"The Trump administration has pursued a series of policy initiatives aimed at making it harder for people fleeing their homes to seek asylum in the United States.... In January 2019, the administration expanded its crackdown on asylum to a wholly new practice: that of returning asylum seekers to Mexico where they are expected to wait until their US asylum court proceedings conclude, for months and perhaps even for years.... [This report] details serious abuses associated with the US Department of Homeland Security's so-called Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP).... The report reveals asylum seekers are trapped in dangerous Mexican border cities with limited shelter space where they lack meaningful access to due process in the US and face risks to safety and security."--Page 4 of cover.
There may be no story today with a wider gap between fact and fiction than the relationship between the United States and Mexico. Wall or no wall, deeply intertwined social, economic, business, cultural, and personal relationships mean the US-Mexico border is more like a seam than a barrier, weaving together two economies and cultures. Mexico faces huge crime and corruption problems, but its remarkable transformation over the past two decades has made it a more educated, prosperous, and innovative nation than most Americans realize. Through portraits of business leaders, migrants, chefs, movie directors, police officers, and media and sports executives, Andrew Selee looks at this emerging Mexico, showing how it increasingly influences our daily lives in the United States in surprising ways -- the jobs we do, the goods we consume, and even the new technology and entertainment we enjoy. From the Mexican entrepreneur in Missouri who saved the US nail industry, to the city leaders who were visionary enough to build a bridge over the border fence so the people of San Diego and Tijuana could share a single international airport, to the connections between innovators in Mexico's emerging tech hub in Guadalajara and those in Silicon Valley, Mexicans and Americans together have been creating productive connections that now blur the boundaries that once separated us from each other.
Frederick Jackson Turner Award Finalist Winner of the David Montgomery Award Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Book Award Winner of the Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award Winner of the Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize Winner of the Américo Paredes Book Award “A deeply humane book.” —Mae Ngai, author of Impossible Subjects “Necessary and timely...A valuable text to consider alongside the current fight for DACA, the border concentration camps, and the unending rhetoric dehumanizing Mexican migrants.” —PopMatters “A deep dive into the history of Mexican migration to and from the United States.” —PRI’s The World In the 1970s, the Mexican government decided to tackle rural unemployment by supporting the migration of able-bodied men. Millions of Mexican men crossed into the United States to find work. They took low-level positions that few Americans wanted and sent money back to communities that depended on their support. They periodically returned to Mexico, living their lives in both countries. After 1986, however, US authorities disrupted this back-and-forth movement by strengthening border controls. Many Mexican men chose to remain in the United States permanently for fear of not being able to come back north if they returned to Mexico. For them, the United States became a jaula de oro—a cage of gold. Undocumented Lives tells the story of Mexican migrants who were compelled to bring their families across the border and raise a generation of undocumented children.
This report describes for the first time the totality and evolution since the mid-1980s of the current-day immigration enforcement machinery. The report's key findings demonstrate that the nation has reached an historical turning point in meeting long-standing immigration enforcement challenges. The question is no longer whether the government is willing and able to enforce the nation's immigration laws, but how enforcement resources and mandates can best be mobilized to control illegal immigration and ensure the integrity of the nation's immigration laws and traditions.
Covering the Border War: How the News Media Create Crime, Race, Nation, and the USA-Mexico Divide examines the notion of the body politic in border newspaper coverage of the USA-Mexico divide and how the nation and immigration are racially imagined in crime news discourse, where whiteness is associated with order and brownness is associated with disorder in a variety of imaginative, nativist ways. By applying critical discourse analysis methodology to the Los Angeles Times, Arizona Republic, Albuquerque Journal, and Houston Chronicle during a peak epoch of border militarization policies (1993–2006), brownness emerges through a news crime frame that reflexively shows the values and meanings of whiteness and the nation. At the body scale, border crossings threaten the whiteness of the national body through suggestions of rape and disfigurement. Border news discourse feminizes the nation with nurturing resources and services under threat of immigrant “rape” as well as expresses racial anxiety about a “changing face” of the nation. Border news coverage constructs immigrants as home intruders at the house scale, both human and animal. Whiteness at this scale reflexively signifies a law-abiding, rightful owner of property protecting against criminal trespassing. Brown immigrants are also seen as wild animals, which constructs whiteness burdened with the task of animal management. Whiteness at the regional scale suggests a masculinized, militarized battleground or a settled region threatened by a brown, cataclysmic flood. Finally, the nation scale complements the body scale but in a more contemporary and scientific way. Whiteness reflects a body politic fighting the disease of cancer/immigration in two ways: with an imagined militaristic, immune system and with hi-tech, aggressive operations. This “diseased body politic” communicates whiteness and nativism about the border through discursive border symptoms and border operations that represent the intersection of immunology discourse, the racial construction of the body politic, and anxiety about postmodern economic transformation and its impact on national borders.
In her Brookings Essay, The Wall, Brookings Senior Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown explains the true costs of building a barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border, including (but not limited to) the estimated $12 to $21.6 billion price tag of construction. Felbab-Brown explains the importance of the United States' relationship with Mexico, on which the U.S. relies for cooperation on security, environmental, agricultural, water-sharing, trade, and drug smuggling issues. The author uses her extensive on-the-ground experience in Mexico to illustrate the environmental and community disruption that the construction of a wall would cause, while arguing that the barrier would do nothing to stop illicit flows into the United States. She recalls personal interviews she has had with people living in border areas, including a woman whose family relies on remittances from the U.S., a teenager trying to get out of a local gang, and others.
Americans from radically different political persuasions agree on the need to “fix” the “broken” US immigration laws to address serious deficiencies and improve border enforcement. In Immigration Law and the US–Mexico Border, Kevin Johnson and Bernard Trujillo focus on what for many is at the core of the entire immigration debate in modern America: immigration from Mexico. In clear, reasonable prose, Johnson and Trujillo explore the long history of discrimination against US citizens of Mexican ancestry in the United States and the current movement against “illegal aliens”—persons depicted as not deserving fair treatment by US law. The authors argue that the United States has a special relationship with Mexico by virtue of sharing a 2,000-mile border and a “land-grab of epic proportions” when the United States “acquired” nearly two-thirds of Mexican territory between 1836 and 1853. The authors explain US immigration law and policy in its many aspects—including the migration of labor, the place of state and local regulation over immigration, and the contributions of Mexican immigrants to the US economy. Their objective is to help thinking citizens on both sides of the border to sort through an issue with a long, emotional history that will undoubtedly continue to inflame politics until cooler, and better-informed, heads can prevail. The authors conclude by outlining possibilities for the future, sketching a possible movement to promote social justice. Great for use by students of immigration law, border studies, and Latino studies, this book will also be of interest to anyone wondering about the general state of immigration law as it pertains to our most troublesome border.
Two New York Times Washington correspondents provide a detailed, “fact-based account of what precipitated some of this administration’s more brazen assaults on immigration” (The Washington Post) filled with never-before-told stories of this key issue of Donald Trump’s presidency. No issue matters more to Donald Trump and his administration than restricting immigration. Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear have covered the Trump administration from its earliest days. In Border Wars, they take us inside the White House to document how Stephen Miller and other anti-immigration officials blocked asylum-seekers and refugees, separated families, threatened deportation, and sought to erode the longstanding bipartisan consensus that immigration and immigrants make positive contributions to America. Their revelation of Trump’s desire for a border moat filled with alligators made national news. As the authors reveal, Trump has used immigration to stoke fears (“the caravan”), attack Democrats and the courts, and distract from negative news and political difficulties. As he seeks reelection in 2020, Trump has elevated immigration in the imaginations of many Americans into a national crisis. Border Wars identifies the players behind Trump’s anti-immigration policies, showing how they planned, stumbled and fought their way toward changes that have further polarized the nation. “[Davis and Shear’s] exquisitely reported Border Wars reveals the shattering horror of the moment, [and] the mercurial unreliability and instability of the president” (The New York Times Book Review).
Why has an economy that has done so many things right failed to grow fast? Under-Rewarded Efforts traces Mexico’s disappointing growth to flawed microeconomic policies that have suppressed productivity growth and nullified the expected benefits of the country’s reform efforts. Fast growth will not occur doing more of the same or focusing on issues that may be key bottlenecks to productivity growth elsewhere, but not in Mexico. It will only result from inclusive institutions that effectively protect workers against risks, redistribute towards those in need, and simultaneously align entrepreneurs’ and workers’ incentives to raise productivity.
Discusses the spate of wall-building by countries around the world and considers the reasons why walls are being built in an increasingly globalized world in which threats to security come from sources that cannot be contained by brick and barbed wire.
