Geographies of Migration and (In)Security

Texas State University - San Marcos, San Marcos TX

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of the project is to tackle the complex challenges created by the increase in the number of refugee-migrants. This phenomenon has led to the tightening of national border policies to deter and exclude refugee-migrants, and increased violence as organized crime responds to shifting policies. By engaging border patrol and refugee-migrants on both sides of the border, the team will examine how recent and changing policies have radically transformed the border and impacted migrant patterns and vulnerability to organized crime. The research team will utilize findings and research to shape future policies that will reduce violence and crime while maximizing human rights and protection for people on both sides of the border. While integrating graduate research assistants in the project, PIs will collect data on both sides of the border, map migrant journeys, document aspects of organized crime, and incorporate a service-learning component. This project addresses border security through a focus on organized crime and migrant vulnerability via innovative, policy-oriented research that engages with policy makers at the nation's capital and with those impacted by changing policies and shifting responses of organized crime at borders. It will contribute to the fields of feminist geopolitics, migration and border studies, and critical security studies through four key innovations: (1) leveraging new developments in geospatial technologies to map and narrate migrant journeys (2) contributing to migration and refugee studies by unveiling root causes of (in)security and the (un)intended consequences of asylum policy that has reproduced precarity and vulnerability for migrants, (3) examining how policies of expulsion are reshaping borders in materials ways, and (4) contributing to critical security studies by analyzing how asylum policies of expulsion empower organized crime and paradoxically threaten national security interests. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.