NAFTA and Gatekeeper: A Theoretical Assessment of Border Enforcement in the Era of the Neoliberal State

The coexistence of border-enforcement policies such as Operation Gatekeeper and economic liberalization programs such as NAFTA is arguably paradoxical given the simultaneous push towards afree flow of products but curtailed flow of labor. This paper presents a critical review and reassement of existing accounts of neoliberal statehood to make sense of this apparent puzzle. While some have argued that the state is eroding under neoliberal globalization, a more sophisticated analysis has focused on how it has been transformed. David Harvey and LoIc Wacquant focus on the role of the repressive apparatus in upholding neoliberalism. Building on Harvey and Wacquant, and returning to Karl Polanyi, I emphasize the ways in which the state has tried to make use of a repressive apparatus as a claim to social protection a function that becomes necessary as the state advances liberalization. The coexistence of NAFTA and Gatekeeper should be not be understood as an anomaly but rather as an expected feature of contemporary statehood.