What is a Bordertown?

Detroit is a bordertown.

It sits on the Detroit River, opposite Windsor, Ontario. The river became the boundary between the U.S. and British Canada in 1783 as a result of the Revolutionary War and was originally considered “no more than a line in the water” among borderland residents who ignored it.[i] Native Americans made up the majority of the population, especially Wyandots, Ojibwas, Odawas, and Potawatomis. Next were French descendants of the first colonial regime, followed by the British military and merchant class, and Africans, both free and enslaved.[ii] “Americans” were not well represented in Detroit until July 1796, when the British finally vacated the city following the Jay Treaty of 1794.[iii] After Michigan became a state in 1805, commercial and personal relations across the border remained unhindered until the War of 1812 forced borderlands residents to choose their loyalties.[iv] From the 1830s to the early 1870s, after the Civil War, the Detroit border region was also “fraught with danger” but “saturated with meaning” for African-descended people traveling the Underground Railroad to freedom.[v] Founded in 1891, the U.S. Bureau of Immigration employed one immigration inspector in Detroit in 1894, two in 1901, and eighteen in 1913.[vi]

Beginning in 1921, the Detroit border became a key site for the flow of people and goods, making it both a site of contestation and a reference point for U.S. immigration policy. From 1921 to 1939, the ferry dock near Woodward Avenue (fig. 5) acted as a “gateway to America” for more than eleven million people commuting to work in the auto industry and its many ancillary businesses, from parts manufacturers to mercantile stores and restaurants.[vii] “Canadians, Poles, Italians, and African Americans passed ‘ramshackle buildings, the relics of the older city,’” writes Ashley Bavery, “before the art deco hotels and department stores of Woodward Avenue drew their eyes upward to stained glass windows and gilded adornments, markers of wealth and success in a city that was fast becoming one of the most important in the nation.”[viii] Thousands of southern and eastern Europeans traveled to Canada with the hope of entering the U.S., often smuggling themselves with the help of organized crime.[ix]

In 1929, seventy-five major gangs — including the notorious Purple Gang, run by Jewish-Russian immigrants — smuggled liquor and people through the Detroit River region.[x] Their presence helped increase enforcement in cities along the northern border, while border patrol in Detroit harassed and criminalized immigrants regardless of their legal status.[xi] “During the Progressive Era,” Bavery writes, “nativists had protested against immigrants for their lack of morals or hygiene, but now, new quotas and enforcers turned potential immigrants into criminals, a far more dangerous prospect for the nation.”[xii]  By 1929, the patrol had organized everyday Detroiters in a “collective practice of border enforcement,” asking them to inform on friends and neighbors who may be authorized to work in the U.S.[xiii] By 1931, the number of immigration inspectors patrolling the Woodward ferry dock, the Detroit-Windsor tunnel, and the Ambassador Bridge had jumped to one hundred fifteen.[xiv] They patrolled from Lexington, Michigan, to Port Clinton, Ohio, with a handguns, handcuffs, and flashlights that could also be used clubs.[xv] Historian Thomas Krug links the increase to a number of factors: “the increase in the volume of border crossings, … the concentration of the automobile industry in the Detroit area, the increase in the region's population, highway construction, improvements in the ferry companies’ boats and landing facilities and the push for twenty-four-hour ferry service, and increased tourist traffic.”[xvi] Krug does not account for the ways in which labor officials and border officials had racialized immigration, criminalized immigrants, and militarized the border. Deportation raids criminalized and targeted ethnic neighborhoods and workplaces and, by 1930, Border Patrol conducted raids hundreds of miles from the border and increasingly cited crime prevention as a reason to target certain populations.[xvii] With the nearest long-term detention facility located sixty miles south in my hometown of Toledo, Ohio, a short-term detention room on Woodward Avenue near the ferry dock became a short-term holding facility where immigrants might wait for months to be processed.[xviii] Deportation of racialized Europeans brought border patrol into the heart of the city, where federal officials worked with city police and everyday citizens to patrol neighborhoods. Policy and practices on the norther U.S. border, then, predates and predicts the “wide net of exclusion” cast during the Great Depression, which saw more than half a million Mexican laborers forced out of the U.S. by repatriation and deportation, many thousands of them coming from the Detroit region.

Detroit is a bordertown.

The whole state of Michigan is less than 100 miles from the international border and therefore within the jurisdiction of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). From 2001 to 2016, border enforcement in the area jumped 981 percent, from thirty-eight agents in 2001 to four hundred eleven in 2016. By 2019, ICE arrests in Michigan were second highest in the nation and enforcement disproportionately concentrated on Latinx residents regardless of citizenship or immigration status.[xix] People who just looked foreign (i.e. brown-skinned in the ICE enforcement logic) reported increased harassment, confirming Day’s assertion, “The racialized vulnerability to deportation of undocumented, guest-worker, or other provisional migrant populations exceeds the conceptual boundaries that attend ‘the immigrant.’”[xx] Geoffrey Boyce uses the concept of “automobility” to describe the effect immigration policy has on racialized populations, regardless of immigration status. Automobility is an “expressly racial and racializing condition through which peoples’ access to and control over the conditions of work, leisure and everyday social reproduction are mediated via specific logics of policing and related state violence.”[xxi]

Citizenship does not confer rights on people of color. Rather, modernity is a period in which the state “shifts from being concerned with society defending itself against external threats to focusing on its internal enemies,” while still using the border to police and criminalize.[xxii] Indigenous people are the original enemies of the interior, made “foreign” to their homelands by Removal and the establishment of the U.S.[xxiii] Bordertowns, in Jennifer Denetdale’s words, are “formerly recognized Indigenous spaces,” like Gallup, New Mexico, where “Indigenous people are endlessly cast as the outsiders and aliens … who threaten white civilization.[xxiv]” In Detroit, Kyle Mays observes, “non-Indians used images of indigeneity to erase Native people,” even framing “Indigenous people as the new immigrants to the city.”[xxv]  The state constantly affirms its boundaries and defines the immigrant to affirm and define itself, where the right to exclude means one owns in the first place.[xxvi] White possession is contained and monitored at the borders of the settler state.

Focusing on the violence of exclusion on U.S. borders, Harsha Walia uses the term “border imperialism” to describe the settler colonial processes by which “the violences and precarities of displacement and migration are structurally created as well as maintained.[xxvii] She identifies four overlapping structures: mass displacement of impoverished and colonized communities and the securitization of the border against them; criminalization of migration with extreme discipline for those deemed “alien” or “illegal”; racialized hierarchies of citizenship; and state-mediated exploitation of migrant labor, “akin to conditions of slavery and servitude, by capital interests.”[xxviii] Immigrant laws, she writes, criminalize migrants while legalizing the occupation of Indigenous lands.[xxix] Day notes, with Adam McKeown, “border controls are not a remnant of an ‘illiberal’ political tradition, but a product of self-conscious pioneers of political freedoms and self-rule.”[xxx] Importantly, she links Indigenous dispossession, racialized labor recruitment, immigration restrictions, and internments to the settler colonial control of land and labor. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, in their sweeping theoretical text on border methodology, identify borders with the “multiplication of labor,” referring to “the intensification of labor processes and the tendency for work to colonize the time of life,” as well as social stratifications of labor producing subjects who do not fit into established categories of political belonging.[xxxi] These neoliberal processes are managed at the border, where for instance surplus labor populations can be recruited and restricted, while preserving “cognitive” or psychic borders through, Day writes, the racialized abstractions of high tech labor and working-class labor — what Spence defined as labor and spatial divides.[xxxii]

Understanding bordertowns as inherently Indigenous spaces made possibly by the border-crossing and border-making of colonization (“the first and only border-crossing that matters”), I apply the term in multiple senses to Detroit to include the international border and the county line, as well as the psychic or cognitive bordering processes through which labor multiplies, subjectivities flatten and fracture, and the settler state affirms itself. [xxxiii] The border upholds property. It creates the U.S. as white property and conditions relations within. But, the bordertown itself is a space of immediate and particular violence brought on by the urgency of upholding those boundaries. Where neoliberalism creates conditions for dispossession in the present as financialization and debt, the bordertown is the space of exclusion, elimination, and violent inclusion. It is the locus of white possession made possible through dispossession as “a perpetually incomplete project” continually asserting and adapting “the terms of value and belonging.”[xxxiv]

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[i] Denver Brusman, Introduction in Border Crossings: The Detroit River Region in the War of 1812. ed. Denver Alexander Brunsman, Joel Stone, and Douglas D Fisher (Detroit Historical Society, 2012), 7.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Brunsman, Introduction, 10; Miles, The Dawn of Detroit, 199.

[v] Nora Faires, “Across the Border to Freedom: The International Underground Railroad Memorial and the Meanings of Migration.” Journal of American Ethnic History 32, no. 2 (2013), 43.

[vi] Thomas A. Klug, “Residents by Day, Visitors by Night: The Origins of the Alien Commuter on the U.S.-Canadian Border during the 1920s.” Michigan Historical Review 34, no. 2 (2008), 79.

[vii] Bavery, “‘Crashing America’s Back Gate,’” 239.

[viii] Ibid. 239-240.

[ix] Ibid. 240.

[x] Bavery, “‘Crashing America’s Back Gate,’” 242, 244.

[xi] Ibid. 248.

[xii] Ibid.

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Klug, “Residents by Day,” 79.

[xv] Bavery, “‘Crashing America’s Back Gate,’” 247.

[xvi] Klug, “Residents by Day,” 80.

[xvii] Bavery, “‘Crashing America’s Back Gate,’” 248.

[xviii] Ibid.

[xix] Geoffrey Alan. Boyce, “Appearing ‘Out of Place’: Automobility and the Everyday Policing of Threat and Suspicion on the Us/Canada Frontier” Political Geography 64 (2018), 1; Marayam Jayyousi, “Michigan has second highest rate of ICE arrests in nation,” Detroit Metro Times, July 16, 2019, https://www.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2019/07/16/michigan-has-second-highest-rate-of-ice-arrests-in-nation.

[xx] Day, Alien Capital, 20-21.

[xxi] Boyce, “Appearing ‘Out of Place,’” 2.

[xxii] Moreton-Robinson, White Possessive, 177.

[xxiii] Ibid., 14.

[xxiv] Jennifer Denetdale, “‘No Explanation, No Resolution, and No Answers’: Border Town Violence and Navajo Resistance to Settler Colonialism,” Wicazo Sa Review 31, no. 1, (2016), 112-113.

[xxv] Mays, “Indigenous Detroit,” 1, 6.

[xxvi] Moreton-Robinson, White Possessive, 14.

[xxvii] Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (Oakland: AK Press, 2013), 5.

[xxviii] Ibid.

[xxix] Ibid., 8.

[xxx] Day, Alien Capital, 17.

[xxxi] Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, 21-23.

[xxxii] Day, Alien Capital, 39.

[xxxiii] Cook-Lynn, Anti-Indianism, 53.

[xxxiv] Byrd, et. al., “Predatory Value,” 2.