Immigration Law and the U.S.–Mexico Border

Immigration Law and the U.S.–Mexico Border PDF Author: Kevin R. Johnson
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816505594
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
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.

Immigration Law and the U.S.–Mexico Border

Immigration Law and the U.S.–Mexico Border PDF Author: Kevin R. Johnson
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816505594
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The INS on the Line

The INS on the Line PDF Author: S. Deborah Kang
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199757437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-1954 offers a comprehensive history of the INS in the southwestern borderlands, tracing the ways in which local immigration officials both made and enforced the nation's immigration laws.

Migrant Longing

Migrant Longing PDF Author: Miroslava Chávez-García
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469641046
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Drawing upon a personal collection of more than 300 letters exchanged between her parents and other family members across the U.S.-Mexico border, Miroslava Chavez-Garcia recreates and gives meaning to the hope, fear, and longing migrants experienced in their everyday lives both "here" and "there" (aqui y alla). As private sources of communication hidden from public consumption and historical research, the letters provide a rare glimpse into the deeply emotional, personal, and social lives of ordinary Mexican men and women as recorded in their immediate, firsthand accounts. Chavez-Garcia demonstrates not only how migrants struggled to maintain their sense of humanity in el norte but also how those remaining at home made sense of their changing identities in response to the loss of loved ones who sometimes left for weeks, months, or years at a time, or simply never returned. With this richly detailed account, ranging from the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s to the emergence of Silicon Valley in the late 1960s, Chavez-Garcia opens a new window onto the social, economic, political, and cultural developments of the day and recovers the human agency of much maligned migrants in our society today.

Threshold

Threshold PDF Author: Ieva Jusionyte
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520969642
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
"Jusionyte explores the sister towns bisected by the border from many angles in this illuminating and poignant exploration of a place and situation that are little discussed yet have significant implications for larger political discourse."—Publishers Weekly, STARRED Review Emergency responders on the US-Mexico border operate at the edges of two states. They rush patients to hospitals across country lines, tend to the broken bones of migrants who jump over the wall, and put out fires that know no national boundaries. Paramedics and firefighters on both sides of the border are tasked with saving lives and preventing disasters in the harsh terrain at the center of divisive national debates. Ieva Jusionyte’s firsthand experience as an emergency responder provides the background for her gripping examination of the politics of injury and rescue in the militarized region surrounding the US-Mexico border. Operating in this area, firefighters and paramedics are torn between their mandate as frontline state actors and their responsibility as professional rescuers, between the limits of law and pull of ethics. From this vantage they witness what unfolds when territorial sovereignty, tactical infrastructure, and the natural environment collide. Jusionyte reveals the binational brotherhood that forms in this crucible to stand in the way of catastrophe. Through beautiful ethnography and a uniquely personal perspective, Threshold provides a new way to understand politicized issues ranging from border security and undocumented migration to public access to healthcare today.

The Law of the United States-Mexico Border

The Law of the United States-Mexico Border PDF Author: Peter L. Reich
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781594601644
Category : Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This casebook is the first to focus on the interaction of the U.S. legal system with Mexican law in the border region. The work presents American court decisions supplemented with the author's commentary and study questions. As the U.S.-Mexico border has generated a wide array of controversies, the casebook covers boundary questions, border detentions, immigrants' rights, family law, real estate transactions, finance and trade, torts, crimes, environmental law, and Mexican law within the United States. It will teach law students in law, public policy, and undergraduate courses about the power and limitations of law in resolving border-related disputes. "Reich provides students and scholars alike with a compelling framework for understanding how laws made on one side of the border can fashion quite dramatically the lives of people living on the other side of the border (or who wish to cross "la linea" in search of economic security)...Reich's analytical commentary and discussion questions will draw students into spirited debate, but a debate informed by thoughtfully presented case studies rather than toxic polemic. Law professors, legal historians, and attorneys with clients who have transnational legal needs will find Reich's casebook quite useful; law students, including undergraduates enrolled in legal studies programs, will benefit from Reich's ability to make accessible some very complex material."-- Professor Michael M. Brescia, The University of Arizona "While the text is primarily intended for a law school audience, borderlands and other historians will find it a very useful addition to scholarship that accepts as axiomatic the fluidity of the Mexico-U.S. border...The text is invaluable and should not go unnoticed by instructors in those fields...Rather than exclusively mimicking the categories of traditional law study, every chapter engages multiple subjects under headings that will look familiar even to lay readers with a working knowledge of border contestations, such as "boundary issues, " "border detentions," "immigrant's rights," "financial and trade transactions," and "environmental law...One of the many values of this volume is that Reich has cast his net widely to find illustrative legal opinions, reaching back into the 19th century and including cases from a wide variety of United States courts....it is clear that Reich has chosen his case to provide opportunities for readers to contemplate the ramifications of courts adopting (even if unwittingly) one view of the border or the other. Following each case, Reich provides thoughtful discussion questions and an occasional explanatory note, which include asking the reader to consider whether the court is viewing the border as a line or a zone."-- Southern California Quarterly, Vol. I0I, No. I

Run for the Border

Run for the Border PDF Author: Steven W. Bender
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814723225
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Mexico and the United States exist in a symbiotic relationship: Mexico frequently provides the United States with cheap labor, illegal goods, and, for criminal offenders, a refuge from the law. In turn, the U.S. offers Mexican laborers the American dream: the possibility of a better livelihood through hard work. To supply each other’s demands, Americans and Mexicans have to cross their shared border from both sides. Despite this relationship, U.S. immigration reform debates tend to be security-focused and center on the idea of menacing Mexicans heading north to steal abundant American resources. Further, Congress tends to approach reform unilaterally, without engaging with Mexico or other feeder countries, and, disturbingly, without acknowledging problematic southern crossings that Americans routinely make into Mexico. In Run for the Border, Steven W. Bender offers a framework for a more comprehensive border policy through a historical analysis of border crossings, both Mexico to U.S. and U.S. to Mexico. In contrast to recent reform proposals, this book urges reform as the product of negotiation and implementation by cross-border accord; reform that honors the shared economic and cultural legacy of the U.S. and Mexico. Covering everything from the history of Anglo crossings into Mexico to escape law authorities, to vice tourism and retirement in Mexico, to today’s focus on Mexican border-crossing immigrants and drug traffickers, Bender takes lessons from the past 150 years to argue for more explicit and compassionate cross-border cooperation. Steeped in several disciplines, Run for the Border is a blend of historical, cultural, and legal perspectives, as well as those from literature and cinema, that reflect Bender’s cultural background and legal expertise.

The Border

The Border PDF Author: David J. Danelo
Publisher: Stackpole Books
ISBN: 0811740226
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
Thoughtful investigative report about a central issue of the 2008 presidential race that examines the border in human terms through a cast of colorful characters. Asks and answers the core questions: Should we close the border? Is a fence or wall the answer? Is the U.S. government capable of fully securing the border? Reviews the political, economic, social, and cultural aspects and discusses NAFTA, immigration policy, border security, and other local, regional, national, and international issues.

Porous Borders

Porous Borders PDF Author: Julian Lim
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146963550X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
With the railroad's arrival in the late nineteenth century, immigrants of all colors rushed to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, transforming the region into a booming international hub of economic and human activity. Following the stream of Mexican, Chinese, and African American migration, Julian Lim presents a fresh study of the multiracial intersections of the borderlands, where diverse peoples crossed multiple boundaries in search of new economic opportunities and social relations. However, as these migrants came together in ways that blurred and confounded elite expectations of racial order, both the United States and Mexico resorted to increasingly exclusionary immigration policies in order to make the multiracial populations of the borderlands less visible within the body politic, and to remove them from the boundaries of national identity altogether. Using a variety of English- and Spanish-language primary sources from both sides of the border, Lim reveals how a borderlands region that has traditionally been defined by Mexican-Anglo relations was in fact shaped by a diverse population that came together dynamically through work and play, in the streets and in homes, through war and marriage, and in the very act of crossing the border.

Line in the Sand

Line in the Sand PDF Author: Rachel St. John
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691156131
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Line in the Sand details the dramatic transformation of the western U.S.-Mexico border from its creation at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 to the emergence of the modern boundary line in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this sweeping narrative, Rachel St. John explores how this boundary changed from a mere line on a map to a clearly marked and heavily regulated divide between the United States and Mexico. Focusing on the desert border to the west of the Rio Grande, this book explains the origins of the modern border and places the line at the center of a transnational history of expanding capitalism and state power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moving across local, regional, and national scales, St. John shows how government officials, Native American raiders, ranchers, railroad builders, miners, investors, immigrants, and smugglers contributed to the rise of state power on the border and developed strategies to navigate the increasingly regulated landscape. Over the border's history, the U.S. and Mexican states gradually developed an expanding array of official laws, ad hoc arrangements, government agents, and physical barriers that did not close the line, but made it a flexible barrier that restricted the movement of some people, goods, and animals without impeding others. By the 1930s, their efforts had created the foundations of the modern border control apparatus. Drawing on extensive research in U.S. and Mexican archives, Line in the Sand weaves together a transnational history of how an undistinguished strip of land became the significant and symbolic space of state power and national definition that we know today.

Midnight on the Line

Midnight on the Line PDF Author: Tim Gaynor
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429994622
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A probing, ground-level investigation of illegal immigration and the people on both sides of the battle to secure the U.S.–Mexico border With illegal immigration burning as a contentious issue in American politics, Reuters reporter Tim Gaynor went into the underbelly of the border and to the heart of illegal immigration: along the 45-mile trek down the illegal alien "superhighway." Through scorpion-strewn trails with Mexican migrants and drug smugglers, he met up with a legendary group of Native American trackers called the Shadow Wolves, and traveled through the extensive network of tunnels, including the "Great Tunnel" from Tijuana to Otay Mesa, California. Along the way, Gaynor also meets Minutemen and exposes corruption among the Border Patrol agents who exchange sex or money for helping smugglers. The issue of illegal immigration has a complexity beyond any of the political rhetoric. Combining top-notch investigative journalism with a narrative style that delves into the human condition, Gaynor reveals the day-to-day realities on both sides of "the line."