Borderland circuitry is a timely and incisive contribution to studies of surveillance systems, international borders, race relations, and immigration. In vivid and elegant prose, the author takes advantage of her personal knowledge of the border and its systems of power to illustrate the widespread individual and social harm caused by racially focused US surveillance and security practices concerned with immigrants. Muñiz's primary scholarly contribution is to show how the borderlands surveillance system – which she considers a circuit – works via cameras, biometrics, and other technologies as well as interviews, algorithms, databases, and government information-sharing computer programs. The Orwellian effects, deleterious human consequences, and racial biases of such a system are undeniable. The surveillance network indeed stretches from the borderlands across the country and becomes externalized through the grasping tentacles of the US hegemonic empire abroad. The result, in the author's terms, ‘is a regime of bodily horror that springs from disembodied data flow’ (p. 142). Although this statement may seem intemperate or overwrought, current Trump administration immigration crackdowns make the author's words prophetic. I suspect few readers will disagree with the author's critique of the negative effects of Big Brother in the borderlands; however, the stridency of the book is also a limitation. There are other social forces at play besides race – namely class, culture, nationality, and citizenship identities – in the borderlands and beyond. For example, some readers who live in border communities, or who are part of the greater Mexican/Mexican-American/Latinx diaspora, may feel uncomfortable with the author's sweeping condemnations. They may not embrace some of the author's propositions, such as that US law enforcement is primarily concerned with white supremacy and the construction and maintenance of racial hierarchies and only residually concerned with fighting crime, and that all borders should be eliminated. Nor will they necessarily agree with her comments on ‘the authoritarianism and the cruelty of those who guard borders’ (p. 22). In the border community of El Paso/Juárez, for example, most people have relatives, friends, neighbours, co-workers, acquaintances, or loved ones who work for the Border Patrol, ICE, the local police, or other law-enforcement agencies. Most also fear the violence of organized crime groups in Mexico more than they do the US state. Many also have connections with people who are undocumented, associated with illicit activities, or who in other ways are viewed as being on the other side of the law. The US–Mexico Border Wall is a monolith of White Supremacy and of the supremacy of the Global North, an anti-beacon warning outsiders to turn back because there is no shelter for you here … The physical barrier and the accompanying searches and interrogations, the violence that happens here, remind people that they are outsiders; it reinforces their identities of non-belonging. The Wall also serves as a constant warning to marginal outsiders that they can easily be rendered foreign if the current modality calls for it. (p. 134) Yet one can share such concerns while recognizing that the forces of Trumpism and other forms of right-wing conservatism in the United States are, in fact, multicultural and multiracial. Race may be the primary factor in such politics, but not the only one. Such is the complexity of border society, but also of modern transnational society, that it is preferable to make finer distinctions between national policy and local individuals and not attribute all social phenomena to race. Furthermore, can we really understand the problem of border surveillance, law enforcement, and politics, if we say that the skin colour of border agents does not matter? The fact that in many border communities, such as Laredo and elsewhere, most border agents are Latinos is not irrelevant as the author claims. The US surveillance hierarchy is based on much more than race but is also sustained by and affects issues connected to socio-economic class, culture, citizenship, nationality, geo-politics, and other factors. Without such considerations, there is no way to understand the large Latino vote for Trump in the last presidential election, but also many other contemporary political and social conflicts in the United States. These caveats aside, Borderland circuitry is an important contribution to border studies, immigration research, and scholarship on racism and systems of social control.
Howard Campbell (Fri,) studied this question.