Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond ─ The War on Illegals and the Remaking of American Boundaries

This is a major revision and update of Nevins’ earlier classic and is an ideal text for use with undergraduate students in a wide variety of courses on immigration, transnational issues, and the politics of race, inclusion and exclusion. Not only has the author brought his subject completely up to date, but as a "case" of increasing economic integration and liberalization along with growing immigration control, the US / Mexico Border and its history is put in a wider global context of similar development s elsewhere.
A companion website is available at www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415996945. The Companion Website contains key U.S. government documents related to the boundary and immigration enforcement strategy; reports from non-partisan research entities and non-governmental organizations that evaluate enforcement from a civil and human rights perspective; and studies that investigate migrant deaths in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. There are also photo essays, including one related to deportations and another to California’s Border Field State Park, for which the site also includes historic photos and other resources. Finally, the site has links to websites—from U.S. government agencies involved in boundary and immigrant policing, to humanitarian and border, migrant, and human rights organizations.

Joseph Nevins is an associate professor of geography at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. His writings have appeared in publications such as The Boston Review, Counterpunch.org, The International Herald Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Washington Post, and Z Magazine. His previous books include A Not-so-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor, and Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid.

1. Introduction 2. Nation-building in the Borderlands: Constructing the U.S.-Mexico Boundary 3. Generating Difference in San Diego-Tijuana 4. Sharpening the Divide: From Border to Boundary 5. Producing the Crisis: The Emergence of Operation Gatekeeper 6. The Ideological Roots of the Illegal as Threat and the Boundary as Protector 7. The Effects and Significance of the Bounding of the United States 8. Security in an Age of Global Apartheid