Borders of Wealth and Poverty: Ideas Stimulated by Comparing the Mediterranean and U.S.-Mexico Borders

Abstract

How can anthropologists and sociologists share ideas and knowledge on the Mediterranean and U.S.-Mexico borders to deepen insight and understanding? The best-known comparison is militarized border enforcement, plus humanitarianism, posed against asylum seeking and irregular migration. But, more complex mobility occurs at these borders, including privileged and other differentiated and sorted mobilities. Interwoven with these mobilities, commerce of many scales and degrees of legality occurs, supporting complicated cultural worlds of informality and exchange. Borders require not just a political analysis, but also attention to capital. Importantly, borders (immediate and extended) have become increasingly important sites of export-oriented production in the world economy. The processes of interchange at borders, in turn, support important urban zones and other communities that merit close ethnographic study for their social and cultural complexity.

Migration in the Mediterranean region: A response to crises and an emergency in its own right

“…Finally, the themes of bordering and globalization were linked to international migration in the Mediterranean context also by Ribas-Mateos (2017, 2005 in a comprehensive study focusing on several 'gateway cities' of the European Mediterranean shore and on their forms of welfare and migration. Moreover in a recent contribution the concept of borders engaged in the relationship between wealth and poverty has been studied ethnographically comparing the situation in the Mediterranean region with the US-Mexico border one (Heyman and Ribas-Mateos, 2019) and extending the analysis beyond migration.…”

Introduction to the Handbook on Human Security, Borders and Migration

“…According to Heyman and Ribas-Mateos (2019), three key kinds of relationship are involved in such a border regional context: (i) Militarized barriers (combined natural and human-made) that prevent the entry of peasant-workers and working classes from the Global South. This includes both uninspected entry of unauthorized workers and asylum-seeker attempts.…”

“…While asylum seekers and unauthorized migrants receive the most attention from media, activists, and scholars, it is important to examine borders in terms of unequal mobility that includes millions of legal entries (see Heyman and Ribas-Mateos 2019). A diverse and complex range of people pass through the Mediterranean and US-Mexico borders, making a complete account unrealistic here, but there is a scattering of ethnographies of privileged crossers and the kinds of visas they hold (managers, shoppers, students, legal border commuting laborers, etc.…”

“…More needs to be done, but we are beginning to understand borders as differentiating filters linking and managing stratified components of the world system. For this task, we need an ethnography of privilege and normalization as well as the reduction to "bare life" and risks in crossing, and humanitarian action at borders (see Heyman and Ribas-Mateos 2019). Ethnography then seeks to make connections between close-ups and extreme long shots.…”

“…The identification of best practices and lessons in border areas through actions directed by different border networks that respond to different aspects of border violence. Within this grounded theory more inductive approach, various texts do inform us on the effects of capitalism, the concentration of settlement around border sites of global production and exchange, which is an important traditional focus of border ethnography (Heyman and Ribas-Mateos 2019). In many chapters there is a background of border ethnography: they include border narratives, identifications and political movements that speak to resistance and reinforcement.…”