Along the US-Mexico border, pro- and anti- immigration groups engage in activist activity to help migrants, or to assist the authorities seeking to detain them. In Divided by the Wall: Progressive and Conservative Immigration Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border (University of California Press, 2020), UTSC Sociology Professor Emine Fidan Elcioglu spent 20 months embedded with these groups, and presents an examination of what drives their members. We sat down with Prof. Elcioglu to find out why both sides engage so passionately in immigration and border politics, and how the issue has become a substitute for concerns about class inequality among white Americans.
In your book you detail how the issue of illegal immigration mobilizes activists on both the left and right sides of the political divide. Why do you think this issue is such a polarizing one, and why are people moved to get involved?
EFE: These are the questions I set out to answer through 20 months of immersive ethnography and nearly 90 in-depth interviews. However, rather than exploring immigration politics in the halls of Congress, I decided to focus on ordinary Americans who go out of their way to collectively mobilize at the US-Mexico borderlands. Specifically, I focused on a part of the border – Arizona – which has become one of the most important entry points of unauthorized entry into the US for migrants. The harsh terrain of Southern Arizona’s Sonoran Desert is also one of most treacherous places to cross the border. Nearly 40% of migrant deaths along the US’s 2000-mile border with Mexico occurred in Arizona-Sonora corridor last year.
Because it has become such a high-traffic area, Arizona has become a focal point for grassroots political activity. Americans who are sympathetic towards the plight of migrants have mobilized to create ‘humanitarian aid’ stations (consisting of water, cans of beans and other essentials) in the desert, in hopes that border crossers will find them. Meanwhile, Americans who are concerned that the US is losing the ‘war’ against Mexican cartel-led drug smuggling, go out in the desert to find border crossers and detain them on behalf of US Border Patrol. Likewise, people are also mobilizing in Arizona’s interior, in cities like Phoenix, Tucson, and South Tucson, to either help or hinder immigration enforcement.
From the get-go, I noticed two very puzzling characteristics among my respondents. First, whether on the political left or the right, these activists were not personally impacted by immigration and border policies. Most were white American citizens. Second, despite being extremely dedicated to their work, my respondents didn’t quite believe that their mobilization would effect change. Leftist activists knew that no matter how much water they put out in the desert, migrants would continue to die from dehydration. Similarly, rightwing activists knew that no matter how often they patrolled the desert, they could never deter cross-border traffic of people and contraband. So, I had myself a two-fold puzzle: why are these folks mobilizing if a) they themselves are not personally impacted by these laws, and b) they don’t even believe that their efforts will bear fruit?
Over time, I came to learn that immigration politics is not just about immigration. Immigration politics has become a convenient way for people to express their distress about increasing inequality. This activism was also very personally meaningful to participants’ self-understandings. My interlocutors felt like they transformed into better people through their immigration-related activism. This is because activism gave participants a way to cope with the misery, uncertainty, and anxiety that they experienced as members of a highly stratified society. Why are some people barely making ends meet while others are making stratospheric profits? Why are some condemned to a lifetime of insecure housing, while others get mansions? Or, why does the state reserve benefits and privilege for some people, and punishment and violence for others? So, in other words, I learned that immigration serves as a placeholder for other concerns – about why some people have it so easy, and more and more people have it so hard.
Oddly enough, therefore, defusing the contentiousness of immigration requires that we think beyond immigration policy. If we can address social inequality, maybe people won’t seek out the salve of immigration politics!
You carried out fieldwork amongst five different grassroots organizations. Can you talk about what kind of activities you observed? What was the experience like?
EFE: It was hard! When I first arrived in Arizona in 2010, I had only one contact – a young white American woman who I had met in Mexico at a Spanish-language school who told me about the pro-immigrant organization in Arizona with which she had begun volunteering. Through her, I was able to meet other members, and over time, as one person introduced me to another, I also made contact with an allied organization. Believe it or not, the three anti-immigrant organizations that I eventually studied were much more receptive to me than the folks on the left. In part, these male-dominated anti-immigrant groups didn’t think a young woman like me was very threatening. Also, at the time, I was a graduate student from UC Berkeley, which has a reputation of being very lefty and radical. My right-wing respondents were intrigued that a Berkeley student would take an interest in them. I was a novelty to them—which worked in my favor! I was able to immerse myself in their world. That’s the nature of fieldwork – what you anticipate will happen is never what actually happens.
Ethnographic fieldwork consisted of following people around. I spent a lot of time in the desert. I followed my leftist respondents as they searched for migrant trails to do water drops. We would lug gallon-sized jugs of water, cans of beans, and other ‘humanitarian’ essentials deep into the desert and place them in areas we thought migrants might find them. I also followed my rightwing respondents into the desert as they too searched for migrant trails. But their goal was different: they wanted to find migrants and contraband to report them to the US Border Patrol.
Other organizations did other things. There was (and continues to be) a lot of controversy around whether regular local law enforcement – like municipal police - should be deputized to act as immigration control agents. So, one pro-immigrant organization I studied looked for ways to protect undocumented residents from encountering cops in their day-to-day lives. I followed activists around as they protested in front of police stations and taught immigrants how to avoid encounters with the police that could lead to deportation. I also followed around an anti-immigrant organization and they too would spend a lot of time protesting in front of police stations. But, they were working towards the opposite goal: they wanted make it easier for cops to act as immigration agents.
I also accompanied people on more mundane occasions. For instance, I tagged along with them to meetings, to church, or to help run errands. I had meals with them and their families. Often, these low-key everyday activities provide the best context to build trust, get to know people, and understand why they do what they do.
To what extent is the divide around immigration rooted in social class?
EFE: Great question! Class, I learned, was very important to what I was observing. Although most of my respondents identified as white, they did not share the same class background. Compared to their pro-immigrant opponents, anti-immigrant activists had less formal education. Also, they did not have a lot of choice in whether they were employed. And their biographies often revealed that they had experienced downward social mobility—particularly in the aftermath of job loss. And there was also a gender disparity across the two sides: while most pro-immigrant activists were women, most of their anti-immigrant opponents were men. So, the political divide mapped onto a positionality divide.
On each side of the divide, would you say there’s a ‘type’ of person who mobilizes around the issue of immigration? Are there any shared characteristics between the two sets? Any crucial differences?
EFE: Yes – there was absolutely a ‘type’ of person on each side of this divide. And it speaks to the fact that certain kinds of ‘selves’ and subjectivities are attracted to certain kinds of political projects—even when the person has nothing to materially gain from that project.
So, pro-immigrant activists tended to be upper and middle-class white women who grappled with the tension between their privilege and their progressive worldview. They wanted the world to be more equal, but at the same time, they were uncomfortably aware of how much they themselves had personally benefited from inequality. Scholarship about whiteness in the US and Canada show that, historically, white middle class women felt ‘counted’ in society by performing ‘goodness’—and a key way to do that was by helping the less fortunate Other. For instance, settlement house movement workers, who provided charitable services to poor, non-Anglo immigrants in the early 20th century, tended to be white middle-class women – like Jane Addams in Chicago or Sara Libby Carson in Toronto. Of course, our understandings have changed a lot over the past century. But this norm – about what it means to be a good white middle-class woman – still lives with us. Pro-immigrant activists felt driven to help immigrants as a way to grapple with this norm in the context of their privileged lives. They reported feeling ‘self-transformed’ through their activism.
Meanwhile, anti-immigrant activists struggled with being white, but working-class—or the disparity between their in-group status as white men and the diminishing sense of control that accompanied downward mobility. What made white-but-working-class a troubled identity was again related to hegemonic whiteness norms. It was the idea that in order to be a ‘good’ or competent white man, one could not feel economically precarious. Rather, American white masculinity norms very much revolve around self-reliance and being the ‘big wheel’; that is, someone who has wealth, power, and status. These are big ideals to live up to, particularly if you struggle with things like job loss, housing insecurity, family dysfunction, and unhealthy living conditions – as many of my working-class respondents did. Within this context, activism felt meaningful because it restored these men’s sense of mastery and control. So, oddly, like their opponents, they also felt transformed through their participation in immigration-related political action.
As I explain in the book, what made this political mobilization so “profoundly meaningful” was its contribution to the “project of remaking the self.” In other words, “the borderland served as a place for American self-actualization as class differences grew starker” (11-12).
What role do attitudes towards state power play in this?
EFE: Contrasting attitudes towards state power is at the core of what separates the two sides’ worldviews. The two movements harbored very different conceptualizations of the state. Pro-immigrant activists saw the state as powerful and dangerously competent. The state, especially as it manifested in the borderlands, was a coherent and domineering structure that preyed on migrants. I refer to this worldview as the ‘strong-state effect’ in the book. Their opponents, meanwhile, saw the state as emasculated and dangerously incompetent. When they looked at the borderlands, they saw a bunch of border patrol agents getting bested by savvy and powerful cartels. This is the ‘weak-state effect.’
The strong and weak-state effects served as mental maps or interpretive schema that activists relied on to understand what was happening around them. Pro-immigrant activists argued that American policies created the displacement that led people to migrate, and then the state weaponized Arizona’s Sonoran Desert against migrants. Anti-immigrant activists, meanwhile, attributed far more agency to migrants, saying that the unguarded Arizona borderlands, made unauthorized entry attractive.
So, when pro-immigrant activists mobilized, they did so in hopes of ‘protecting’ immigrants from the dominating state. Their opponents mobilized to ‘protect’ and bolster the state so that it could stave off migration and drug smuggling. These ideas about the state also synergized with gendered expectations. Progressive-but-privileged women felt like they were using the unearned advantages of their whiteness and citizenship to help the unfortunate migrant Other. White-but-working-class men themselves felt empowered as they helped empower the state.
All of these ideas help explain to the puzzles that I alluded to earlier. Why do people engage in struggles even when they don’t think their actions have that much impact? I realized that for my respondents, the external effects of their actions didn’t matter that much. What mattered far more was how their activism made them feel about themselves in this context of inequality.
Do you see attitudes to the issue softening with the end of the Trump era? How do you see the evolution of these attitudes changing over time?
EFE: Unfortunately, I don’t. My findings suggest that the immigration debate is how many Americans articulate their unease with the social world, particularly the yawning gap between the wealthy and powerful, and everyone else. One interesting trend in recent years is that the pandemic, and specifically, public health measures to fight it, has also become a highly politicized topic. My hunch is that anti-vax mobilization is also driven largely by issues that have nothing to do with the vaccine—but people are using this topic as a way to express their frustrations about larger structural problems. We don’t live in a stable, certain, or safe world. There is a lot of ontological insecurity. We need to address the root causes of these issues – one of which is the worsening inequality that capitalism creates.
Can you tell us a little about your current project?
EFE: The current project is entitled “New Canadians, New Tories,” and it will explore people’s participation in and understandings of immigration politics—but from a slightly different angle. While Divided by the Wall was set in the rural borderlands of the US, the current study will take place in the bustling GTA. While DBTW examines extra-electoral activism, the current project will focus on people’s voting behavior.
So, for many years now, Canada has experienced sharp growth in majority-minority ridings, such that racialized foreign-born Canadians have become critical players in the nation’s key political battlegrounds. The Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) has long been aware of this trend and for this reason, have engaged in “ethnic outreach” campaigns to attract new Canadian voters. Existing research suggests these outreach efforts have been successful. We can no longer assume that immigrants are surefire supporters of the Liberal Party. However, what we don’t know is why immigrants are increasingly voting for center-right parties.
This question is particularly puzzling, given the Tories’ record of upholding xenophobic and racist policies. Stephen Harper’s CPC government, for instance, reduced pathways to citizenship; broadened the grounds for deportation for noncitizens; limited refugees’ access to asylum; shrank family class immigration; and threatened Muslim and Arab Canadians’ civil liberties. Moreover, Harper-era policies gutted social assistance, education, and settlement services, while fiscally prioritizing policing and prison construction. These initiatives disproportionately harmed visible minorities, particularly new Canadians and their families. Given this policy record, why are more and more immigrants voting for the Tories and other parties on the political right?
To answer this question, my RAs and I will conduct interviews with different groups of naturalized Canadians starting in May. With the provincial elections around the corner, politics will no doubt be on people’s minds. I hope that the answers we gather will help us address a larger question that intrigues social scientists, which is: why do people behave in ways that work against their group interests?
To see how this project is developing, check out the website in the coming weeks.
Divided by the Wall can be purchased here and here. An e-book version is also available through the University of Toronto’s Library website.