Security, surveillance, and the new landscapes of migration (original) (raw)

Ethno-Architecture and the Politics of Migration, 2015

Abstract

Chinatown. Little Italy. The French Quarter. Names like these have described migrant neighborhoods for decades in cities across the United States. These are places where generations of migrants found refuge, relationships, and hope as they embarked on new lives in the planet’s self-proclaimed “melting pot.” But today’s migrants are not pursuing such clearly delineated place-based geographies. They are more dispersed and more integrated into the socio-spatial fabric of their host metropolises. In this chapter, I will describe why this dispersed model is more commonplace. To do this, I will first trace the history of traditional socio-spatial strategies. I will then explore how these strategies are changing in an increasingly polarized and securitized melting pot. In the past, migrants lived a diaspora experience and have tried to define themselves by reference to their distant homeland. In effect, they used spatial strategies to help create what Benedict Anderson refers to as “imagined communities.” And they have done this by attempting to reconcile difference through the creation of Amos Rapoport’s “cultural landscapes.” They have built or occupied what they know. Migrants have found the familiar in the mosques, shophouses, temples, and gardens that populate these districts. But identities are neither completely fixed nor completely fluid. As Stuart Hall argues, cultural identity is marked through differences that are continuously under construction. This is certainly the case for migrant communities. Place-bound migrant districts may slowly disappear as new migrants confront an increasingly hostile host nation. Mosques and marketplaces that announce a migrant culture are generating intense controversies given growing fears of terrorists and undocumented immigrants. The current state of affairs regarding immigration, especially from Latin America and the Middle East, points to a new model. By holing up in identifiable and easily controlled areas, immigrants may be more easily placed under the watchful eyes of the state. Deportations, round-ups, and relocations can be facilitated by place-based migrant communities. This chapter concludes by arguing that now, however, multi-ethnic communities are replacing the traditional immigrant neighborhoods where migrants can more easily melt into today’s landscape of surveillance.

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