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Reviewing the history of immigration from Mexico to the United States, this chapter reveals that immigrants are lured by compelling economic opportunities and higher wages in the United States, and that no means of border enforcement ever undertaken will deter immigrants driven to improve their own lives and especially their families’ futures. Debunking myths of welfare-seeking and criminal undocumented immigrants, this chapter describes the virtue of immigrants, undocumented and documented, who have supplied vital labor in U.S. industries for decades. These labor entries include the wartime Bracero Program, and continue in the era of ramped-up U.S.-Mexico border enforcement that imperils the lives of undocumented border crossers.

This introductory chapter provides a history of the U.S.–Mexico border. Long before the border existed as a physical or legal reality it began to take form in the minds of Mexicans and Americans who looked to maps of North America to think about what their republics were and what they might someday become. Their competing territorial visions brought the United States and Mexico to war in 1846. Less than two years later, the border emerged from the crucible of that war. With U.S. soldiers occupying the Mexican capital, a group of Mexican and American diplomats redrew the map of North America. In the east, they chose the Rio Grande, settling a decade-old debate about Texas's southern border and dividing the communities that had long lived along the river. In the west, they did something different; they drew a line across a map and conjured up an entirely new space where there had not been one before.

This chapter examines lessons from 150 years of U.S.-Mexico border crossings, as the basis for later chapters’ construction of a framework for comprehensive border reform.. Particularly, these experiences demonstrate the futility of supply-side enforcement that concentrates on interdiction, as well as illustrate the U.S. history of unilateral policymaking on subjects that spur border crossings and on the crossers themselves. In contrast to interdiction, reducing demand for cheap labor and illegal drugs may hold more promise for controlling border movement, as the Prohibition experience confirmed when legalization of alcohol in the U.S. eliminated the market for Mexican trafficking. Further, the supply-side approach of economic vitalization measures in Mexico, in contrast to tactics of interdiction that have dominated the U.S. arsenal, holds promise for easing the migratory pressures that sometimes tear Mexican families apart, and could even alter the climate in which U.S. sexual predators take advantage of economic desperation to find child victims in Mexico.

This chapter examines the establishment of the United States-Mexico border, not just as a cartographic construction, but as a joint production of cooperative policing. As U.S.-Mexico relations deepened and became more complex in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the borderland transformed into a space of bilateral, if sometimes grudging, consent. By focusing on U.S.-Mexico military campaigns against Apaches and U.S. attempts to quell Mexican political dissidents on American soil, an image emerges of a fledgling bilateral policing apparatus, one in which the police power of both countries is pooled, borrowed, and amplified.

Reviewing the history of immigration from Mexico to the United States, this chapter reveals that immigrants are lured by compelling economic opportunities and higher wages in the United States, and that no means of border enforcement ever undertaken will deter immigrants driven to improve their own lives and especially their families’ futures. Debunking myths of welfare-seeking and criminal undocumented immigrants, this chapter describes the virtue of immigrants, undocumented and documented, who have supplied vital labor in U.S. industries for decades. These labor entries include the wartime Bracero Program, and continue in the era of ramped-up U.S.-Mexico border enforcement that imperils the lives of undocumented border crossers.

Most of the contentious debate on U.S.-Mexico border crossings focuses on northbound crossings, but this chapter urges consideration of reverse traffic from the United States into Mexico as detailed historically and at present in this study. The chapter begins the articulation of a comprehensive border policy for southbound crossings, particularly for weapons trafficking to drug cartels and for U.S. corporate entries, suggesting how Mexico might better encourage a shift in the U.S. presence and investments away from the borderland maquiladoras and beach tourist havens, and into the terrain devastated by NAFTA and other economic factors.

This chapter explores the effect of transnational movement on gendered kin relations, and examines how families living across an international border are both divided and united transnationally. Individuals, couples, and families living across an international border experience the contradictory processes of continuity and fragmentation. Even as the U.S.–Mexico border divides couples and families, Mexican immigrants build relationships and construct home and family in a manner that transcends nation-states. However, despite the fluid movement of transnational Mexicans between the U.S. and Mexico, the border is a barrier with a powerful and far-reaching impact on families and the geographic and symbolic locations of kin. Ultimately, for Mexican immigrants, constructing home, marriage, and family is a transnational endeavor, one that bridges—yet is always ruptured by—the U.S.–Mexico border.

Human migration has been a factor in environmental disruption along the United States–Mexico border both historically and in modern times. This chapter examines the impact of human migration as well as the impact of modern-day border security forces in Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is a federally protected wilderness area in southern Arizona on the U.S.-Mexico border. The root causes of environmental disruption in the region are often blamed on modern undocumented immigrants. However, U.S. border security forces also create significant environmental disruption and degradation. Through an examination of the environmental history of human migration in the region, we see that people have long used this region as a travel corridor. A longer-term historical analysis offers a more comprehensive understanding of human migration and environmental disruption along the U.S.-Mexico border.

This chapter examines the large scale death of migrants in southern Arizona and the reasons why this should be viewed as an extended massacre. This mass violence against migrants is perpetrated by the state through U.S. government policies and the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border. These policies affect the routes used by migrants, often funnelling them through some of the harshest areas of the Sonoran Desert and resulting in many exposure-related deaths. The funnelling of migrants into dangerous terrain is intentional and aimed at deterring unauthorized migration. In this case, the desert itself is the weapon that is used against the victims.

Completing the discussion of illicit and law-bending motivations for U.S. resident “runs for the border,” this chapter discusses a variety of additional lures in the history of southbound border crossings that stem from differences in the laws of the United States and Mexico. Throughout the mid-twentieth century, the ready availability of no-fault divorces in Mexico, in contrast to strict standards then prevailing in many U.S. jurisdictions, drew spouses across the U.S.-Mexico border to obtain a quickie Mexican divorce. Border runs also sought relatively cheap or experimental pharmaceuticals from Mexican dealers, and low-cost and non-traditional medical procedures.

This chapter serves as a prelude to discussions of today’s economic motivations for northbound border crossings involving the delivery of illicit drugs and cheap labor to feed U.S. addictions to both. In similar fashion, Prohibition-era rumrunners funneled liquor across the U.S.-Mexico border to U.S. destinations, earning enormous profits and demonstrating the futility of supply-side enforcement against economically motivated crossings. Only the legalization of alcohol in the U.S. stymied liquor trafficking from Mexico into the United States.

Scholars have long suggested that nineteenth-century runaway slaves turned the U.S.-Mexico border into a line of freedom. However, as this chapter argues, such an interpretation of the border is somewhat problematic. A closer examination of the history of northern Tamaulipas explains why. From 1820 onward, African Americans began to arrive to that region in search of freedom and a changed racial milieu, but this process was deeply fraught. U.S. American jurisprudence could continue to affect Mexican space formally and informally from the outside, greatly troubling Mexican sovereignty and its foreign relations in the process. Hence, the freedom found by African Americans in Mexico—guaranteed by Mexican law—was never particularly secure in practice. This chapter builds upon the previous chapter and provides an in-depth analysis of a specific case study of fugitive slaves’ struggles for freedom in the Texas-Mexico borderlands.

This chapter examines the major security challenges at the U.S.-Mexican border in the twenty-first century. Security is a key issue in the U.S.-Mexico bilateral relationship as it impacts both countries. This work focuses on the cases of Texas and Chihuahua, Mexico.

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.

Tackling the other contentious border issue today, this chapter articulates the facet of the proposed harm reduction agenda that sweeps aside the current protocol in which undocumented immigration, drug trafficking, and the amorphous terrorist threat define our U.S.-Mexico border agenda and push us toward militarizing the border to no avail in stopping entries. The drug reform proposal couples decriminalization of certain less harmful drugs with an increased regulatory emphasis on the demand side in the form of funding addiction and treatment programs.

This final chapter addresses the issue of synchronization—whether and when the laws of the United States and Mexico are best aligned in areas that induce border crossings. Among the laws discussed are those related to gambling, prostitution, abortion, the death penalty, and the legal drinking age. Regardless of whether all such laws are aligned, the United States and Mexico’s increasingly interconnected economies and cultures suggest that the U.S.-Mexico border is better envisioned as an open door than as a walled battleground.

This chapter frames the nineteenth century borderlands as a theater of movement that had long been marked by imperial contestations and diverse migrations. Native American, colonial, Mexican, and American migrations shaped the region, keeping territorial boundaries porous, and racial and national identities blurred. Following the transformation of the indigenous borderlands to a capitalist borderlands, the chapter traces the seismic demographic shift that drove the region’s rapid industrialization; as the borderlands connected into national, transnational, and global circuits of migration, and oceanic lines fed back into railway connections, white, black, Mexican, and Chinese immigrants descended on the border from all directions. Focusing on the multiple boundaries that intersected at the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border – namely, the international boundary as well as the limits of Jim Crow that ended where Texas met New Mexico – this chapter shows how and why the late 19th century borderlands looked so promising for these diverse groups. It begins to develop a transborder framework for understanding immigration, emphasizing how the narrowing of economic opportunities, political rights, and social freedoms in both the United States and Mexico contributed to such diverse men and women coming together in the borderlands.

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.

This chapter examines the vision and planning process behind the Caminata Nocturna, which began from a “Night Hike” in El Alberto as a response to the increased danger of crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Using rigorous embodied action, the Caminata simulation of border crossing urges both tourists and the youth of El Alberto to set their sights not on the United States, but rather on the “Mexican Dream”—the dream of a future in which migration will no longer be a necessity. This chapter suggests that the Caminata does not only protest the trend of U.S. border militarization that has rendered undocumented passage increasingly difficult, but also unlocks the creative potential of the undocumented journey and channels it toward new ends. It argues that the Caminata humanizes migrants, whereas U.S. border enforcement policy objectifies them.