Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide. By Peter Andreas. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. 176p. $39.95 cloth, $15.95 paper.

Abstract

The difficulty of policing a complex border like that between the United States and Mexico, specifically stemming the flow of illegal drugs and immigration, demonstrates, according to Peter Andreas's insightful and pathbreaking analysis, the challenges associated with globalization, diminished sovereignty, and economic integration between developed and developing economies. In fact, as he notes, intensifying law enforcement on the U.S.-Mexico border has had several unintended consequences, including enhancing the incentive and thus the flow of illegal drugs and migrants, which, in turn, create obstacles to the expansion of legal flows. Throughout the book an implicit question emerges: How do you balance the positive gains from globalization with the negative or dark side effects of free trade, that is, drug trafficking and illegal immigration? Taking the dilemma further, how can states in a global, borderless economy promote two contradictory policies simultaneously: strong prohibitionist, law-enforcement policies to enforce state sovereignty and economic neoliberalism and integration?