"A Flood Of Immigrants"

Bryan Finoki mulls over a metaphor:

...certainly, people aren’t floods; and perhaps, like floods, mere walls cannot contain them. Nor should migrants be treated with equivalent barriers of borderland floodgates and levees. In some ways, I wonder, how the discursive use of the flood/migration analogy might only contribute to the acceptance of a political logic that assumes migration can somehow be managed in much the same way as broken and overflowing hydrology.

[...]

Nevertheless, my purpose here is less to try and argue the merits – or lack of – using fluidity as a productive metaphor, but (after all this excessive verbiage) just to show a few examples of how issues of “illegal” immigration, national security, and active floodplain control are very literally – and very eerily – being handled together in the U.S. government’s attempts to “secure” the Mexican border.

Where once the government may have been able to boast progressive environmental conservation, we now seem to be getting a strange experiment in security preserves instead. Not security measures designed to protect the environment, but environmental augmentations that might be meant to protect the security measures themselves.