Border Control and Sexual Policing:

Abstract

This article argues that the convergence of immigration law and morals purity movements, beginning in 1907, constructed the U.S. southern border as a site of gender and sexual exclusions. At the turn of the twentieth century, policing the U.S.-Mexico border was a gendered and sexualized project of the American state that sought to prohibit the admission of “alien” women and girls practicing prostitution and those who procured them. This work joins a growing body of scholarship that places the origins of the U.S. immigration regime and its use of deportation and surveillance strategies before the Immigration Act of 1917.