Introduction

The attention that global borders have received in recent years, particularly the USA-Mexico border, points to the geopolitical strife and deleterious impacts of globalization and poverty.

This chapter then examines the effects of border violence, vulnerability, and death on: (1) children and youth in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico across from El Paso, Texas, and the USA; (2) transmigrant youth struggling to cross multiple countries’ borders to the USA; and (3) youth living clandestinely in the USA without proper documentation. This chapter seeks to contribute to a growing understanding of the complexity with which violence is interpreted and understood at the USA-Mexico border and the exposure to violence, vulnerability, and death on both sides of the USA-Mexico border that children and youth endure. This includes the dangers children and adolescence confront en route to the USA and the children and youth who clandestinely live in the USA.

1.1 Placing the Border in Context

Within border zones, more and more young people are migrating alone and are left to navigate treacherous terrain for their own economic and social survival (Chaparro 2014; Patterson 2014a; Musalo and Ceriani Cernadas 2015). The Child­hood and Migration in Central and North America report points to children “experiencing and witnessing human rights violations and discrimination on vari­ous grounds; suffering from social exclusion; and being deprived of education, employment opportunities, medical services, and even food” (Musalo and Ceriani Cernadas 2015). Root causes for children’s migration from their home countries include: extreme poverty, extreme violence, and the threat of violence that is perpetrated by organized criminal syndicates, intrafamilial and sexual violence along with the deprivation of fundamental human rights and the right to reunite with their family members located elsewhere, social exclusion and discrimination, and corruption and institutional weakness within state agencies that are unable to protect them (Musalo and Ceriani Cernadas 2015).

Local border youth are also made vulnerable by the lack of opportunities available to them. Youth at the Mexican North and US Southwest border fall prey to failing systems that foster shadow economies, offering quick-money oppor­tunities or promises of a better life in return for working illicitly as drug couriers or traffickers, sicarios (assassins), or halcones (drug cartel lookouts).

Beneath the well-publicized border violence associated with the drug trade lurks more systemic forms of border violence that cause greater vulnerabilities for children and youth. Poverty, hunger, lack of education and urban infrastructure, and government policies that negatively impact communities are rarely discussed as contributing factors to border violence. The term border violence refers to the systemic manifestations of structural violence and its proliferation across regions where two or more nation-states meet, especially when those nation-states have a history of violence, competition for scarce natural or human resources, or are ravaged by neoliberal policies associated with globalization. Violence associated with race, class, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, and environment is compounded by the tensions associated with wealth inequalities, as well as demographic pres­sures resulting from migration and transnational movement. These and other factors leave border societies, economies, and people more vulnerable to structural and systematic violence more than other areas. Youth and children are especially vulnerable to these forms of violence because of a wide array of economic insecu­rity and instability issues that some border areas experience.

Nonetheless, popularly recognized forms of border violence are used by nation­states to justify tactics that facilitate more violence, through strategies of violence containment (Institute for Economics & Peace 2012) and border security (Andreas 2009; Dunn 2009; Bejarano et al. 2012). The Institute for Economics & Peace “defines violence containment spending as economic activity that is related to the consequences or prevention of violence where the violence is directed against people or property” (2012, p. 4). Greater violence containment justifies greater border security measures. Although scholars and activists have elaborated on them, the human costs and vulnerabilities associated with so many security measures are neglected by policy-makers (Andreas 2009; Staudt and Mendez 2015; Musalo and Ceriani Cernadas 2015).

On February 4, 2012, the painful story of a 12-year-old girl Noemi Alvarez Quillay who traveled 6,500 miles from El Tambo, Ecuador, to reunite with her parents, Jose Segundo Alvarez and Martha Violeta Quillay, who live in New York City without proper documentation, is the quintessential story of failed immigra­tion policies and the dangers for children.

Musalo and Cervantes (2015, p. 9) argues that “increased enforcement... has not deterred migration. If anything, amplified enforcement, particularly in the case of child migrants, makes children and adolescents even more vulnerable following repatriation and often leads to remigration.” This also makes youth more vulnerable to drug cartels who force migrant youth to transport drugs across the US border, to serve as halcones (lookouts), or to act as sicarios (assassins). Girls are also preyed upon for sex-slave trafficking and even killed after they have been sexually exploited (Moretti 2013). Some youth are forced to continue working for cartels once they cross the US border (Chaparro 2014; Patterson 2014a).

Rather than address deeply rooted economic and political problems, nation­states implement elaborate policing and surveillance strategies and criminalize the victims of impoverishment. Border-dwellers - especially youth - restrict their own movement out of fear of rampant violence or harassment by authorities, or they feel forced to migrate and risk the chance of death or dying. In the end, people become more vulnerable because they are policed and monitored. The “War on Drugs” has failed to stop the mass importation of narcotics into the USA, but it has created a landscape of violence for youth and children. This drug war also overlaps with privatization policies that exacerbate wealth inequalities and the related disappearance of civil society and social programs, due to meager funding and stability issues to protect youth and the poor. The post 9/11 regime of border security has conflated the alleged threat of terrorism with undocumented migrants - particularly youth - seeking economic and political refuge in the United States.

To highlight the multilayered and multifaceted forms of violence confronting youth and children in this border zone, the next sections portray “everyday life” at the border as it is perceived and imagined by various actors and entities in the USA and Meixico. The next section argues that the regime of inspection at border crossing centers constitutes a particular form of state-sanctioned violence that violates the human rights of youth and children. The remaining sections of this chapter offer a balance of theory and empirical case study focusing on the multiple forms of death and dying along the international boundary. Organized generally around “necropolitics” and concepts of “social death,” these sections reveal the narrowing opportunities for youth who are moving through or who are trapped within these increasingly violent border zones.

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