodies. Biopolitical power seeks to optimise and maximise the vitality of the population and migrant bodies, to influence their health, economic productivity, and well-being.

Most migrant shelters have a labour office, which is responsible for connecting employers with migrants. Laura Alvarado has shown that most employers benefit from migrants’ precarious situation since jobs offers seek workers with migrants’ characteristics, that is, lacking strong links to the city, without knowledge of their rights or citizenship to exercise those rights (Alvarado, 2020).

Alvarado’s studies reveal the case of one traditional urban shelter that requires migrants to find a job quickly in order to remain housed there. Migrants are therefore forced to look for a job the day after arriving. Alvarado also found a major contradiction: By offering medical care, legal advice, food, and a place to sleep, shelters pay for the social security that companies evade while exploiting the migrant labour power. Seen in this way, a humanitarian-minded politics of care (directed at the bodies of migrants) seems to go hand in hand with capitalist hyper-exploitation (of migrants’ bodies).

Richard Ávila is a deportee who resides in Tijuana after having lived for almost 30 years in the United States. ‘It was all about working and working to get ahead. My crime was to have entered illegally’. Like many deportees, given his proficiency in English, he is able to work in one of Tijuana’s numerous call centres. Call centres are often run by US companies that benefit from the deportees and work for US commercial activities from this city.

Richard works in a call centre that grants loans throughout the United States. One job requirement stipulated that he answer incoming calls as if he were located in a US city. ‘These companies want someone who speaks English and I need the job. It’s ironic because the U.S. deports us to Mexico and then uses our skills for much less money’. ⁸

This case highlights a number of paradoxes. The corps of deportees, which includes many people like Richard, is expelled and excluded, but their labour power continues to be exploited. In this way, as in Aneesh’s notion of virtual migration, while their skills and labour migrate abroad, these workers remain Mexican citizens, living and working in Mexico. Their labour and skills cross national boundaries, but the workers themselves do not (Aneesh, 2006).

At the same time, the case demonstrates that the border regime benefits from the maximum extraction of value possible, a value that is extracted from their bodies, their skills, and their enormous capacity to reach the limits of their strength.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, deportations and express expulsions increased enormously (Alma Migrante et al., 2021). Of course, in Hyndman’s feminist perspective, as all mobility of people is shaped by a geometry of power, these deportations and expulsions are more acute on those criminalised bodies (Hyndman, 2000): generally bodies from the global south.

Seen in a broader sense, I agree with Samaddar when he points out that the neo-liberal regime of population management provides capitalism, through refugees, deportees, and displaced persons, with a large amount of child labour, semi-slave labour, and deregulated labour (Samaddar, 2016). Capitalism survives better because of this vulnerable labour.

Enclosed bodies, weakened bodies

Like most of the poorest and most racialised people in the world, migrants constantly face being criminalised and confined. This happens especially at CBP detention centres, nicknamed hieleras [iceboxes] by migrants. ⁹ During their confinement in the United States, migrants are subjected to days or weeks of detention, without knowing exactly when they will be released. They are housed under difficult conditions, including cold temperatures and incandescent lights that subject migrants to low-intensity torture, causing such anguish that people often want nothing more than to put a definitive end to their increasingly nightmarish American dream.

In many ways, iceboxes are the material ‘ground zero’ of migration containment policies. They are sites where the dehumanisation of people occurs, where control technologies are organised simultaneously under biopolitical, medical, and scientific criteria. Iceboxes are where the psychological effects produced by these forms of confinement are characterised by a tendency to induce self-denigration among migrants, that is, feelings of worthlessness and constant vulnerability.

Detention centres, like prisons, are confined spaces that reproduce the racial and class inequalities that exist in society. Based on Price’s ideas, De Genova argues that the subjects of systematic criminalisation are racially subordinated populations, for whom prison is not some sort of separate, distant, and mysterious space, but is instead an identifiable and familiar cruelty that is thoroughly interwoven into the fabric of everyday life (Price, 2015, quoted by De Genova, 2021).

In any encounter with the state, a migrant body is subjected to its own fatigue, as the system works to exhaust migrants, draining their strength. In common parlance used by migrant defenders, the objective is to hacérselas cansada [wear them down, frustrate them], that is, to make it seem as if there is no exit and no alternative. In other words, migrants’ desperation is toyed with constantly.

Toño, a deported migrant I met at the ‘La Luz del Camino’ shelter in Tijuana, explained:

. . . gringos are very smart. They know very well what they are doing. They tell you, ‘Yes, we are going to review your case’, but meanwhile you have to wait in those iceboxes. And that’s where they break you. They destroy your will inside. And when you get out, you don’t want anything anymore and you just hope to get out as soon as possible (Interview in Tijuana, June 2019).

The result is that these bodies are stripped of their strength and their hopes. After spending a period in an icebox and repeatedly being sent to different detention centres, indefinitely prolonging their stay in confinement, migrants feel dejected and exhausted. Given their situation, some will decide to return to their places of origin.

Thus, the mass incarceration of migrants is an important part of migration control. This demonstrates that a system of disciplinary power exists that targets the individual body, which is educated and corrected through these methods of extracting strength and weakening bodies. In many ways, the disciplinary power dispenses discipline and does so in a manner that set an example, warning other migrants who have not yet passed through the iceboxes so that they know very well what can happen to them.

The result of this system of detention and immigration control is that, as Del Monte Madrigal explains, an important part of this population ends up being rejected from the border social order and therefore they become disposable persons (Del Monte Madrigal, 2021).

Tijuana is a city where deportees are visible in many ways. It is not uncommon for many of them to end up living on the streets or on the edge of the border. Through their stories, one understands how a disciplinary regime such as immigration detention produces a profound dehumanisation of people.

As Del Monte Madrigal explains, the system of control means that their lives have become disposable. The northern border offers a panorama, says this author, that is part of a long history of juxtaposing structural constraints of inequality. And in this history, forms of disciplinary power are combined with a wide variety of necropolitics impulses (Del Monte Madrigal, 2021: 200).

Disappeared bodies

Another fundamental aspect of current migrations is the production of missing persons. This is a necropolitical dimension because it denotes, according to Mbembe’s definition, a fundamental de-structuring of the boundaries between life and death.

There are no reliable statistics on disappearances. Studies indicate, however, that many of the more than 500,000 people who enter Mexico each year from Guatemala are among the frequent victims of robbery, extortion, torture, and assaults that are (sometimes) reported along the migratory routes (MSF, 2019). Organised crime has built a profitable business around migrants, who have become fodder for the ongoing struggles among drug cartel (Slack, 2019). According to some reports, there is a growing economy based on migrants that generates returns of $2.5 billion annually (MSF, 2019).

Other studies estimate that nearly 4 out of every 10 Central American migrants who cross Mexico on their way to the United States disappear. They could be alive, dead, or victims of human trafficking, according to reports by Amnesty International. ¹⁰

The deaths or disappearances create border-enforcement systems. According to Kobelenski, such systems translate into border policies and practices implemented through a kind of governmentality of death. Thus, the management of bodies, their identification, and return to their countries of origin create an enigmatic universe where people’s lives are impacted. For migrants, being a missing person is their worst nightmare. Kobelenski’s studies show that disappearance creates a void, an unknown. Migrants know that with disappearance there is no mourning and that, in addition, no one, no loved one will know about them. Words are insufficient to describe this feeling and fear. ¹¹

The disappearance of migrant bodies is a phenomenon of enormous magnitude in Mexico, which is the result of state or parastatal actions that inflict situations of extreme violence on migrants. Researchers such as Sabrina Melenotte (2022) make an important differentiation between making people disappear and letting them disappear. The former was typical of the authoritarian regimes that characterised Latin America. The latter, on the other hand, consists of abandoning migrants to their fate either in Central America or Mexico. For Melenotte, disappeared migrants in Mexico are the result of an authoritarian tradition within the state, in addition to the de-structuring effect of advanced capitalism.

The increasing number of disappeared people has led numerous collectives to search for migrants and missing persons in Mexico. These groups are new actors within the wider field of migration. In these collectives, family action is a key component, as is their professionalisation and politicisation (Melenotte, 2022). Various organisations have charged that the state is practically non-existent in the investigation of disappearances, since this task is carried out mostly by families themselves with the help of a few accompanying nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and professionals.

For example, the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement has for years been searching for missing migrants in Mexico. According to this organisation, 4 out of every 10 migrants from Central America disappear on their way through Mexico, contributing to an annual figure that could reach 160,000 people who disappear in their attempt to reach the United States. ¹²

Physical anthropologist Jason de León built on these figures through his research in the Arizona desert, the main crossing point for undocumented migrants, who face a hostile environment, high temperatures, and persecution by the Border Patrol. De León argues that the US government cannot openly kill 3000 migrants, but it can force them, with restrictive immigration policies, to cross through places where they are often left to die (De León, 2015).

We see this occur with increasing frequency not only at this border but in countless places where systems of control and expulsion of migrants have been erected. For example, Carolina Kobelinsky has documented the case of migrants who want to reach Europe, finding that ‘there is a close relationship between the death of migrants at sea and the tightening of migration policies’.

After observing how dire migrant disappearances are, we can ask how this tragedy combines with the need for migrant labour under contemporary capitalism. My answer would be that today’s capitalism has an important tension: It needs migrant labour power (if it is undocumented, so much the better), but this need simultaneously causes populations to be expelled. In other words, the system produces needed migrant labour power but cannot absorb it in its entirety. Since the model of capitalist accumulation cannot use all the displaced labour power that it generates, then a part of that population will be left to its own fate and subject to the machinations of criminal sectors.

This scenario leads me to agree with Tyner, who argues that the system works by threatening and endangering living bodies. In this sense, this author proposes that capital is increasingly extracted from dead or dying workers (Tyner, 2019).

The forms of disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical power, then, will act in multiple and complementary ways on these bodies in particular. Crucially, although they seem to be contradictory forms of power applied to bodies, this itself facilitates the maximum possible extraction of value from these bodies.

We have briefly reviewed the effects we observe in migrant bodies (exploited, weakened, disappeared). The list of effects is much longer, but these examples help us understand the enormous anti-immigrant machinery built to deal with the supposed threat posed by the arrival of ‘undesirable foreigners’.

Preceded by a long history of anti-immigrant policies, during the Trump administration, record levels of government spending were channelled to build and staff privately-run detention centres. Resources were also invested in technologies aimed at detaining, identifying, and controlling migrant populations. ¹³ These actions confirm that the capitalist security system succeeded in turning the circumstances into a profitable business.

Yet, how can this enormous governmental attention and readiness to halt the arrival of poor people from the Global South be explained? What is the concrete threat that they represent to the internal security of receiving countries? What message do governments intend to convey to anyone wanting to cross their borders?

These are still unanswered questions and this article endeavours to propose some possible responses.

Bodies that resist, bodies that defy, and bodies that remain

Since they defy the migratory apparatus previously described and the deployment of its technologies of bodily control, migrants cannot be thought of simply as victims. On the contrary, their presence along the border is irrefutable proof that they are still with us, crossing through dangerous areas and inhabiting ramshackle shelters. They set up camps in proximity to US ports of entry and march and fight for their rights. Their very existence is proof of their bodies’ power. They demonstrate in every action and in every individual or collective migratory project their irrepressible exaltation of life and the constant tendency to autopoiesis, that is, a constant and enduring ability to reproduce themselves as bodies and as a subjective force, despite all constraints. It is not necessary to idealise migrants to validate the strength and persistence of their migratory projects.

This perseverance has caught the attention of various authors. Pedro Roa, for example, in analysing testimonies of Africans who arrive in Tijuana and await entry to the United States, finds that many of them are guided by the fundamental human impulse of self-preservation. A kind of life force manifests itself in migrations as acts of faith, as an ethical-political rationality that guides migrants (Roa, 2021). This determination, Napolitano says, stems from affective forces and life impulses (Napolitano, 2016). Thus, in the midst of the current violence that migrants experience, their mobility projects are life-saving missions to flee from sundry forms of death in their home countries.

The migrant support organisation FM4 in Guadalajara has confirmed this finding through interviews with women arriving at their shelter: Many of them imagine their migratory journey to be redemptive, an experience that will change their entire lives from here on out (FM4 Paso Libre, 2018).

In many ways, migrations are explained by migrants’ subjectivity and autonomy, since they possess the ability to deploy strategies, choose the best routes, and persist in their migratory projects. These projects are also life impulses, a desire to escape from violence and death in order to transform their existences forever. Migration, in this and in many other ways, is a project of life.

Migrant caravans are part of this phenomenon and can be thought of as forms of collective bodily action. They are groupings and expressions of communality that are a way of confronting – by placing bodies on the front line – the entire adverse scenario, characterised by an anti-immigrant system established jointly by state actors, criminal elements, and public and private control mechanisms. ‘In the caravan I felt safer’, Maria told me when I interviewed her upon her arrival in Tijuana. And this is a common sentiment expressed in the testimonies I obtained at the border.

No wonder. Notwithstanding their different backgrounds, everyone walks together with the desire to materialise their migratory projects. Their bodies, united, are a defence against the adversity they must face.

The act of migrating has been called counter-conduct and an act of migrant disobedience (Álvarez Velasco, 2021; Aradau and Tazzioli, 2020). Herein lies one of the fundamental paradoxes of any ontology of bodies in migration. I refer to the fact, mentioned previously, that migrant bodies are routinely weakened, exploited, maimed, and often disappeared. In spite of this and their history of being excluded and segregated, their bodies and subjectivities are still with us as irrefutable proof of a perverse order that is embedded in the contemporary history of migration.

Their presence, subjective force, and materiality confirm that something is happening. That something has happened, from which a response can be organised. Their bodies and subjectivities survive the persistent dehumanisation and, in their absolute materiality, constitute the symbolic strength to ground their resistance and retrace their history.

Conclusion

The Covid-19 pandemic greatly accelerated the implementation of policies and administrative procedures put in place over recent years to detain and expel migrants. This new virus provided perfect and indisputable reasons for governments across the political spectrum to justify their anti-immigrant policies. It gave governments legitimacy and in turn they led people to believe that defending citizens’ health is sufficient reason to continue denying human rights and inflict the greatest possible pain and vexation in migrant populations.

Viruses serve to reinforce a certain type of society, says Preciado (2020). And in this case, it is a society and a state order that increasingly reject a determined type of people. Through a system of migratory control that promotes the exclusion of people from the South, a racialised, sexualised, and classist body order is imposed. We have seen in this article how the pandemic shaped a process that deepened the illegalisation of migrants, who were expelled with greater legitimacy.

In this article, we have seen how States abandoned their protection of migrants during the pandemic, while they applied more vehemently their migration control policies. For these reasons, the migration containment regime operates under a variety of forms of power that have the body as their main target, whether to exploit it in the precarious labour market, to weaken and discipline it in detention and confinement centres, or to disappear it in the migratory transit.

The result of all this is that the migrant bodies were and are dehumanised through a process that transforms them simply into bodies, while discarding their histories and the human dimensions of people on the move. Thus, capitalism produces a constant and progressive tendency in the migratory structure to devalue migrants’ bodies. The system devalues them, while simultaneously preparing them to enter the structure of labour exploitation of illegalised bodies.

This is a body policy that prepares and makes migrants docile for precarious work, a kind of anthropology of bodies within capital where the system supports and disseminates a concept of bodies that adapt, that have resilience (resisting exploitation to the maximum extent possible), and that exist solely as individual and abstract bodies. They are bodies that, in sum, adapt to the economy of precarious employment.

The migrant body can be thought of as a body that is always divided, that expresses itself in all its multiplicity and contradiction. Migrant bodies matter insofar as they are available bodies that can be incorporated into a system of labour exploitation in the principal economies. The system conceives them as enclosed bodies, discarded bodies, and bodies that do not matter. However, these are bodies and subjectivities that demand rights. People who aspire and who struggle.

For this reason, the response of migrants has been to continue to further their migratory projects and rely on them. In many ways, moving forward has meant resisting, despite the fact that because of the pandemic, the already high number of detentions has doubled since lockdowns began.

In this context, we should realise that we are witnessing an economic system that intrinsically generates a population surplus, that is, an economy that combines, in a very organised way, maximum brutality with sophistication, merging technological development with continuous population expulsion (Sassen, 2014).

During the pandemic, migrants have had to choose between capital and life, between economy and health. A mantra often repeated by migrants from around the world is: Either starve to death or die from the virus!. ¹⁴ Faced with these choices, it is clear that the migration issue is much more than a discussion about the human right of free movement of a few populations. To properly begin these discussions, we must focus our critique on capital and the existing system.

In this article, I have shown that bodies are the ultimate target of political control and domination of migrants. Bodies are affected in multiple ways and through varied forms of power. This politics of bodies in migration cannot easily be analysed without considering the racial, class, and gendered conditions that it itself creates. Thus, I conclude that the system of migration control has produced an enormous war machine that affects migrant bodies in multiple ways and with different mechanisms of power. Machines to exploit bodies and machines to discipline and docilize. Machines to weaken and machines to disappear. A whole machine-like dimension emerges to ensured, in this way, the maximum use of the migrant power while keeping migrants at bay, unable to demand rights or struggle for better conditions. Because of all this, capitalism and the States reinforce their power thanks to this anti-immigrant machinery. Machinery that is, in the end, a corporal machinery.

Finally, every single day those same bodies organise a whole series of resistances and struggles to face off against this entire machinery that would seek to dominate them.

Author biography

Yerko Castro Neira is a Professor of Anthropology at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico. His research topics are human mobilities and the migration control regime, its multifaceted violence, and the problems associated with law and justice. He has previously undertaken research stays and fieldwork in Chile, Mexico, United States, and France.