Producing-resisting national borders in the United States, France and the Netherlands

Since the 1990s, governments in the United States, France, and the Netherlands have expanded their capacities to police their national borders against immigrants. The paper examines how such efforts have contributed to the growth of centralized policing agencies and the devolution of powers to individualized border enforcers (local police, service providers, nonprofit organizations, etc.). The paper argues that bordering strategies have closed some “holes” in national walls, but they have also introduced countless disagreements, disputes, and resistances by undocumented immigrants, legal permanent residents, national citizens, and frontline border enforcers. Many of these small resistances stay small and do not evolve into large contentious struggles. Others scale up and present more important challenges to government efforts. Rather than simply producing smooth governing machines that sharpen boundaries between the national citizen and the foreign Other, bordering strategies generate waves of small and big struggles that puncture and blur these facile boundaries.