Immigration Article of the Day: Breakdowns at the Border: Legal Infrastructures and Political Polarization by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

 

All legal infrastructures are to some extent dysfunctional.  An infrastructures lens contemplates the motivations of a range of actors and mechanisms involved in a particular enterprise, foregrounding the underlying structures of power and contests of meaning and purpose.  Those dynamics can stymie effective state control of outcomes and present formidable obstacles to access for the less powerful.  It is hardly novel to say that legal infrastructures are not seamlessly achieving clearly specified goals, delivering us along a linear path to modernity.  Breakdown can even be understood as a necessary precondition to the emergence of new infrastructure.  In some cases, however, infrastructural failure can be so severe as to stymie course correction and produce further conflict and instability.  Using the case study of border legal infrastructures in the southwestern United States, this article examines the role of political polarization in contributing to acute infrastructural dysfunction.

 

KJ