Vigilante border groups embody the neoliberal model of privatized state functions

Evidence

In the US, the Minutemen, a vigilante border patrol group fueled by Latin American anti-immigrant sentiment with tacit approval from the Bush administration, have been protesting recently under the slogan, “This is America, get off my property.” In this emphatic privatization, the Minutemen perfectly represent neoliberal state commitment, even as they explicitly resist neoliberalism’s more expansive global reach. The traditional state function of border enforcement is at least partially abrogated to a private, self-promoted vigilante group. The claim to America is staked as a national one, the belonging to which is implicitly characterological: one is taken to belong because one embodies the characteristics – the character – of presumptive Americans, their rugged individualism, racially coded as white. And public land, the property of the nation, is privatized, becomes symbolically enclosed, closed off, from which the group can expel those taken not to belong. There is a privatizing, too, of extreme political expression, encouraging private sphere expression of views that the formal representatives of the state, with its nominal commitment to neutrality and formal equality, cannot be seen to express, to stand for. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1759

Categorization

• XREF: Builds on the broader landscape of privately outsourcing state violence; parallels contracting-out other state duties to private actors. — connects to: Border enforcement devolved onto private vigilantes who read national belonging as white character — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1759; Border enforcement devolves to private groups claiming character-based national belonging. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1759
• SEED: Article angle: ‘This is America, get off my property’ as a distilled one-liner for how enclosure rhetoric privatizes national belonging and charactological whiteness.
• CANDY: The Minutemen slogan ‘This is America, get off my property’ is a darkly quoteable distillation of the whole thesis.