UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation analyzes the development of a system of militarized migration management in the United States for simultaneously incorporating “unskilled” migrant and immigrant workers into the bottom rung of the labor market and deterring the entry of “surplus” populations. Why has said regime only begun to appear during the third decade of the twenty-first century, half a century after the outline of a comprehensive plan first appeared? To answer this question, I carried out a historical institutional analysis of state efforts to control undocumented migration since the 1960s, drawing on hundreds of government documents, private reports, journalistic accounts, original empirical data gathered from interviews and participant observation, and various secondary sources. My research demonstrates that the problem is best conceptualized through the lens of state capacity. At the dawn of capitalist globalization in the 1970s, both the technology and the political will necessary to channel the tens of millions of future immigrants into institutional pathways was absent. As a result, illegalization gradually emerged as an informal means of regulating migration from Latin America and Asia, and businesses in the United States grew structurally dependent on undocumented labor. This arrangement was nonetheless always unstable and contradictory, and it has been progressively undermined due to a combination of tougher immigration enforcement, the state’s drive to achieve greater levels of surveillance over the population, novel migration patterns, and a changing set of labor demands. My analysis suggests that, as the United States emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic and faces a historically unprecedented migration crisis at its southern border, the transition to a regime of militarized migration management is now fully underway.