The Brooklyn Rail

Two images: on June 24, 2019, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in tears against the exterior fence of the South Texas Family Residential Center; on January 20, 2026, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents dragging five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos by the handle of his backpack after detaining him on his way to school in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights. Ramos was whisked to the same Texas facility, now the Dilley Immigration Processing Center. During those five and a half years, the Port of Laredo—just over an hour drive down I-35 from the detention facility—was elevated from a regional logistics chokepoint to one of the busiest ports in North America. Between 2019 and 2024, the dollar value of freight moving across the border at Laredo rose by over 100 billion dollars, reaching 211 billion dollars in imports and 128.6 billion dollars in exports.¹ Today, despite uncertainty around tariffs and the legal status of Mexican drivers, an average of twelve thousand trailers go through the Port every day.

If one looks outward from the walls of the detention center, one will see eighteen-wheeler trucks flow in a nearly endless stream on I-35 towards San Antonio, Fort Worth, the Midwest, and beyond. If the drivers of those trucks are attentive, they will notice the lights and fencing that confined Ramos and continue to hold over eleven hundred other detainees in a facility where guards scream at children making too much noise, food is regularly served half-frozen or containing mold and worms, and detainees are refused necessary medical care.² But the drivers of these trucks—perhaps US citizens, but just as likely Mexican nationals granted access to the US labor market by a much-contested clause in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—are just as likely to assimilate it to the general penury and boredom of the US Sunbelt. Before passing Dilley, these drivers will have crossed one of several “world trade” bridges that span the Mexico-US border, stopped at one of many intermodal distribution hubs that ring Laredo, or seen one of South Texas’s colonias (unincorporated cities, often lacking water and electricity, that proliferate throughout the borderlands). The town of Dilley, halfway between Laredo and San Antonio, is surrounded by a landscape of Tamaulipan thornscrub solely interrupted by I-35. Its population is less than four thousand and its economy is defined by two prisons: Dolph Briscoe Unit, a Texas state prison opened in 1992 and repurposed as a migrant detention center in 2021, and the Dilley Immigration Processing Center.

It is a socially useful lie that the economic and enforcement functions of the border are distinct. The violence that the physical border wall and its securitized integuments deal out—documented extensively by humanitarian groups that pepper the two thousand miles between Brownsville and Tijuana³—is conceptually detached from its role as the connective tissue between commercial networks, tariff and customs regimes, manufacturing, and continental labor markets. This detachment maintains a separation between the macabre everyday of the Río Bravo del Norte and the Sonoran Desert, and the mundane operations of construction, hotel housekeeping, back-of-house restaurant work, and home health care. At the same time, the veil of discretion characteristic of more “humane” administrations than the present one is now in tatters. A January 2026 White House document (“Mass Deportations Are Improving Americans’ Quality of Life”) argues that deportations will lower housing costs, raise wages, create jobs, and decrease crime.⁴ This evisceration of a conventionally granted divide between border and economy has drawn opprobrium from the Democratic Party establishment who nevertheless, in all but the extremity of spectacle, accept the necessity of Trump’s ethnic cleansing campaign. And yet there is a truth to the vulgar economism of Trump and his cronies: border politics do not arise in a vacuum. In order to transcend the presentism of political discourse, the deportation offensive and the generalized crisis it chaotically reacts against must be read against the grain of both a long history of trade and policing in the Mexico-US borderlands and stagnation in the engine room of capitalist society. Laredo’s port of entry and the migrant detention centers in Dilley offer, in their shared histories and place in the capitalist world system, a clue to the exceptional brutality of the present.

 

Border Prime

Steven A. Camarota, Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies has testified that deportations raise wages for low-skilled workers, and that US workers will pick up the slack in industries with high rates of undocumented employment.⁵ The Heritage Foundation, likely the most influential think tank behind Trump, argues that these positive wage dynamics are already in place—claims that now appear in White House documents and briefings.⁶ Alongside explicitly racist outbursts from administration ideologues like Stephen Miller and Gene Hamilton, these market “solutions” to skyrocketing housing, food and health care costs form the basis of the current administration’s offensive.

This line of argumentation extends beyond the sycophants of the White House. A National Bureau of Economic Research report from 2018 argues that border wall construction may raise wages for low-skilled workers even as the wages of high-skilled workers take a hit.⁷ A Wharton School budget model points to possible GDP reductions following deportation policies, but notes that “authorized” low-skilled workers may see their wages rise.⁸ Such studies provide ideological fuel to capital and state. In contrast to the Obama Administration’s moderated language of reform and humanitarian concern, consummated in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals reform, the vulgar instrumentality of the Trump administration’s justificatory apparatus is striking in the connections it makes between shattering violence carried out by ICE and the seeming normality of continental trade flows. And yet, it was under Obama that the ICE workforce grew two times over, and deportations reached a high of 438,000 in 2013. Rather than discontinuity, there is a consensus of US governance that migration policy, law, and policing are tools to address wages, unemployment, workforce participation, productivity, and, not least, crises both short- and long-term. The border is, in this continuity, operationalized as a hinge of accumulation. Faced with widespread upheaval over the cost of basic goods, the lives and values of US workers are counterposed to those of their undocumented comrades; Trumpian dealmaking meets the us-versus-them civilizational discourses that the Administration’s openly fascist members take part in; and the border is foregrounded in both everyday life and the dizzying heights of the economy. Its barbarism touches not only those economies that brush against the southern boundary—maquilas, logistics chokepoints, and free trade zones—but a world-spanning industrial reserve army of labor, stagnating profits among global shipping firms, and a K-shaped economic recovery that shows no signs of letting up.

US migration policy, since the mass expulsions of Chinese and Mexican workers in the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, has offered an especially influential means to measure and manage labor power. Months before Trump took office for the second time, the US Census reported that an increase in net international migration, numbered by the UN at 304 million persons in 2024, has resulted in the largest US population increase since 2001.⁹ Central bankers from the European Union, England, and Japan recently argued that the integration of foreign workers into the Global North may address the “most pressing” economic and demographic issues these countries face.¹⁰ The US appears to buck this trend. Rather than progressive cultural and economic integration, the seesaw of brutality and reform foments management of the rate of migration as a project of ethnic cleansing, even as US capital becomes ever more reliant on undocumented workers. For some, a status quo of deportability is enough; as long as the undocumented live in a state of constant fear, their subjection is ensured.¹¹ But for the baying reactionaries, blood must be spilled; deportations must not only be accelerated, but performed for the camera. However, the composition of undocumented persons relative to US citizens is likely to rise in coming years regardless of the brutality exercised by federal border police. The perverse instrumentality of the current administration is, in this regard, closer to the views of those enlightened capitalists than it appears at first glance. Several questions emerge in the face of these seemingly oppositional stances on the necessity of migration policy: How might we conceive of the US state’s attempted management of the rate of migration through alternating violent, legal, and administrative mechanisms? What secular and cyclical economic trends does it react against? And what accounts for the expansion of both detention and deportations?

In April 2025, acting director of ICE Todd Lyons obscenely declared that the agency must handle deportations as Amazon does package delivery: “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”¹² This promise is becoming a reality. In early 2026, DHS purchased commercial warehouses in Arizona, Maryland, and Texas with the express purpose of refitting them as immigration detention centers. The agency plans to open twenty-four migrant prisons in total and will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase and refit the facilities. These logistics hubs-cum-concentration camps will hold between one to ten thousand migrants each, and, as Damon Hininger, CEO of CoreCivic (a private prison corporation set to massively benefit from DHS contracts) claims, these facilities “represent the best value and are the most humane, most efficient logistically, have the highest audit compliance scores in their system, are more secure, weatherproof and are readily available.”

 

Prison and Port

Before Trump, Minneapolis, and Amazon Prime for deportations, the militarized border ran headlong into the logistics revolution in South Texas. In contrast to gargantuan maritime ports like Los Angeles/Long Beach, Busan, and Dubai’s Jebel Ali, Laredo is a historical borderland and mid-sized US city (population ~250,000) that neither matches the architectural largesse nor cultural potency of its oceanic counterparts. Nuevo Laredo, across the Río Bravo, serves as the site for numerous maquiladoras (Panasonic, Electrolux, Continental) but it is the US city of Laredo and its snaking freeways, warehouses, cold storage, intermodal hubs, and corporate offices that make up the binational port’s logistical hinterland.

Located 135 miles from Monterrey and Saltillo, Mexico’s automotive production capital; 173 miles from the Gulf of Mexico and its oil and natural gas refineries; 146 miles from San Antonio, the nearest US urban center; and nearly 660 miles from Manzanillo, Mexico’s largest maritime port; Laredo both sits askance to and mediates supply chains that extend from Chattanooga to Shenzhen. Laredo is neither hinterland to a single industrial center nor transportation infrastructure for a larger port of entry. It is rather a condensation of road and rail, special economic zone and customs territory, state-built security wall and bridge system for accelerating turnover. The freight truckers that pass through it are by and large owner-operators (independent contractors) who accept jobs on a digital load board platform and are surveilled by a byzantine arsenal of sensors, cameras, and performance metrics.

For Laredo’s residents—14.4 percent of whom work in the transportation and material-moving employment category—the violence of the border is constant. Surveillance towers introduced under Customs and Border Protection’s “Watchful Eye” program—Remote Video Surveillance Systems (RVSS), Autonomous Surveillance Towers (AST), Integrated Fixed Towers (IFT)—loom over the city; the “elite” Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) unit can regularly be seen in public parks, and unmarked SUVs speed through the city’s arterials. Beyond the suburbs that ring Laredo, The Border Patrol’s “Prevention Through Deterrence” policy pushes migrants away from inhabited areas where, inevitably, many are “left” to die. Right next to Laredo’s four trade bridges, a campaign of terror is waged on citizen and non-citizen alike.

The Port of Laredo is unique not only in its quantitative import to Mexico-US trade and relative oddity as an international logistics hub predominantly for freight trucking, but due to its coextension with the border, deportation infrastructure, and migrant detention facilities. It has taken the exceptional circumstances of family separation and the imprisonment of a five-year-old to bring attention to Dilley. And yet, the multiple crises that characterize our era are emplaced with particular force and extravagance in Laredo and the logistical hinterland that forms its environs.¹³

 

The Royal Road

Laredo has anchored borderlands trade networks since the eighteenth century. It was a frontier outpost on El Camino Real de los Tejas, a Spanish colonial trade route between Mexico City and modern-day Louisiana, and the city has flown under six flags since (in order: Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederate States of America, and the United States). Laredo and Nuevo Laredo were split in 1848 following the Mexican-American War; became a vessel for smuggled cotton during the US Civil War; was modernized as an export-processing zone under the Porfiriato of the late nineteenth century; took on its contemporary binational economic geography with the introduction of the maquila in 1964 (part of Mexico’s Programa de Industrialización Fronteriza); and was wholly integrated into the world market through tariff, agricultural, and, most importantly, freight trucking clauses of NAFTA.

The history of migrant detention in Texas begins with the Immigration Act (1924), legislation that birthed the Border Patrol as a federal migrant policing agency, and the Undesirable Aliens Act (1929), which criminalized crossing the border. Prior to then, deportations and border policing were an administrative matter, first under the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), and then under a series of quotas, anti-trafficking laws, and literacy tests aimed primarily at immigration from Europe. In 1932, Galveston on Texas’s Gulf Coast was home to an infamous prison for migrants that held Jewish refugees and Estonian maritime laborers in wretched conditions, including,—reminiscent of horror stories told by those held today in Dilley—louse-infested bedding and guards sexually assaulting inmates.¹⁴

The Border Patrol consolidated what were previously diffuse state and private militia forces into a singular agency, with the remit to police the southern border and, most importantly, to regulate an agricultural labor market then growing rapidly. Crucially, the Undesirable Aliens Act did not set strict quotas for Mexican migrants, but instead—in a compromise between South Carolina’s segregationist Senator Coleman Livingston Blease and agribusiness interests—made “unlawfully entering the country” a misdemeanor and set the Border Patrol loose on undocumented farm hands.¹⁵ By the end of the 1930s, compelled by the mass unemployment of the Great Depression and a complementary rise in nativism, half a million Mexican workers (as well as many Filipinos) had been deported or were being prosecuted for crossing the border. This policy of ethnic cleansing was reversed in 1942 with the Bracero Program, an attempt to address agricultural labor shortages that followed mass conscription in World War II which remains the largest guest worker program in US history.

The first permanent migrant detention center in Texas opened in 1961. Unlike “temporary” migrant detention facilities—ranging from Ellis Island (1892–1954) and Angel Island (1910–40) to Japanese internment camps (1942–46) and “Operation Wetback” camps in McAllen, Texas (1954–55)—the Port Isabel Detention Center (PIDC) was opened on a former military base as a purpose-built, long-term, civil immigrant detention facility for adults. It is no accident that the PIDC was unveiled at the height of mid-twentieth century profitability. Unlike the mass incarceration and deportation campaigns that characterized “temporary” sites, this permanent facility was built to regulate the movement of labor power in peace time.

By 1985, Laredo was home to a private migrant prison owned by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), later CoreCivic, that not only detained adults but also children. Over the course of the 1980s, the peso was devalued, Mexico opened to huge rounds of foreign direct investment, and its agrarian peasantry became dispossessed by both legal mechanisms and the introduction of US corn. Beginning in this period, the State of Texas built an extensive network of detention centers, and, to this day, imprisons more migrants than anywhere else.

By the late nineteenth century, Laredo was the most prominent port of entry on the border, with capital equipment for mining moving south on the Mexican National Railroad from Mexico City to Laredo (completed in 1882), and ore moving north. The 1920s, simultaneous with the criminalization of migration, saw a rapid expansion of highway infrastructure on both sides of the border and the opening of several freight forwarding-brokerage firms in Laredo.¹⁶

The circuit of capital moving through Laredo accelerated over the course of the twentieth century: World War II spurred uneven commercial integration between the US and Mexico and the transformation of the borderlands into a commercial throughway under the Mexican-American Commission for Economic Cooperation; the Bracero Program was closed down in 1964 and the Programa de Industrialización Fronteriza brought forth foreign direct investment and the maquiladora as we know it;¹⁷ Mexico defaulted on its sovereign debt in 1982, ending its import substitution industrialization policies, leading to entry into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a constitutional reform terminating ejido land protections, and Mexico’s ascension to NAFTA.

It was NAFTA that transformed the geography of North American accumulation for good, pushing the maquila south from the border into the central states of Michoacan and Puebla—after its function as a laboratory for labor exploitation in states Nuevo Leon and Chihuahua—and, in turn, repositioned Laredo as the logistical pivot for Monterrey: its immediate industrial reference, but also a broader value chain that runs through the border. The three decades since NAFTA’s passing have seen the agreement “modernized” as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), but the lineaments of dispossession, uneven development, and logistical streamlining remain in place. By 1995, trade across the US-Mexico border amounted to 96.7 billion dollars, a number that rose to 403.9 billion dollars in 2012 and 817.4 billion dollars in 2022. In 2020, 386 billion dollars of freight crossed from Mexico into the United States by truck, amounting to 71.1 percent of all southern border freight; in 2023, Mexico supplanted Canada as the US’s largest trade partner.

Between 1970 and 2017, Texas’s daily migrant detention capacity expanded from under fifteen hundred to over thirty thousand. The siting of these facilities in increasingly rural locales like Dilley is part and parcel with what Brianna Nofil describes as the state’s “weaponization of remoteness,” a policy begun under the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and continued by DHS.¹⁸ The facility in Dilley, opened as the South Texas Family Residential Center in 2014, held over a thousand children by 2015. Operated by CoreCivic and Target Hospitality, the detention center was briefly closed in June 2024, but reopened in mid-2025 with a 180 million dollar annual contract for CoreCivic. While some detention centers are located in urban areas, the majority are placed in the far hinterland—a trend that inversely matches relative decarceration in the urban core.¹⁹

 

Circuits of Capital and Incarceration

The globalization of capital, propelled by the logistics revolution, requires not only an emphasis on mobility, flow, and speed, but also containment, fixity, and precision measurement:²⁰ labor power must be stalled in particular locations and affixed to machinery; fixed capital investment must be made in ports to ensure petty commodities remain in motion; and freight truckers must be welded to their perpetually moving rigs. More than a mere homology or reactionary wish fulfillment then, the Amazon Prime-ification of deportations and migrant detention evokes an internal relationship between incarceration and logistics, prison and port, worker and detainee. The proximity of Dilley and Laredo can, likewise, hardly be reduced to a contingency. The border is logistical to its core and—insofar as it filters and repels, fixes in place and throws into motion—it intensifies the logics of exploitation and domination that characterize capitalist society.

The expansion of migrant detention appears to contradict the requirements of capital with windfall profits flowing to a handful of corporations at the expense of cheap labor for the rest of the class. This may be true in the short run but the history of border policing demonstrates how the state, and particularly its policing function, is recomposed in the face of crises of accumulation. As Michael Macher notes, immigration policy is characterized by “selective nonenforcement.”²¹ Like the outsourcing services that third-party logistics firms provide to capital, the deportation machine is not a unidirectional project of expulsion, but a means for the state to manage the rate of migration—both in and out—and subject all undocumented persons to a state of deportability.

The Detention Reengineering Initiative (DRI) proposed by ICE will reduce the total number of detention centers while doubling their capacity to 92,600 and bringing these purpose-built facilities directly under ICE control. At present, fourteen out of fifteen persons held in migrant detention centers are deported, and the DRI is intended to “streamline” this process.²² And yet, the number of deportations carried out since January 2025 lag well behind those of Obama’s DHS. Estimates range widely, but there are almost certainly over ten and as many as fifteen million undocumented persons remaining in the US Regardless of the brutality waged against them, the undocumented population is likely to climb as long as the US continues to bomb Venezuela and Ecuador, wage a sanctions war on Cuba, and threaten Mexico with territorial incursion.

At the same time, the US-born workforce is likely to shrink relative to its migrant counterpart. Undocumented labor will almost certainly become more, not less, important for US capital. This raises several questions about Border Prime: What purpose do the mega detention warehouses serve that its diffuse detention network could not? What will become of DRI capacity if the deportation machine runs aground in the face of logistical or political challenges? Can profits funneled to certain fractions of capital as others struggle—private prisons versus construction, for example—without limit or risk of upheaval? Rather than parse the tea leaves of the political class or attempt to locate a rational kernel in the chaos on the streets of Los Angeles and Minneapolis, these questions can only be answered by delving into the crises of capital that precede and are magnified by Border Prime.

The relationship between accumulation and the state’s carceral apparatus, which we can extend to its borders, has been elegantly explained by Ruth Wilson Gilmore in the geographer’s study of the parabolic growth of California prisons from the late 1970s through the 1990s.²³ In the face of multiple crises, immobilized surpluses of land, finance capital, labor, and state capacity were “fixed” in the state’s carceral infrastructure. For Gilmore, surplus and crisis are two sides of the same coin, and in moments when crisis is generalized to the whole of society, the state steps in to help capital restart the engine of accumulation.

Today, we are again faced with a rearticulation of public and private resources into an explicitly repressive project. Capital—despite record stock-market highs—struggles to find outlets for profitable investment. The Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction and CHIPS Acts sought to funnel investment and state capacity towards industrial and green growth, policies which allowed US firms to rise up global value chains but hardly to countervail widespread stagnation. The Trump Administration’s abandonment of these programs in favor of a chaotic tariff regime by-and-large accepted secular stagnation, and moved its efforts towards redistributing what remains of the surplus towards favored firms and supplicants. Undergirding this is a turn towards the expansion of debt and the money supply, effectively replacing the accumulation of capital with that of debt. This not only places downward pressure on working and living conditions, as Paul Mattick demonstrates, but compels the state to protect asset prices through whatever means necessary.²⁴ Both administrations align in their aggressive policies towards China, with the border as a tool for both military bellicosity and economic integration, but this hardly registers an attempt to allocate capital more efficiently. Likewise, both administrations see eye to eye on what Alexander Aviña calls the Palestine-Mexico border; surveillance towers produced by Israeli military tech firm Elbit dot the bluffs that overlook the Río Bravo while ICE agents receive training on how to best practice apartheid and violent racial separation from the IDF.²⁵

South Texas—and particularly the Lower Rio Grande Valley, several hours to the southeast of Laredo—is one the primary agricultural belts in the US. But much has changed since the California prison conjuncture. “Crises are historically specific,” Gilmore notes, “and their generalities play out in particular ways in particular places.”²⁶

As in California, Texas’s agricultural land has been shrinking for decades. Between 2017 and 2022, 1.6 million acres were taken out of production. Much of the land that remains, however, has become more productive. Land is concentrated among fewer farmers and ranchers and is now utilized for higher value cash crops for export. It relies, like more traditional manufacturing, on the logistics infrastructure concentrated in the borderlands. Moving in the other direction are horticultural exports (vegetables, fruits, nuts, ornamental plants), 90 percent of which move from Mexican farmland to US store shelves (and reliant on that same infrastructure). This is an uneven continental market that exceeds the bounds of the nation-state and is framed as much by NAFTA and the USMCA as by the bounded dynamics of the later twentieth century. At risk of diluting Gilmore’s framework, then, we must widen the aperture of these surpluses from the scale of the state and its municipal armature to those of the world market. It is not so much farm and ranch land that forms the pivot of political economic transformation, as it did in California’s Central Valley, but logistics and the commercial infrastructure that rings most US cities.

According to a study compiled by a retail and warehousing consultancy, vacancy rates in e-commerce and logistics warehouses have risen from historic lows in 2022 (under 4 percent) to as high as 7.4 percent in the third quarter of 2025. The wave of logistics warehouse and distribution center construction that sought to meet COVID-19-era demand has resulted in overcapacity, stagnating rent, and underutilization.²⁷ From a wider view, the logistics industry faces a generalized crisis of overcapacity. Historical profits in 2021 and 2022 led to a rise in container ship orders, and firms like Maersk and CMA-CGM now face their first losses in over a decade.²⁸ Despite NAFTA and the USMCA lowering legal barriers to cross-border freight movement, both the US and Mexico trucking sectors claim that they face a driver shortage crisis. Brokerage, freight forwarding, and third-party logistics firms cannot soak up workers into what is one of the most dangerous professions in the US.

The state capacity referred to by Gilmore includes the fiscal, institutional, and ideological means by which government agencies support capital accumulation. For our purposes, the fiscal, institutional, and ideological registers remain relevant and are joined by policing and surveillance. 170 billion dollars have been allocated to DHS since January 2025, while ICE funding will grow from around 10 billion dollars to 100 billion dollars by 2029. The same bill increased ICE’s detention budget by 45 billion dollars. ICE doubled its workforce in 2025 (from 10,000 to over 22,000) with new hires promised a 50,000 dollar hiring bonus. Perhaps most important, the current border offensive has involved cross-agency cooperation that reallocates state capacity from a vast range of institutions, including not only those under the DHS umbrella, but the DEA, FBI, ATF and Bureau of Prisons. This extends to cross-agency data sharing, the instrumentalization of courts, and the utilization of both public and private transportation infrastructure for deportations.

Surpluses of labor can be measured in a number of ways. One takes up the world-historical dispossession of Mexico’s peasants and communal landholders driven by the end of ejido protections in 1991, the lowering of barriers for agricultural imports brought on by NAFTA (and the subsequent mechanization and commercialization of Mexican agriculture) and the dispossessive violence of the ongoing drug war.²⁹ These factors have resulted in a surge of northward migration, both into the maquilas of Mexico’s border states and on into the US Unlike the Janus-faced migration policies that characterized the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—with first Chinese and then Mexican workers recruited to build the railroads and form an agrarian underclass—the millions who have been displaced from their land and livelihood in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, and more recently from Central America’s Northern Triangle, Venezuela, Ecuador, and beyond, now form surplus humanity that cannot be reversed nor ameliorated.³⁰

Another measure is unemployment and workforce resignation in the United States. Long-term tendencies towards the growth of a relative surplus population and the inability of a service economy hindered by productivity stagnation to absorb it are met by recent job losses in manufacturing and tech. Here, surpluses of labor and capital meet in an unwieldy fission that sees more and more workers fall into substandard employment, underemployment, and unemployment. The service sector, a broad and unwieldy category, is the only place where those relegated to the relative surplus population are able to find work—and the undocumented represent an outsized fraction of this group—which results in an assimilation of policing into labor discipline.

As noted in our discussion of warehouse space, the logistics sector faces crises in its infrastructural base. This extends to employment within the sector. Warehouse and transportation work can be filed under services, but, while one might expect these sectors to sop up surplus labor, Jason E. Smith notes how employment in circulation work—contiguous with but not identical to the logistics sector—is hemmed in by the same productivity logics that stymie the rest of the service sector.³¹ It is by-and-large in-person, hand-to-hand work—Laredo’s freight-trucking market exemplifies this—that is difficult to automate. Further, circulation work is fragmented across national borders and economies. While jobs may accrue in particular locales, as they do in logistical agglomerations like Los Angeles’s Inland Empire, they are more often scattered across space in a manner that allows capital and the state-maximum flexibility to draw on and filter the cheapest sources of labor, exploit racialized wage differentials, and move circulatory infrastructure entirely if needed. As Smith emphasizes, it is more likely that the surplus under- and unemployed end up as security guards, watching a rising mass of commodities, rather than in jobs with productivity and wage upsides.

This is where our four surpluses (capital, warehouse space, state capacity, and labor) meet. Consecutive administrations, unable to restart the engine of accumulation, foreground upward redistribution and repression through the legal, financial, and policing mechanisms of the border. State capacity that might once have been used for the asylum process, subsidies for semiconductor and green technology production, or a modicum of redistribution is used to justify an ethnic cleansing campaign and the hiring of right-wing vigilantes. Agriculture, already in decline and fractured across the world market, is subjected to supply chain crises which, spurred by ecological and pandemic turbulence, result in their own problems of overcapacity and profitability. And, most prominently, those dispossessed by imperial violence, market penetration into subsistence agriculture, and climate change in the Global South come face-to-face with the unemployed of the industrialized core; the former as undocumented workers, the latter as border agents, policemen, and warehouse security guards. Warehouses previously utilized for the circulation of physical commodities are modified for the storage and discipline of labor power. And it all collides in the borderlands.

 

Rate of Migration, Rate of Profit

In contrast to the multi-agency raid led by DHS on a Hyundai electric vehicle plant outside of Savannah, Georgia in September 2025—touted as the largest immigration operation in US history but then scuttled from public view after it incited a diplomatic crisis—Operation Metro Surge has been undertaken with gleeful fervor. Our four surpluses pose one answer to this divergence: plant-level discipline is likely to remain under the auspices of capital, but sectors with the highest preponderance of undocumented workers—especially those that breach the public-private divide like home health aides—are less reliant on workplace-level discipline than the state’s willingness to police the movement of persons both into and out of US territory and within US territory. This dynamic is intensified when we consider people cast out of formal employment entirely. In Joshua Clover’s turn of phrase, moments in the history of accumulation characterized by circulation (and its counterpart, the riot) find the state near and production far.³² The reference point of Amazon Prime calls to mind immediate satisfaction for consumers, but its evocation by Lyons more aptly indexes the complex relay mechanisms that ensure commodities are exactly where they need to be when someone clicks “buy.” And while there is clearly a libidinal pleasure that the right takes in the deportation spectacle, it is the power to move and contain that just-in-time deportations and migrant incarceration guarantees. The state thus steps in to simultaneously undercut firms reliant on undocumented labor and ensure the long-term reproduction of capital. In many instances, this is the same process, as low productivity firms reliant on undocumented workers—easily found and even more easily shedded—are unceremoniously cut off at the knee.³³ This is where the intra-political class conflict over the rate of migration meets the rate of profit—not as if in some back alley, but in the public spectacle of the wall, surveillance tower, and customs booth.

That capital acts irrationally when faced with crises of its own making is a given. Innumerable individual capitalists and firms are driven by the compulsions of the market to maximize their own piece of the surplus, and a specifically capitalist (ir)rationality results. Some fractions of capital seek to localize and constrain crises of the border at the border itself, or, even better, through its externalization to Mexico’s southern border and the maritime extraterritoriality of the Caribbean. Others attempt to turn the logic of the border inside out so that its violent exceptionalism saturates the erstwhile normalcy of the nation-state. There is a ready-made arsenal of legal, policing, and ideological tools at their disposal to make this happen. Despite Minneapolis lying outside the hundred-mile border zone that might grant DHS operational legitimacy in the city, the agency and its brownshirts have found it relatively easy to obtain legitimacy from the courts, local police (despite some hemming and hawing), and politicians on both sides of the aisle.

When liberal and conservative think tanks measure the economic effects of migration and produce policy papers advocating for one position or another, the politics of the migration are reduced to two options: open or closed borders. These studies present the human figure of the migrant as an arithmetical representation on a balance sheet or Palantir database. And as the joint histories of circulation and migrant detention in South Texas show, we can see how this degradation of the migrant as both worker and non-citizen stretches from the earliest embers of capitalism to the present. It is only in moments of abjection and crisis, from Minneapolis to Dilley, that the prospects of abolition—a politics of an entirely different order to open or closed borders—becomes a necessity.