Immigration Protocols and Extralegal Demands: A Comparison Between the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands and South Africa

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative case analysis arguing that undocumented immigrants in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and in South Africa become criminalised by navigating host and recipient country legal protocols and norms. The immigrants (often bonafide asylum seekers and refugees) live in host countries without the necessary legal immigrant papers and therefore lack legal status. Illegality attaches to this status and creates economic demands satisfied by those who produce immigrant papers whether authorised or not. At times, government functionaries participate in these extralegal economies, adding to the robustness of the illicit economies and further harming this vulnerable population of cross-border migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants. (For this paper, the term immigrants is an umbrella term for all the migrants.) The criminalisation of immigrants is rooted in the actions or inactions of government actors in the Global North and Global South who deny immigrants legal standing in the host country or in transit. These government functionaries and their smuggler counterparts, in turn, create extralegal demands for papers and profit from restrictive immigration protocols.