Local Luminary: Joseph Nevins

by Christina Kaminski and photographs by Joshua Adels, September 25, 2008

It is conventional political wisdom in America to secure and fortify the country’s borders. Joseph Nevins disagrees. At Vassar College, he teaches courses on geography, mass violence, and the partitioning of the global landscape. Nevins has been conducting interviews and doing research on immigration and the US-Mexico border since the Clinton administration. He is increasingly unsettled by the level of surveillance, fences, underground sensors, weaponry, and laws that comprise the boundary-enforcement apparatus. Today, 338 miles of fencing separate the US and Mexico; the Department of Customs and Border Protection plans to have another 332 miles of fence in place before the end of this year. With a total of 20,000 agents expected by next year, the Border Patrol will have doubled in size since 2001. More than 5,000 migrants have died in attempts to cross the border over the last 10 years; some of them in efforts to return to their US-citizen wives and children. A keen critic of today’s border policies, Nevins powerfully asserts that the more fences we fortify, the more deaths we can expect to see in the borderlands. Produced with the assistance of his partner and wife, photographer Mizue Aizeki, Nevins’s newest book, Dying to Live: A Story of US Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (2008,City Lights Books), is an examination of how and why the US-Mexico borderlands have become what they are and a memorial to the many migrants who have lost their lives there.
What role does geography play in immigration?
We have a tendency to think about history as dynamic—as always moving; but we tend to think of space as something static. While there might be a physical environment independent of human beings, the way we perceive that environment, the way we act toward it, our practices upon it, mean that we are always creating that environment and, in turn, that environment affects us. The places in which we live our lives—places to which we attach meanings that help define who we are—and the connections and divisions between them are all things that we can, and do, create and change. The nature of these places profoundly informs who migrates, to where, and under what conditions.