Tropic of Chaos

by Christian Parenti

  Among those detained was Michael Graves, an African American born in the United States. Graves told the House Judiciary Committee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law, “They just held me there for eight hours. No reason. No probable cause. It was like our plant was transformed into a prison or a detention center. I am a U.S. citizen. I was born and raised in this country. And I was treated as a criminal on a normal day where I just got up and went to work.” Another detainee testified, “I was held for six hours. No water, no food.”13

  Latino citizens were told they needed to show either passports or citizenship certificates. Those who could not were transported to a military base 300 miles away in Johnston, Iowa. The new ICE quotas led to a spike in the number of deportations, from 69,226 in fiscal 1996 to almost 400,000 in 2009. 14

  That is what the political theorists’ “state of exception” looks like in practice. It has the potential to define everyday life in a world that fails to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and chooses, late in the game, a form of military adaptation.

  Detention

  Many people caught at the border are quickly dumped on the other side. However, illegal entry is now a punishable offense, and ICE detains many undocumented immigrants before deporting them. ICE holds about 29,000 detainees on any given day; that is almost 50 percent more than in just 2005.15 According to the DHS more than 80 percent of these detainees have committed no crime other than illegal entry.16 As civil—not criminal—prisoners, they have no right to government-funded attorneys, and most are too poor to hire private ones. When the Associated Press analyzed an official ICE database, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, it found a detainee population of 32,000 on the evening of January 25, 2009. A shocking 18,690 of those detainees had absolutely no criminal conviction—not even for previous illegal entry. Over 400 of those totally innocent prisoners had been locked up for a year or more.17

  ICE operates a network of more than five hundred detention facilities that cost $1.7 billion and are scattered across the country. Many of these are run-down but fortified motels or converted suburban office parks; all are infamous for their wretched conditions, overcrowding, and violence.18 The majority of these facilities are managed by state and local governments and specialized private firms, like Corrections Corporation of America, which runs sixty lockups of various types. Abuse in these prisons and detention centers is widespread, though the inmates, all poor and headed for deportation, have a difficult time bringing complaints or lawsuits against their jailers. So, it is hard to know what is really happening inside the ICE gulag.

  Yet, there are hints. We know of two dim-witted Mexican men who languished in detention for years for no reason except their mental disabilities. Their deportation cases were completed in 2005 and 2006, respectively, yet both—having only the mental abilities of little children—did not know when they were due for release, did not pester their jailers, and thus got lost, “shuttled through a network of jails, psychiatric hospitals and detention centers.”19

  Women in Maricopa County, Arizona, describe physical abuse, including being shackled during childbirth.20 In March 2008, Jarrod Hankins, a bailiff for the Washington County Sheriff’s Department, locked an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, named Adriana Torres-Flores, in a small courthouse holding cell. Hankins then forgot about his prisoner as she suffered without food or water for four days. Sleeping on the floor, she drank her own urine to survive.21 Until at least 2008, ICE officers would regularly inject deportees with psychotropic sedatives before their deportation flights. The “preflight cocktail” was sometimes so heavy that ICE agents had to use wheelchairs to get the slumped deportees on board.22

  Desperation among detainees sometimes boils over. On December 12, 2008, a riot broke out at a private facility in Pecos, Texas, run by the GEO Group. The immigrant detainees were protesting the death of Jesus Manuel Galindo due to lack of medical care. Billed as the world’s “largest detention /correctional facility under private management,” the sprawling complex is ringed by razor wire and has cells for thirty-seven hundred undocumented immigrants but no infirmary or clinic. On February 2, 2010, journalist Tom Barry went to investigate, and by chance the detainees rioted a second time, burning a whole housing unit.23 Barry described the immigration detention network as “the new face of imprisonment in America. . . . Because they rely on project revenue instead of tax revenue, these prisons do not need voter approval. Instead they are marketed by prison consultants to municipal and county governments as economic-development tools promising job creation and new revenue without new taxes.”24

  Another feature of the ICE detention network is the constant transfer of prisoners. Though usually detained at the border or near their homes, in the cities of the Northeast and California, captured immigrants are routinely transferred to remote, rural detention facilities in Arizona, Louisiana, or Texas, hundreds or thousands of miles away from families and sympathetic lawyers. Human Rights Watch found that from 1999 to 2008, at least 1.4 million detainee transfers occurred.25 Whether by political design or bureaucratic habit, the transfer policy is a sadistic mechanism of control and demoralization.

  This is the face of climate change. Drought and flood in Mexico and Central America are expressed, later and elsewhere, as the ICE detention gulag. As the planet warms, the political tumors of American authoritarianism, our current repression of immigrants, will metastasize. A similar illness infects Europe, and climate change will intensify even if necessary mitigation finally begins. Already we see the forms that adaptation in the developed world will take. The de facto authoritarian, cryptoracist state hardening, encapsulated by the war on immigrants, will accelerate as climate-change-driven migration become an ever more pressing issue.

  Land of Violent Talk

  Border militarization, the paramilitary immigrant roundups, the largely privatized ICE detention network—it is all a human rights abomination. But it is also policy as ideological spectacle. When the government treats innocent brown people as criminals, it lends respectability to racism. Native-born people, particularly white people, get the message and feel invited to catharsis via tribal solidarity, especially during hard times.

  The flow of people from south to north—people deracinated by the structural violence of neoliberal economics, Cold War militarism, and now climate change—is met not only with walls, armed patrols, and cells but also with the calumny, hatred, and ideological spittle of rightwing demagogues. Nowhere is this more evident than on American talk radio. All day and night, up and down the dial, one can hear raw, uncut hate speech. Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Mike Savage are only the most well-known of those who talk hate for a living. Every day tens of millions of people listen to the hard-right messages that vomit out across the airwaves. While they drive, work, tinker in the basement, or lie awake at night rehearsing personal worries, Americans are kept company by talk radio’s constant rhythm of fear, resentment, exaggeration, and free market fundamentalism.

  A central trope in this embittered carnival is the specter of immigration. Xenophobia and smug nationalism are old American traditions. Tocqueville found it back in 1835: “Nothing is more annoying in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans. A foreigner will gladly agree to praise much in their country, but he would like to be allowed to criticize something, and that he is absolutely refused.”26 Today’s version of this irritable patriotism takes place in a warming world where populations are increasingly on the move. The rate, intensity, and desperation of migration is guaranteed to increase precipitously throughout this century. Thus, the hate in American politics is becoming an expression of the catastrophic convergence. It is sobering to listen to talk radio with an eye toward the future and an understanding of climate science. It is also important to remember that the rightist xenophobes, though repulsive, nonetheless play upon real issues: The political economy of the world is unfair, and immigration is an increasingly challen
ging social issue that requires new policy—that is to say, climate adaptation based on social justice.

  Consider again the words of the former intelligence officers, military men, and politicians who wrote that Pentagon-oriented report on climate change, Age of Consequences. Here is James Woolsey, former head of the CIA, writing in a chapter addressing the worst-case scenario of unmitigated growth of greenhouse gas emissions:If Americans have difficulty reaching a reasonable compromise on immigration legislation today, consider what such a debate would be like if we were struggling to resettle millions of our own citizens—driven by high water from the Gulf of Mexico, South Florida, and much of the East Coast reaching nearly to New England—even as we witnessed the northward migration of large populations from Latin America and the Caribbean. Such migration will likely be one of the Western Hemisphere’s early social consequences of climate change and sea level rise of these orders of magnitude. Issues deriving from inundation of a large amount of our own territory, together with migration toward our borders by millions of our hungry and thirsty southern neighbors, are likely to dominate U.S. security and humanitarian concerns. Globally as well, populations will migrate from increasingly hot and dry climates to more temperate ones.27

  Adaptation as the armed lifeboat is only possible if Americans think in certain ways, and not in others. This raises the question, How are the media educating adult Americans? It is instructive to survey the messages that spill forth across the nation, for this is the political context in which immigration and climate change are being understood. When immigration reform came up for debate in 2006, much of the American media worked itself into a hate-filled lather. In 2010, immigration again came up, and the controversy erupted anew. Those episodes offer a glimpse of how opinion makers will frame a future immigration crisis.

  Ideological Parapets

  You can hear the bad future of the armed lifeboat in the words of self-described Northern Californian, environmentalist, and feminist Brenda Walker. A radical Malthusian, Walker is a green racist who was inspired to politics after reading Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb. Speaking on the Peter Boyles Show, a Denver-based talk radio program, Walker said, “If there’s one thing that the Mexicans are good at, it’s establishing smuggling infrastructures. They can get through, you know, obviously, millions of illegal aliens and WMDs as well.”28

  Or consider the comments of William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration on the same program: “Oh, look, I’ll take it further than that, Peter. Let me say something about these brown Nazis. . . . Get out of my country—now. Take a hint. Vamoose. I don’t got to say, ‘Don’t let the border gate hit you on the backside on the way out.’ And I mean it. I’m very serious about it. Americans are the Jews.”29

  Here is another canard from radio host Jay Severin (formerly Jay Severino): “So now, in addition to venereal disease and the other leading exports of Mexico—women with mustaches and VD—now we have swine flu.” On another occasion, he put it this way: “When we are the magnet for primitives around the world—and it’s not the primitives’ fault by the way, I’m not blaming them for being primitives—I’m merely observing they’re primitive. . . . It’s millions of leeches from a primitive country come here to leech off you and, with it, they are ruining the schools, the hospitals, and a lot of life in America.”30 Always the position of the nativist is aggrieved, put-upon, outnumbered, abandoned, almost overrun. Increasingly the nativists see themselves as nature’s staunch defender, its last bulwark against the human locusts.

  Consider the ravings of another nationally syndicated DJ, Michael Alan Weiner, now known by the rather more Teutonic sounding name Mike Savage: “Burn a Mexican flag for America, burn a Mexican flag for those who died that you should have a nationality and a sovereignty, go out in the street and show you’re a man, burn 10 Mexican flags, if I could recommend it. Put one in the window upside down and tell them to go back where they came from!”31 This self-appointed tribune of real Americans traffics under the website tagline “borders, language, culture.” In a different context, that slippery triptych could pass for a postmodern academic subtitle, but here it recalls fin de siècle Anglo-Saxonism in the style of Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race.32 Savage describes himself as “an ardent conservationist” and claims to have 100 million listeners per week. More objective sources, like Talkers magazine, put his audience at 8 million—still very large.

  What do the xenophobes suggest be done? Here is Neal Boortz, one of the top talk radio hosts in the country: “They are not going to be shipped back. I mean, Royal [his off-air producer], think about it—Mexico doesn’t want ’em back, first of all. Think what happens if we round—first of all, where do we store 11 million Hispanics just waiting to ship ’em back to Nicaragua, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico. Where do we store ’em? . . . The Superdome! Exactly. And the Astrodome in Houston. That’s where we’ll put ’em.”33 During a 2006 broadcast, he addressed the same theme: “When we defeat this illegal alien amnesty bill and when we yank out the welcome mat and they all start going back to Mexico, as a going-away gift let’s all give them a box of nuclear waste. Give ’em all a little nuclear waste and let ’em take it on down there to Mexico. Tell ’em it can—it’ll heat tortillas. Or something like that.”34

  More mainstream characters are almost as bad. Here is Lou Dobbs, formerly of CNN, now a Fox business news host: “There are some Mexican citizens and some Mexican-Americans who want to see California, New Mexico and other parts of the Southwestern United States given over to Mexico. These groups call it the reconquista, Spanish for reconquest. And they view the millions of Mexican illegal aliens in particular entering the United States as potentially an army of invaders to achieve that takeover.”35 Dobbs—echoing nineteenth-century concerns about hookworm among Chinese immigrants on the West Coast—likes to equate immigration with infectious disease: “The invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans. Highly-contagious diseases are now crossing our borders decades after those diseases had been eradicated in this country.”36

  Glenn Beck is another respectable mainstream fanatic. Here he is on Muslims: “All right. Here it is. Tonight’s exclusive: In 10 years, Muslims and Arabs will be looking through a razor wire fence at the West. . . . The Muslim community better find a spokesman who isn’t a ‘yes, but’ Muslim. They shouldn’t even understand the word ‘but,’ because if they don’t, when things heat up, the profiling will only get worse, and the razor wire will be coming.”37

  Like Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly—who is more respectable than the baby-faced, conspiracy-theorizing, ranting, dry-drunk Beck—dabbles in reconquista paranoia. On May 1, 2006, while Latinos were marching for their rights in California, O’Reilly warned some of his 3.25 million weekly viewers, “And then there’s the hardcore militant agenda of ‘You stole our land, you bad gringos.’ This is the organizers of these demonstrations: ‘The border—we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.’ That is their slogan. That you stole our land, and now, we’re going to take it back by massive, massive migration into the Southwest. And we’re going to control those places, because you stole it from us, and that’s the agenda underneath.”38 At times his war rhetoric gets more explicit: “You have no policy unless you have border security. . . . So now, it’s becoming a race war. That’s what it’s becoming—a race war. You see half a million people show up in L.A. and they were waving Mexican flags. And they’re saying, ‘Hey, we have a right to be here.’ No, you don’t. If you’re illegal, you don’t have a right to be here.”39

  Season of Hate, Again

  In 2010, immigration politics heated up again with the passage of Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, which ordered all police officers to stop and interrogate anyone they suspected of being undocumented. Furthermore, it allowed citizens to sue if they felt an officer was negligent in these anti-immigrant efforts.40 SB 1070 embodied the lifeboat politics of armed adaptation. Internationally, the face of the bill was Governor Jan
Brewer, whose bleached-blonde hair, spray-on tan, and perpetual, unblinking, grimace-like smile gave her a robotic affect. The backdrop to all this was Arizona’s economic crisis: it had the third-highest foreclosure rate in the United States and an unemployment rate that reached 10 percent in July 2010.

  With the new law, thousands of terrified undocumented Latinos fled the state. Critics said the bill would, among others things, make Arizona less safe as it would be harder for police to solve crimes if Latinos began avoiding cops. Brewer defended the crackdown by claiming that immigrants were beheading innocent victims. But no such crimes were occurring. Neither she nor anyone else could find any evidence to back her claim. Next, Governor Brewer banned ethnic studies in Arizona schools on the grounds, as her spokesperson put it, that “public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people.”41