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Border Codes

Mark Marino, Author

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politics

If the problem of the 20th Century was the color line, the problem of the 21st Century may be the border.  Not just the US-Mexico border, but the crises of national boundaries in the age of globalization, international trade pacts, transnational corporations, and deterritorialized political coalitions.  

The border is currently THE trigger word for stirring protectionism, xenophobia, and a 9/11-inflected brand of exclusionary nationalism.  Perhaps it is clearer to call this political mood and impoverished nationalism, since it feeds off fears of economic collapse.  At the same time, the border is a stage upon which pantomimes of militarization and security entertain patrons whose theater is paid for by transactions of bodies and wealth across the national boundaries with such ease, that when viewed from space would be imperceptible except for the greater amount of greenhouse gasses produced from so many automobiles waiting in the queue.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool does more than burst into this theater. It draws back the curtain of the political pantomime that stages battles between cardboard cutouts of all those involved. In so doing, it reveals the human drama, the tragedy that this political theater inscribes upon the lives of the poor who dare to step across a line on a map.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool looks at the "hot-button" issue of immigration and jabs at it with a fast-texting thumb of a mobile phone hacktavist.
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