: Opinion: Dead on Arrival #IndiaNEWS #News By Pramod K Nayar The recent news about 46 migrants found dead inside a tractor trailer in San Antonio, Texas, shocked the Americans. Most of the migrants

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Opinion: Dead on Arrival #IndiaNEWS #News
By Pramod K Nayar
The recent news about 46 migrants found dead inside a tractor trailer in San Antonio, Texas, shocked the Americans. Most of the migrants had suffocated to death. All of them were Mexicans, part of the recent surge in migrant crossing from Mexico into the USA.
Aylan Kurdi is not so old as news. Migrants dying in boats when attempting to reach Australia is also not new.  The International Organization for Migration estimated that 15,348 deaths occurred at the EU’s borders between 2014 and 2017 alone.
In short, San Antonio was the iteration of an old story: of the border.
Who crosses the border?
The border is the key site of contemporary geopolitics.   It is at once a metaphor for authorisations and aspirations, but also a concrete reality.
Policed, surveilled, reinforced, the border defines nations, peoples, movements and identities. Immigration policies focus on the migrants seeking refuge, asylum and escape and are determined by these geopolitics: are the asylum seekers deserving of asylum? Do they have linguistic and religious affinities with the receiving societies?
These and other questions are matters of geopolitical formations. The authorisation to cross the yellow line at Immigration Control cubicles in airports is perhaps the softest of these dimensions and their embodiments. Ellis Island, as history records, was positively a horror-site for migrants, given how they were treated before being granted entry (or not).
But the border is also the site of a biopolitics.
Not everybody is allowed across, not every body crosses. The migrant’s or asylum-seeker’s body is the site where the nation and its politics is played out. This could be in the form of identification papers that testify to the body being who the person claims s/he is. It could be in the form of the health of the migrant, as Ellis Island famously insisted on in the early 20th century. It could be the biometric investigations and documentation that contemporary crossings and check points insist on. There are injured bodies seeking to cross, there are starving bodies, awaiting permission to cross. Are maimed bodies more deserving of asylum and help? We see such bodies in works like Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace and in graphic texts such as Olivier Kugler’s Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters with Syrian Refugees.
The border is where the migrant’s body is scrutinised, and rendered into an object or specimen. But this body is also a spectacle: made to stand for long hours before teams of inspectors, incarcerated in camps where they often spend years, their movements restricted, monitored.

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