ABSTRACT
The border examination is crucial for understanding the porosity of borders and the viscos ity of the global mobility regime, because it is at the border that the claims to citizenship, entry, or asylum are adjudicated. The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative requires Canadians to present passports at borders, although they are subject to biometric capture through US-VISIT. Mobility is one of the distinguishing characters of modern globalization, demonstrated in dramatically increased empirical flows of capital, information, and people. Chris Rumford highlights this change in the discriminatory geopolitical function of borders: “borders are now less important in terms of military defence and coercive control, and are notable for the permeability to human mobility”. Borders are overdetermined because each border represents overlapping political, economic, linguistic, social, and cultural boundaries: they are “world-configuring,” and simply territorial. Identities are created and reified by borders, which become heavy with social, cultural, and political meaning.
