Literary Journalism and "Illegal" Border Crossings

Abstract

The twenty-first century has been hailed as ushering in a new era of globalization and "post-nationalism," in which the nation-state is becoming an increasingly "obsolete" category (Appadurai 169). Such grand claims are belied, however, by the strong wave of resurgent nativism in the U.S. that has accompanied immigration reform debates of the last decade—most recently manifested in Arizona's notorious SB 1070 and similar legislative efforts in other states1 —as well as by the accompanying escalation in "boundary enforcement" at the U.S.-Mexican border (Nevins 158-59). As immigration spiked to ever higher numbers in the 1990s and early 2000s in the wake of NAFTA, policy enforcement "crack-downs" suggested a new level of border policing. Operation Hold-the-Line in 1993 and Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 implemented more rigorous enforcement at highly populated points such as San Diego and El Paso, driving border crossers through less populous areas and harsh desert conditions (Eschbach 4, 9). These developments resulted in large numbers of immigrant deaths due to dehydration, suffocation, hypothermia, and hyperthermia. The United States Government Accountability Office reports that border crossing deaths as a whole more than doubled between 1995 and 2005, although this increase was not accompanied by a corresponding rise in illegal entries.