Typologies of Borders and Migration (Pt. 1A of 3)

BOULDER, Colorado -- As Itchy continues to formulate his thoughts on American immigration policy, I thought I would do a brief intervention about some current research on borders and migration and offer up some illustrative maps.

There are two basic schools of thought on borders. The traditional view is that the current international borders are the static, physical outcomes of international relations, and they are largely unchanging. Alternatively, the popular belief today is that we are entering a "borderless" world where distinctions of national territory and sovereignty are becoming less and less important. Neither of these are correct. Borders are, as George Simmel said, "not a spatial fact with sociological effects, but a sociological fact which takes a spatial form" - that is, they are constructions, the manifestation of a set of social processes. But just because they are constructed does not mean they are not meaningful, or that they do not have impacts on people's daily lives.

As for the second line of thinking, innovations like the Internet may have broken down some walls between people across the globe, but even access to information can be controlled and restricted by states. For every wall that has come down in the European Union, for example, another hard border has been erected, whether that be in the form of a Chinese firewall or a moveable fence in the California desert. A vast new network of migration management is growing, and it permeates far beyond the border regions. As America's recent experience with immigration has shown, the free trade impulse often loses out to fear-mongering arguments about national security when it comes to border policy, so there is no clear trajectory towards freer and more open borders [for more on this see Newman, David (2006) "The lines that continue to separate us: borders in our 'borderless' world," Progress in Human Geography 30(2): 143-161.]

One of my favorite tools for teaching students about borders is "Hypothetica," a fictitious nation that is stricken with nearly every type of border conflict known to man. From trans-border oil fields to meandering rivers to irridentist nationalism, Hypothetica is besieged from all sides. Here we can see why borders pose so many problems.


But that is only the beginning of the messiness. Many of these are static physical features, but borders only gain meaning when people or things move across them, so integrating a discussion of migration into the study of borders is essential. While we can develop some typologies of borders and migration, there can never be any sort of unified theory of borders. Ultimately, this map merely argues that it is hard to draw straight lines for borders without really considering that these characteristics can overlap and shift over time, creating a much more complicated picture. Michele Acuto in her article "Edges of the Conflict: A Three-Fold Conceptualization of National Borders" offers her own typology of migration, classifying national borders as either walls that restrict mobility, ideal lines that demarcate intangible - but not physical - barriers between communities, and border regions with varying degrees of extent. What we need to do is re-scale the border and not think of it merely as a line.

Borders have traditionally been conceived as divisions between states, but we should think about their meaning and impacts on different scales as well. As Hypothetica illustrates, international borders can also divide sub-national communities, and they are often managed, patrolled, and interpreted by people and authorities other than the national government. If we take a closer look at most borders, they are not bright lines or solid walls, but a series of gaps and zones where access and enforcement are highly variable, as this map of Brownsville, Texas illustrates. This does not mean that we should strive for this ideal type of a continuous wall from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean - that is neither possible nor desirable.

This also means we need to rethink how borders are drawn on a map. They are traditionally thought of as linear features - the proverbial line in the sand separating two entities. In reality, few borders conform to this two-dimensional notion. The line is often broken, demarcated in some spaces and not in others. Borders can also be point features, as access across many borders is often restricted to particular nodes. Or they can be areal features as well - there are interstitial spaces where neither side can claim absolute sovereignty, or there may be a no-man's-land between the hard borders the two sides enforce. There are also border zones, areas near the border where different territorialities and legal regimes may operate. Even approaching the border may be restricted, or the border zones may have more liberalized trade and customs regimes. Even the popular conceptions of a "borderland" or "frontier" evokes different meanings and representations - the landscape, the reach of state authority, and the identities of the people living there can change as one moves closer to or farther away from a border.

We will never be able to tackle any of the challenges that immigration presents until we stop trying to achieve that perfect, impermeable border and recognize that borders are messy. They are not lines in the sand, but a series of processes of movement and management and representation that are all tied to much larger questions of citizenship and mobility. The permeability of a border depends on who is crossing it, or what, and where and why. We can never wall off America, nor would we ever want to.

Moldovans Protest Parliamentary Vote, Violence Sparked by Government Provocateurs?

BOULDER, Colorado -- Moldovan authorities regained control of the country's parliament and presidential administration buildings Wednesday after the capital Chisinau had been gripped by demonstrations sparked by Sunday's parliamentary elections. Protesters claimed that there was widespread vote-rigging by the government. Moldova's communists, led by the country's president Vladimir Voronin, did far better than expected, winning nearly 50% of the vote, ensuring their ability to form a government and choose the next president.

The protests, which began Monday, were led mostly by Moldovan youth movements. More than 10,000 people gathered in the city streets, many waving signs telling people to "trash" the communists. By Tuesday, the protests had devolved into rioting, and the authorities sent in riot police. Protesters stormed the parliamentary building, setting fire to furniture and hurling objects out of the windows, and it was not until Wednesday that the police managed to regain control of the building. Police made 193 arrests over the past three days, and more than 200 police and civilians were injured during the violence.

While sparked by political grievances, the protests also centered around economic concerns. Nearly a third of the country's adult population travels abroad for work, and remittances made up 36% of Moldova's GDP in 2007, making it the most remittance-dependent economy in the world. However, the economic downturn in Europe has caused jobs to dry up, and many workers, especially young people, have been forced to return home, unemployed and dissatisfied with the economic and political stagnation they are witnessing there.

Several of the protesters were waving Romanian and EU flags, demanding closer ties with their western neighbor. The government took this as a sign of foreign provocation, accusing Romania of inciting the riots. While there is a strong Romanian nationalist movement within Moldova, most citizen want closer ties with Romania and the European Union because EU membership would allow easier access to job markets for Moldovan workers and provide the country some degree of collective security from Russia, which supports and occupies its breakaway region of Transdnistria. During the unrest in Chisinau, Transdnistria sent troops (many of them Russian "peacekeepers") to its western border to seal off access, apparently fearing the unlikely scenario that someone from Moldova would flee to the gangster republic.

Some are now speculating that the worst of the violence was actually instigated thugs organized and paid by the Moldovan government. Unimedia has posted photos of several young men they claim were mainly responsible for ransacking the parliament, and may have been told to do so by the police. There are photos of people raising EU and Romanian flags atop the parliament with policemen clearly visible in the background, making no effort to stop them. The site also includes a video of police allegedly placing stones and other projectiles around the parliament for their paid provocateurs to throw.

Russian nationalist and all-around crackpot conspiracy theorist Alexander Dugin somehow managed to place the blame for the riots on Barack Obama. [Note: the preceding link comes from the Moscow News, a Russian government-owned propaganda rag now edited by apologist fool Tim Wall.] He claims that the American government has organized a "color revolution" for Moldova, much like the public uprisings that toppled governments in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, events he also blames on the US.

Meanwhile, protesters are also putting pressure on Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili. Tens of thousands gathered in front of parliament to demand his resignation, citing his dictatorial rule and brazen mishandling of relations with Russia, which culminated in last summer's disastrous war in South Ossetia. The protests come on the twentieth anniversary of a brutal crackdown of independence protesters in Tbilisi by Soviet authorities. Soldiers and police killed twenty civilians that day, which is now considered a formative moment in the Georgian independence movement.

Many of the protests in the Moldovan capital were organized by the help of social networking sites Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately, the country's Internet service provider is the state-owned (and awfully-named) Moldtelecom, which promptly cut off access to the services. Most foreign journalists were not allowed access to the country during the violence, meaning much of the information was disseminated by participants via the Internet. The pictures in this post come from unimedia.info, which contains several galleries of photos and videos of the protests.

While the parliamentary voting was nominally approved by foreign observers as fair, many in Moldova believe that the vote was rigged to keep the communists in power. Voronin will have to step down from the presidency in a few months, as he has reached the constitutional limit of two four-year terms, but it may be very important for him to have a say in choosing his successor. In a move similar to Boris Yelstin passing power to Vladimir Putin in 1999, in part to ensure that the Yeltsin family's corruption would not be investigated by his successor in the Kremlin, the 67-year-old Voronin could keep his own ill-gotten riches safe by passing power to a close political ally. There has been some speculation that he may even choose his son Oleg, though the corruption allegations that have swirled around him make that unlikely.