Elisabeth VALLET, UQAM, Canada
Daniela BEA, UQAM, Canada
Gabrielle GAGNON, UQAM, Canada
From October 2020 to August 2021, US border agents made more than 30,000 arrests of Haitians, the largest number ever apprehended at the U.S. land border. Last September, nearly 15,000 Haitian migrants converged in Del Rio, Texas, across the Rio Grande River. These areas were the largest crossing locations during 2021, eclipsing the historically busier locations of El Paso and Tucson. The dissolution of the 15,000-migrant camp under a border bridge in Del Rio by the eviction, in the space of two weeks, of 8,000 of them to Mexico and 7,500 to Haiti is part of the same pattern. However, this recent arrival of thousands of Haitian migrants shaking Del Rio is only the tip of a predictable migration movement of which the fortified American border was only the culmination. Following the devastating earthquake in 2010, tens of thousands of Haitians fled their country to South America. The economic effects of the pandemic, which hit South America particularly hard, combined with restrictive immigration laws and a favorable perception of the Biden administration have recently amplified these flows. Based on the work done by Mainwaring and Brigden, 2016, this paper dvelves on the overall political device of (re)bordering through a case study whose aspects can be easily documented over a decade (for the migration process) and over a few days (arrests and deportations). We will explain how walls cannot exist by themselves and generate a complex legal architecture based on an externalized migration policy and a networked border policy.
Mots clés : borders|border wall|Haiti|americas|Texas
A105080EV