Women and Extra Legal Border Crossing

Abstract

For the vast majority of the world’s women there is no legal migration from the Global South to the Global North. Yet the absence of legal avenues for migration has not quelled the desire for global mobility—women still move across borders for a range of reasons. The effective target hardening of the wealthiest nations of the world of migrants from the poorest nations of the world has created a new (renewed) frontier of illegality: border crossing. Like many other forms of illegality and the attempts to police them, extra legal border crossing has significant gendered dimensions. This book explores women’s extra legal border crossing in the midst of some of the most intractable conflicts and contested border crossing regions of the world. The impossibility of legally crossing many borders is not specific to the experience of women. However, the experience of extra legal crossing is significantly different for women.

Insecurities hover in a circle. Within a secure circle, there are insecure spaces; similarly there are insecure zones at the point where circles meet; within grand security little insecurities persist—little not to those who are insecure but to the custodians of grand security. A feminist perspective suggests a critical view of these grand perceptions, a concern for what passes as the small, and a willingness to stand the existing accounts on their heads. That can be done when women’s chronicles have been given priority in accounts of security.

(Banerjee, 2010)

Even the freest of free societies is unfree at the edge, where things and people go out and other people and things come in. Here, at the edge we submit to scrutiny, to inspection, or judgement. These people guarding these lines must tell us who we are. We must be passive, docile. To be otherwise is suspect, and at the frontier to come under suspicion is the worst of all possible crimes….

(Rushdie, 2002)