CHAPTER 1
THE PROLIFERATION OF BORDERS
The World Seen from a Cab
Anyone who has used the taxi system in New York City over thepast decade will know the vast diversity that exists within the laborforce that drives the city's yellow cabs. Fewer people will know whatit takes to organize a strike among these predominantly migrantworkers who speak more than eighty different languages. In Taxi!Cabs and Capitalism in New York City (2005), Biju Mathew, himselfan organizer of the grassroots New York Taxi Workers Alliance(NYTWA), documents the history of the many strikes that led to thehistoric fare rise victory for the city's cab drivers in March 2004.Mathew's book is in many ways a story about borders—not only thelinguistic borders that separate these workers but also the urbanborders they routinely cross as part of their working lives, the internationalborders they cross to reach New York City, and the socialborders that divide them from their clients and the owners fromwhom they lease the cabs. Investigating the restructuring of theNYC cab industry and its links to the wider shifts of capitalism in aglobal era, Taxi! illustrates how these many borders figure in thecomposition, struggles, and organizational forms of the labor forcein this sector.
It is no secret that many NYC cab drivers are highly qualifiedindividuals, whose presence in such a job is often a kind of transitstation or waiting room for further labor mobility. Indeed, as hasalso been noted in a recent study of Indian techno-migrants inSilicon Valley (Ong 2006, 163–65), it is frequently the case that the "illegal" juridical status of these workers produces another border that crisscrossesand multiplies the already existing diversity of this workforce. Moreover,the wounds of history resurface in the composition of the labor force.This is particularly the case with migrant workers coming from South Asia,for whom the memory and actual legacy of the subcontinent's partition is anongoing experience. It is thus all the more remarkable that, as Mathewrecalls, Pakistani and Indian drivers acted side by side during the 1998 NewYork taxi strike when some 24,000 yellow cab drivers took their cars off theroad to protest new safety measures that subjected them to higher fines,mandatory drug testing, higher liability insurance requirements, and a prohibitivemeans of attaching penalty points to their licenses. Just one weekafter their home countries tested nuclear weapons in an environment ofescalating nationalist tensions, these drivers acted together in two day-longstrikes that brought the city to a halt.
Mathew bases his research on a particular image of globalization andneoliberalism as well as a critique of multiculturalism and postcolonialismas a set of state- and market-friendly discourses that protect establishedclass positions. At times this seems to us too rigid. More interesting, in ourview, is the way Taxi! can be read as a chronicle of the proliferation ofborders in the world today and the multiscalar roles they play in the currentreorganization of working lives. Although Mathew's study focuses on asingle city, the increasing heterogeneity of global space is evident in thestories he tells about negotiating the metropolis. Issues of territory, jurisdiction,division of labor, governance, sovereignty, and translation all collapseinto the urban spaces that these drivers traverse. This is not merely becausethe city in question is New York, where migrant labor has played a key rolein the reshaping of the metropolitan economy and the development ofsocial struggles in the past fifteen years (Ness 2005). As we show in thechapters that follow, the proliferation of borders in other parts of the world(whether on the "external frontiers" of Europe, the sovereign territory ofChina, or the Australian sphere of influence in the Pacific) displays tendenciescommon to those discussed by Mathew.
Our interest is in changing border and migration regimes in a world inwhich national borders are no longer the only or necessarily the most relevantones for dividing and restricting labor mobilities. The nation-state stillprovides an important political reference from the point of view of powerconfigurations and their articulation with capital–labor relations. Nevertheless,we are convinced that contemporary power dynamics and strugglescannot be contained by national borders or the international system ofstates they putatively establish. This is an important point of departure forour work. Though we emphasize the strategic importance of borders in thecontemporary world, we do not intend to join the chorus that in recent yearsand from many different points of view has celebrated the return of thenation-state on the world stage, dismissing the debates on globalization asmere ideological distortion. To the contrary, one of our central theses is thatborders, far from serving simply to block or obstruct global flows, havebecome essential devices for their articulation. In so doing, borders have notjust proliferated. They are also undergoing complex transformations thatcorrespond to what Saskia Sassen (2007, 214) has called "the actual andheuristic disaggregation of 'the border.'" The multiple (legal and cultural,social and economic) components of the concept and institution of theborder tend to tear apart from the magnetic line corresponding to the geopoliticalline of separation between nation-states. To grasp this process, wetake a critical distance from the prevalent interest in geopolitical borders inmany critical approaches to the border, and we speak not only of a proliferationbut also of a heterogenization of borders.
The traditional image of borders is still inscribed onto maps in whichdiscrete sovereign territories are separated by lines and marked by differentcolors. This image has been produced by the modern history of the state,and we must always be aware of its complexities. Just to make an example,migration control has only quite recently become a prominent function ofpolitical borders. At the same time, historicizing the development of linearborders means to be aware of the risks of a naturalization of a specific imageof the border. Such naturalization does not assist in understanding the mostsalient transformations we are facing in the contemporary world. Todayborders are not merely geographical margins or territorial edges. They arecomplex social institutions, which are marked by tensions between practicesof border reinforcement and border crossing. This definition of whatmakes up a border, proposed by Pablo Vila (2000) in an attempt to criticallytake stock of the development of studies on the U.S.–Mexican borderlandssince the late 1980s, points to the tensions and conflicts constitutive of anyborder.
We are convinced that this constituent moment surfaces with particularintensity today, along specific geopolitical borders and the many otherboundaries that cross cities, regions, and continents. Borders, on one hand,are becoming finely tuned instruments for managing, calibrating, and governingglobal passages of people, money, and things. On the other hand,they are spaces in which the transformations of sovereign power and theambivalent nexus of politics and violence are never far from view. To observethese dual tendencies is not merely to make the banal but necessarypoint that borders always have two sides, or that they connect as well asdivide. Borders also play a key role in producing the times and spaces ofglobal capitalism. Furthermore, they shape the struggles that rise up withinand against these times and spaces—struggles that often allude problematically,but in rich and determinate ways, to the abolition of borders themselves.In this regard, borders have become in recent years an importantconcern of research and political and artistic practice. They are sites inwhich the turbulence and conflictual intensity of global capitalist dynamicsare particularly apparent. As such they provide strategic grounds for theanalysis and contestation of actually existing globalization.
What Is a Border?
In an influential essay titled "What Is a Border?," Étienne Balibar writes ofthe "polysemy" and "heterogeneity" of borders, noting that their "multiplicity,their hypothetical and fictive nature" does "not make them any lessreal" (2002, 76). Not only are there different kinds of borders that individualsbelonging to different social groups experience in different ways, butborders also simultaneously perform "several functions of demarcation andterritorialization—between distinct social exchanges or flows, between distinctrights, and so forth" (79). Moreover, borders are always overdetermined,meaning that "no political border is ever the mere boundary betweentwo states" but is always "sanctioned, reduplicated and relativized by othergeopolitical divisions" (79). "Without the world-configuring function theyperform," Balibar writes, "there would be no borders—or no lasting borders"(79). His argument recalls, in a very different theoretical context, that developedin 1950 by Carl Schmitt in The Nomos of the Earth (2003), a text thatmaintains that the tracing of borders within modern Europe went hand inhand with political and legal arrangements that were designed to organizean already global space. These arrangements, including different kinds of"global lines" and geographical divisions, provided a blueprint for the colonialpartitioning of the world and the regulation of relations between Europeand its outsides. To put it briefly, the articulation between these globallines of colonial and imperialist expansion and the drawing of linear boundariesbetween European and Western states has constituted for several centuriesthe dominant motif of the global geography organized by capital andstate. Obviously, this history was neither peaceful nor linear.
The history of the twentieth century, which was characterized by theturmoil of decolonization and the globalization of the nation-state and itslinear borders in the wake of two world wars, witnessed an explosion of thispolitical geography. Europe was displaced from the center of the map. TheU.S. global hegemony, which seemed uncontested at the end of the ColdWar, is rapidly giving way, not least through the economic crisis that marksthe passage from the first to the second decade of the twenty-first century.On the horizon is a more variegated and unstable landscape of global power,which can no longer be fully described with such concepts as unilateralismand multilateralism (Haass 2008). New continental spaces emerge as sites ofuneasy integration, regional interpenetration, and political, cultural, andsocial mobility. Although this is a long and doubtlessly unfinished process,we can identify several factors at play in its unfolding. Devastating wars,anticolonial upheavals, changing patterns of communication and transport,geopolitical shifts, financial bubbles and busts—all have contributed to redrawingthe world picture. Furthermore, under the pressure of class strugglesand interrelated contestations of race and gender, the capitalist mode ofproduction continues to undergo momentous and uneven transformations.A crucial aspect of these changes is the realignment of relations between thestate and capital—sometimes seen to work in tandem, at other times understoodto exist in logical contradiction—but always implicated in shiftingregimes of exploitation, dispossession, and domination.
If the political map of the world and the global cartography of capitalismwere never entirely coincidental, they could once be easily read off oneanother. In the post–Cold War world, the superposition of these maps hasbecome increasingly illegible. A combination of processes of "denationalization"(Sassen 2006) has invested both the state and capital with varyingdegrees of intensity and an uneven geometry of progression. In particular,the national denomination of capital has become an increasingly less significantindex for the analysis of contemporary capitalism. In this book, wetackle this problem, elaborating the concept of "frontiers of capital" andinvestigating the relations between their constant expansion since the originof modern capitalism and territorial boundaries. Although there hasalways been a constitutive tension between these relations, the developmentof capitalism as a world system has given shape to successive forms ofarticulation between the demarcations generated by economic processesand the borders of the state. One of our central points is that contemporarycapital, characterized by processes of financialization and the combinationof heterogeneous labor and accumulation regimes, negotiates the expansionof its frontiers with much more complex assemblages of power and law,which include but also transcend nation-states. Looking at the expansion ofcapital's frontiers and considering the proliferation of political and legalboundaries, we are thus confronted with a geographical disruption and acontinuous process of rescaling. A deeply heterogeneous global space correspondsto this process, and the border provides a particularly effectiveangle from which to investigate its making.
Meanwhile, the crisis of cartographical reason (Farinelli 2003), which hasbeen at the center of debate between geographers since the early 1990s, hasraised epistemological questions that are of great relevance for the study ofthe material transformation of borders. The increasing complexity of therelation between capital and state (as well as between their respective spatialrepresentations and productions) is one of the factors at play in this crisis.This has given rise to a certain anxiety surrounding the figure and institutionof borders, questioning their capacity to provide stable reference pointsand metaphors with which to geometrically order and frame the world(Gregory 1994; Krishna 1994; Painter 2008).
Borders today still perform a "world-configuring function," but they areoften subject to shifting and unpredictable patterns of mobility and overlapping,appearing and disappearing as well as sometimes crystallizing in theform of threatening walls that break up and reorder political spaces thatwere once formally unified. They cross the lives of millions of men andwomen who are on the move, or, remaining sedentary, have borders crossthem. In places like the Mediterranean or the deserts between Mexico andthe United States, they violently break the passage of many migrants. At thesame time, borders superimpose themselves over other kinds of limits andtechnologies of division. These processes are no less overdetermined thanthose of the modern world order, but the ways in which they configure theglobe has dramatically changed. Rather than organizing a stable map of theworld, the processes of proliferation and transformation of borders we analyzein this book aim at managing the creative destruction and constantrecombining of spaces and times that lie at the heart of contemporary capitalistglobalization. In this book we do not aim to discern the shape of afuture world order. Rather, we investigate the present disorder of the worldand try to explain why it is highly unrealistic to think of the future in termsof a return to some version of Westphalian order.
We know that the border is not a comfortable place to live. "Hatred, angerand exploitation," wrote Gloria Anzaldúa over twenty years ago in describingthe background for the emergence of what she called the "new Mestiza," "arethe prominent features of this landscape" (1987, 19). Walls, grating, andbarbed wire are the usual images that come to mind when we think aboutborders, whether that between Mexico and the United States, those in theoccupied Palestinian territories, the "fence of death" constructed around theSpanish enclave of Ceuta in north Africa, or the many gated communitiesthat have sprung up all over the world to protect the privileged and shut outthe poor. We are prone to see borders as physical walls and metaphoricalwalls, such as those evoked by the image of Fortress Europe. This seems evenmore the case after the events of September 11, 2001, when borders becamecrucial sites of "securitarian" investment within political rhetoric as much asthe actual politics of control. We are painfully aware of all of this. Yet we areconvinced that the image of the border as a wall, or as a device that servesfirst and foremost to exclude, as widespread as it has been in recent criticalstudies, is misleading in the end. Isolating a single function of the borderdoes not allow us to grasp the flexibility of this institution. Nor does itfacilitate an understanding of the diffusion of practices and techniques ofborder control within territorially bound spaces of citizenship and theirassociated labor markets. We claim that borders are equally devices of inclusionthat select and filter people and different forms of circulation in ways noless violent than those deployed in exclusionary measures. Our argumentthus takes a critical approach to inclusion, which in most accounts is treatedas an unalloyed social good. By showing how borders establish multiplepoints of control along key lines and geographies of wealth and power, we seeinclusion existing in a continuum with exclusion, rather than in oppositionto it. In other words, we focus on the hierarchizing and stratifying capacity ofborders, examining their articulation to capital and political power whetherthey coincide with the territorial limits of states or exist within or beyondthem. To analyze the pervasive character of the border's operations—letalone the marked violence that accompanies them—we need a more complexand dynamic conceptual language than that which sustains images ofwalls and exclusion.
