Racism and Borders: Representation, Repression, Resistance

While policies like SB 1070, Arizona’s now infamous immigration legislation, have raised issues of racial profiling and policing practices, there have been few detailed analyses of broader practices of racialization and racism at borders more extensively.

Some works have focused specifically upon profiling, without looking at varied processes of racialization. In addition, most studies of border controls have examined the US context, while few have looked at racism and racialization and borders in multinational contexts as the current work does.

The work provides analyses of constructions of race and repressive border policies and examines critically larger policy questions in the context of neoliberal governance practices. It can serve as a primary or supplementary text for university courses in Criminology, Sociology, Politics, Geography, Cultural Studies and International Affairs. Beyond academia, it provides a useful resource for civil liberties and human rights groups, advocacy movements and community organizations supporting immigrants and refugees as well as those representing members of racialized non-migrant communities in diverse contexts.

The Editor's introduction examines the historical and recent contexts of racial profiling and resistance to profiling, especially since 9/11 and the war on terror. Chapters contributed by scholars from a diversity of backgrounds, perspectives and institutions explore the problem of "the Other," the power and means of defining "territory," gender, the treatment of indigenous peoples, and the active and passive ways in which those in the dominant group step over, obliterate, abuse and turn a blind eye to all other groups. In contrast, Graciela Susana Boruszko discusses the concept of "hospitality" -- calling upon each of us to "make room for the other" and asserting that "divergent perspectives do not call for reconciliation but to remain standing at ease, side by side, while we disagree on that issue."