The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US–Mexico Border, 1917–1954, by S. Deborah Kang

Abstract

In 1900, the US–Mexico border amounted to little more than a scattered line of boundary stones. Through the twentieth century, the US government gradually created fences, walls, detention centres, laws and institutions to define and regulate the border. Still the border retained an uneven, contested and somewhat phantasmagorical quality—and arguably still does. The enormous, beautiful, Mexico-funded wall promised so fervently by Donald Trump has failed to materialise. (The new wall now being built increasingly resembles the wall which already exists; some of Trump’s supporters claim that the wall was only ever a metaphor for something else.) Meanwhile, towns, cities and campuses around the United States plan to resist a federal crackdown on undocumented migrants. Deborah Kang’s tightly focused and deeply researched study of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) tells us a great deal about this complicated history and the contentious present. Kang argues that the INS officials in the US Southwest not only administered federal laws and policies, but helped to make them. To do this she deploys an unfashionable but apt genre—legal and institutional history. Kang has sifted through the internal documentation of INS and uncovered a long and fascinating record of mid-level officials in Arizona, California and Texas exercising ‘administrative discretion’ (p. 1). These men produced their own knowledge of border society, decided how, or whether, they would enforce the law, and created numerous local practices and institutions: temporary border passes, exemptions from literacy tests, mobile task forces to locate and deport migrants, ad hoc legalisation procedures, guest worker programmes and (particularly among the Border Patrol) a tradition of gun-happy abuse of migrants. In the late 1940s, INS officials even determined wage levels for the bracero guest worker programme. This administrative leeway sometimes fostered graft and corruption. It also allowed INS officials to navigate the daunting topography of the border and a welter of competing political forces: agribusiness hungry for cheap and compliant labour, state and county authorities, nativists, distracted or pro-business federal legislators who repeatedly starved the agency of funding, a growing cross-border vice industry, different branches of the Mexican government, Cold War-era liberals who aimed to protect guest worker rights while boosting policing and, last but not least, tens of thousands of ordinary residents who wanted to continue living and working across the border.