The Prison and the Border: An Ethnography of Shifting Border Security Logics

This study examines the ways in which border controls have taken on aspects of crime control. To understand this transformation, I draw on the methods of historical anthropologists who blend ethnographic and historical tools of analysis. The historical research shows that the shift occurred in 1990s, when New Democrats adopted crime politics of the New Right and supported bipartisan policies that restructured detention, deportation, and criminal prosecution. The ethnography documents the ways in which border controls have taken on aspects of internal security and domestic policing, shifts seldom captured in contemporary border security debates.