Externalization through Security: Exception and Routine

By bringing the historically-specific racial project of “White Argentina” to the

forefront, this research sought to explore how racialization shapes state responses to youth migration as well as how young migrants understand their experiences in a country sometimes chosen for its progressive immigration policies. The objective

of this research is to bring to the fore new questions in migration studies, particularly about how “security” becomes constructed and deployed, who becomes understood as a “threat” to the state and on what account. The key

arguments of my research project are organized through critical engagement with literature on the migration-security nexus.

Critical security studies scholars have explored both the logics of “exception” and “routine” through which states seek to manage international migration

(Bourbeau 2014). Such logics are also relevant for understanding the production of “state effects” in the face of ethno-racial, economic, and social contradictions that challenge the state’s legitimacy and, in the case of Argentina, the racial

configuration of the nation. Both logics serve to externalize populations marked as “Other,” projecting any “unease” onto their bodies, and sustaining exclusionary

boundaries of national belonging.

i. The Logics of Exception and Routine

I use El Crimen de Brian, for example, to illustrate what critical security studies scholars have identified as a “logic of exception” (Bourbeau 2014). Under this logic, “labeling something as a security issue imbues that issue with a sense of

importance that legitimizes the use of emergency measures extending beyond the usual political processes” (Bourbeau 2014, p. 3). Notions of chaos, crisis, and disorder “become gateways to exceptionalism and opportunities for states to

legitimate enforcement activities in ways that result in the expansion of sovereign reach” (Mountz and Hiemstra 2014, p.386). The signing of DNU 70, an emergency

decree supposedly addressing a crisis of insecurity perpetuated by “out of control”

migration, becomes a textbook example of the “logic of exception” as conceptualized in critical security studies. Such practices, however, not only allow states to pursue otherwise “exceptional measures,” they also allow states to re- define problems, and, as a result, reaffirm their role as “providers of protection and

security and to mask some of their failures” (Bigo 2002, p. 65). Exceptional measures taken in moments of “crisis” or “moral panic” legitimize state power in the face of challenges posed by the cultural and economic “blurring” of national

borders under globalization (Duany 2011). As states like Argentina struggle to provide social, economic, and political “security” for its citizens, “exceptional practices” simultaneously provide a semblance of control and externalize “the problem” they define.

Drawing from Foucault’s lessons on biopower, critical security studies scholars

also note the routinization of security narratives and practices, arguing that the “logic of exception” functions in tandem with and is reinforced by a “logic of routine”

(Bourbeau 2014). The routinization of (in) security involves the regularity with which states tap onto notions of crisis, emergency, chaos, and disorder for the purposes of negotiating contradictions posed by globalization, as well as the everyday (re) creation of insecurity and unease (Bigo 2002). Bourbeau (2014) summarizes the “logic of routine” of securitization narratives as follows:

…the logic of routine sees securitization as a process of establishing and

inscribing meaning through governmentality and practices. It sees the securitization process as consisting of a series of routinized and patterned

practices, carried out by bureaucrats and security professionals, in which technology holds a prominent place. (p.3)

Such routine (re) production of insecurity can be located in narratives about “bad” and “abusive” refugees that circulate across Argentine state agencies, in the

routine stops that mark young global south migrants as suspect as they navigate the streets of Buenos Aires, and even in the normalization of discourses about the border as “out of control” in relation to South American migrants.

ii. Producing State Effects

Both the logics of routine and exception are tremendously productive for the racial state. Specifically, they help create what Trouillot (2001) has called the state’s spatialization, identification, and legibility effects. The “spatialization effect,” refers to the state’s ability to (re) assert power over its sovereignty and jurisdiction

within its territorial borders (Trouillot 2001). Moral panics such as that over El

Crimen de Brian as well as routine discourses of “border crises” allow the state to

reassert power over its territorial borders, despite the permeability of Argentina’s

borders and strategic acceptance of migrant presences. Similarly, as I have argued in Chapter Six, externalizing “insecurity” as originating from outside of the state’s

territory, allows the state to reassert jurisdiction over its territory despite the citizenry’s disaffection with its ability to provide material and economic security.

Routine and exceptional security measures also serve as “identification” and “legibility” effects for the state (Trouillot 2001), allowing state and nonstate actors

time create a language that classifies and regulates said population, reproducing the material conditions for the undesirability and externalization of those marked as “Other.” As Favell (2015) contends,

We can actually observe the self-constitution of the (nation-) state in the very act of bringing itself into being in the way—albeit sometimes with difficulty—that it identifies, conceptualizes, classifies, enumerates and then

controls the persons whose crossing made its own borders visible, and whose faces enable its own population to become a “people” (Favell in

Brettell and Hollified, 2015, P. 322).

As discussed in Chapters Three and Four, as young migrants become stopped on the street, their bodies marked as suspect, at times even examined through pseudo-scientific and invasive practices of age determination, everyday state actors contribute to narratives of national belonging that have been historically centered around “Whiteness” and structured in relation to categories of difference and othering. In Sara Ahmed’s terms, they reinscribe the skin of the social as white,

forcing those racialized as non-white to navigate a mine-field of racialized suspicion—yes, moving throughout the city—but doing so ever so carefully and

strategically.

iii. Youth Responses

This research has pointed to less apparent but perhaps no less insidious practices of migration control. In doing so, I’ve sought to attend to the ways in which young people—regularly constructed as potentially unruly, violent, and

delinquent (Chaves 2009; Reguillo 2000)—experience the state’s everyday

deployment of the migration-security nexus. From protection mechanisms for asylum seekers, to everyday police interactions and media narratives, I’ve sought

to understand how this nexus becomes relevant in the lives of global south migrant youth. I’ve argued that—precisely due to ongoing constructions of youth as

potentially rebellious, unruly and even ungovernable, and the specific association youth/poverty/criminality, solidified since the late 20th century in Latin America—

examining youth experiences with the state is fertile ground for understanding broader realities in Argentina. Drawing from Youth Studies, I’ve also sought to

explore how youth who participated in this research negotiated, challenged, and responded to the narratives and practice of the state, which often positioned them as the very embodiment of (in)security. In her work on “biopolitics,” as a form of

social control and classification aimed at disciplining young bodies, Reguillo (2000) argues that “attending to the dimensions of biopolitics is not only unveiling

mechanisms of control, exclusion, and domination, but also making visible the devices through which youth bodies subvert the programmed order.” (p.94)

As I’ve shown, the routine, everyday securitization of migrants’ movement is

deeply felt at the most intimate and embodied levels by youth like Ian, who strategically remains silent and wears “middle class” clothing in certain neighborhoods, or Steven and Jean who have carefully developed a specific habitus for their frequent encounters with city police. I’ve documented experiences

like those of Moru, a 24-year-old Senegalese street vendor who also strategically navigates the city in ways that reveal his knowledge of both the “routine” and

“exceptional” logic of state security narratives. Moru works the city streets

constantly looking over his shoulders, carrying a highly-portable display of sunglasses. He is ready to “disappear” at the slightest sight of the city’s “professionals of security.” Moru’s ongoing “geographic disappearance” (Simmons

2012) is a survival strategy. Much like what can be witnessed in other migrant cities, even if he is driven away by the presence of municipality or police agents, Moru might return to work at the same corner a few moments or hours later. And yet, he understands that not disappearing can have extreme and exceptional consequences for him. His merchandise has been taken without explanation before, and Moru is likely to be aware of lawsuits that other Senegalese migrants have filed against Buenos Aires police. Even more so, he is likely to be aware of a handful of YouTube videos that evidence the type of violence that can ensue from failing to disappear on cue.

My experiences with Paraguayan and Bolivian migrant youth organizations also revealed youths’ creative responses to the exceptional and routine ways in which “insecurity” is located on the bodies of global south migrants. As discussed

in Chapter Seven, youth collectives like Movimiento 138 and Simbiosis Cultural challenge state discourses and practices. For example, they reclaim narratives of “uncontrolled migration” to assert the sheer economic and political power of South American migrant presences in Buenos Aires, and—through constant efforts to “remember” a fire in a textile sweatshop where several Bolivian children and youth died in 2006—they seek to make the labor exploitation of Bolivian migrants visible in ways that cannot go “willfully unseen” by state actors.

2. Conclusion: Centering the Racial State in Studies of Migration and