Print Price: $38.50

Format:
Hardback
296 pp.
22 illustrations, 163 mm x 234 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199757435

Publication date:
January 2017

Imprint: OUP US

The INS on the Line

Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-1954

S. Deborah Kang

For much of the twentieth century, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials recognized that the US-Mexico border region was different. Here, they confronted a set of political, social, and environmental obstacles that prevented them from replicating their achievements on Angel Island and Ellis Island, the most restrictive immigration stations in the nation. In response to these challenges, local INS officials resorted to the law, nullifying, modifying, and creating the nation's immigration laws and policies for the borderlands.

In The INS on the Line, S. Deborah Kang traces the ways in which the INS on the US-Mexico border made and remade the nation's immigration laws over the course of the twentieth century. Through a nuanced examination of the agency's legal innovations in the Southwest, Kang demonstrates that the agency defined itself not only as a law enforcement unit but also as a lawmaking body. In this role, the INS responded to the interests of local residents, businesses, politicians, and social organizations on both sides of the US-Mexico border as well as policymakers in Washington, DC. Given the sheer variety of local and federal demands, local immigration officials constructed a complex approach to border control, an approach that closed the line in the name of nativism and national security, opened it for the benefit of transnational economic and social concerns, and redefined it as a vast legal jurisdiction for the policing of undocumented immigrants.

The composite approach to border control developed by the INS continues to inform the daily operations of the nation's immigration agencies, American immigration law and policy, and conceptions of the US-Mexico border today.

Readership : Legal, immigration, borderlands political, Mexican, and western U.S. historians; scholars of public policy and American Studies; political scientists; legal scholars; policymakers.

Reviews

• "Kang's deeply researched book yields powerful insights about the importance of studying immigration law in action, shifting our focus from Congressional policy-makers in the nation's capital to low-level immigration officials on the nation's southwestern border with Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century. Short on resources and torn between competing interests, immigration officers used their most powerful weapon--administrative discretion--to devise procedures that ultimately became national policy. Want to understand what made today's militarized border possible? Read this book!"
  
  --Lucy E. Salyer, author of Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law
  
  
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• "In this meticulous legal history, Kang reveals how immigration officers on the US-Mexico border not only enforced national regulations, but also shaped and gave meaning to US immigration law. For anyone trying to understand the origins of the tangled bureaucracy, deportation raids, and overcrowded detention centers that make up the modern American immigration system, this is the place to start."
  
  --Rachel St. John, author of Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border