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This chapter provides a streamlined account of the laws and policies most relevant to undocumented students in higher education. It begins by first contextualizing the legal discussion on educational institutions within a social justice framework, before describing the legal landscape of the education of undocumented students from K–16 (Kindergarten through College). It explores two specific legal policies that have greatly affected how undocumented students experience higher education: the 1996 Omnibus Immigration Laws and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). It then considers future trends of the legal landscape. It proposes that universities have a role to play in paving a just and compassionate path to undocumented students' access and success in higher education, with or without comprehensive immigration reform. The chapter concludes by posing a challenge to universities—how do your (in)actions on this issue define the ideals of a democratic society and an educational institution committed to social justice?

This chapter explores the role of the shipping lobby in shaping American laws that regulated migrant transport, particularly the laws that opposed and attempted to suppress immigration. It seeks to determine the lengths shipping companies would go to in order to ensure the right of entry of as many passengers as possible. It examines the American Civil War and the labour shortage and necessary encouragement of migration that resulted from it; immigration as a federal issue; the shrink in tolerance of immigration amongst xenophobic American labour unions; the calls for immigration restrictions and the improvements to their enforcement; the system of remote border control; migration as a lobby issue; and lobby campaigns both for and against immigration. It concludes that the shipping lobby was harshly divided along the lines of nationalist interests.

This chapter examines the hardening of the border during the 1920s and 1930s, and the more expansive racially restrictive immigration regimes that developed from both sides of the border. As the United States shifted its focus from excluding Chinese immigrants to targeting Mexicans, Mexico enacted its own set of immigration policies to marginalize and bar Chinese and African-American movement to Mexico. Using NAACP papers, government correspondence, and immigration records from both U.S. and Mexican archives, this chapter provides a fresh perspective on the experiences of African Americans in Texas who felt the double blow of exclusion at the U.S.-Mexico border: the exclusions of Jim Crow and Mexico’s indigenismo. Providing a more integrated understanding of Chinese, black, and Mexican experiences at the border, the chapter ultimately emphasizes the shared venture between the Mexican and U.S. nation-states in controlling race, immigration, and the nation during the first half of the twentieth century. As racial ideologies and immigration policies migrated across national boundaries, it became more difficult for racialized bodies to do the same. And not only was their multiracial presence physically marginalized within the landscape of the borderlands, they were removed altogether from the nation’s identity and history.

Through a close, on-the-ground reading of U.S. immigration records and newspaper accounts, this chapter shows how Chinese immigrants repeatedly improvised new cross-racial strategies to gain entry into the United States during the era of Chinese Exclusion. Their actions not only forced local immigration officials to continually adjust their own practices in response, but to focus increasing attention on racial differentiation. In the process of distinguishing Chinese from Mexican, and rooting out smuggling rings that depended upon the cooperation of Chinese sponsors and immigrants, Mexican guides, and black railroad workers, these street-level bureaucrats not only enforced U.S. immigration law, but did so through practices that rendered multiracial relations and identities suspect and illegitimate. Moreover, as immigration officials and the immigrants they sought to police drew the attention of the federal government to the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border, they brought the American state into the borderlands. The chapter thus connects local enforcement practices at the border with the broader goals of federal immigration law and nation-building at the turn of the century.

One of the functions of literature is to convey a lived, embodied experience, to give others the possibility to empathize. Bessora's novel 53 cm portrays the complexities and absurdities of a process shared by Afropeans: gaining and maintaining legal status in a racially skewed bureaucracy. The main theme of this work is the dissonance between legal status and physical presence for its protagonist, whose cultural and legal identity are both ambiguous. This chapter analyzes a persistent aesthetics pertaining to the physical and biological, or what several critics have called Bessora's “corporality”. The book's title is an allusion to the width of the protagonist's hips, an ironic quantification of a particularly body-centered racial stereotype. The deployment of “bodiliness” in Bessora's writing, rather than an appeal to African heritage as a source of a “natural” physicality, participates in a critique of a quantification and measurement of race and ethnicity, as a means to refute dominant discourses of identity, both cultural and legal, in Europe.