Making Immigration Law on the US–Mexico Border, 1917–54

Drawing upon the findings of her first monograph, The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1917-1954, Dr. Kang will discuss the role of local actors in the shaping of the U.S.-Mexico border. Whereas migration scholars have tended to focus on the role of the President, Congress, and the courts in shaping American immigration policy, Kang’s work argues that immigration officials in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands played a profound and enduring role in defining the nation’s immigration laws and our very conceptions of the border. In response to the social, political, and geographical challenges surrounding their effort to close the border to unwanted immigrants, local immigration agents resorted to the law or used their discretionary authority to modify, invent, and even ignore the nation’s immigration laws. In the process, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in the Southwest not only redefined the law, it also contributed additional layers of meaning to the ever-evolving genealogy of the border. Despite their efforts to instantiate a singular vision of the border as a sovereign boundary, INS officials ultimately came to define the border in multiple and competing ways as a geopolitical boundary, a transnational economic and social zone, and a vast jurisdiction for the policing of unwanted immigrants.