UC Santa Barbara

Twenty-first century human mobility has been typified by the clash of “unfitted migrants” and increasingly restrictive and interconnected migration regimes. On one side are poor migrants from marginalized religions, races, and nationalities, forcibly crossing border after border fleeing poverty, fallen states, the devastation of climate change, conflicts, and assaults to their most basic human rights. On the other side are richer countries invested in keeping them out of their borders, raising walls, denying asylum, and leading to deadly routes by land and sea, the multiplication of human smuggling networks, and unprecedented global migratory flows. My research examines this clash through the case of the unprecedented Haitian migration from the Caribbean to the United States through South and Central America in the last decade. Particularly, I investigate how the intersection of anti-Haitian sentiment, racial discrimination, and migration deterrence policies and practices both displaced Haitians and defined their experience as Black migrants crossing the Americas, particularly in Brazil, Mexico, and the USA. Two main questions lead this investigation: “How has anti-Haitian racism shaped Haitian migrants’ border crossing experiences within the Americas since 2010?” and “How immigrant selection policies based on ‘humanitarian parole’ transformed Haitians into ‘permanently in-transit’ migrants in Brazil, Mexico, and the USA in the last decade?” This dissertation is the result of more than 150 interviews in Spanish, Portuguese, and English with migrants, smugglers, policymakers, border militias, and immigrant support networks, as well as participant observation in Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and the USA. I argue that both the Haitian migratory corridor through the Americas and Haitijuana are the outcome of centuries of racialized migration deterrence policies and practices that have undergirded migration regimes spanning the Caribbean, Latin America, and the USA.