Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 A Sectional Immigration Policy
2 The Battle for the Border
3 Repatriation and Reform
4 An Agency in Crisis
5 Making the Local National
6 The Federal Regulation of the U.S.-Mexico Border
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
S. Deborah Kang is an Assistant Professor of History at California State University, San Marcos.
"The book is impeccably researched. It is aÂdelight to find
archival documents in footnote after footnote. Kang's main source
is, unsurprisingly, the INS's internal files at the National
Archives. But to tell the story's local context, Kang plumbed a
dozen regional archives as well. The result is a deeply evidenced
and convincing story. Kang did the hard work so readers can benefit
from her cogent and impressive summary of a complex history." --
Katherine
Benton-Cohen, H-Net
"This impressively researched book enhances readers' understanding
of how border residents and officials helped create immigration
laws and shape the way the United States has defined and understood
the border ... .Kang does an excellent job showing the creativity
and flexibility employed by the Immigration Service to carry out --
with mixed results -- its difficult mandate and satisfy competing
interests at the national and local levels." -- Jensen
Branscombe
, Journal of American Ethnic History
"This excellent and timely book ... concludes with some
historically informed and sensible reflections on policy. ...
Anyone interested in understanding the border should probably
ignore most of the overheated, vague, misleading and hypocritical
statements crafted by federal politicians, and focus on the
everyday exercise of state power." -- Thomas Rath , English
Historical Review
"An eminently accessible account of a federal administrative
agency's engagement with law ... .[It] should be of interest to
both historians of migration and government and, especially,
scholars concerned with the development of law and the commitment
to the rule of law in the Americas. ... Through its nuanced
approach to the INS's decision making on the southern border of the
United States, Kang demonstrates the conflation of law and power
that has so often
bedeviled the project of governance in the Americas." -- Kif
Augustine-Adams , Hispanic American Historical Review
"Kang argues that the border has always been simultaneously open
and closed, responding to a panoply of competing interests mediated
by the INS... Kang's excellent book raises questions about the
nature and impact of administrative policy-making, often hidden
from public view and operating outside of democratic processes. But
it also exposes the limits of Congressional law-making when it
comes to immigration policy. Immigration laws often embody the
divisive
immigration debates, trying to address different constituencies but
pleasing none of them and leaving administrative officials to sort
out the mess." -- Lucy Salyer, Western Legal History
"Kang successfully shows how the INS and the Border Patrol were
constantly harried by local, national, and transnational pressures
and often worked from a place of weakness when trying to enforce
immigration law. There is little to criticize in this work. Kang's
research is extensive and her contribution to borderlands history
is clear." -- Benjamin C. Montoya, Southwestern Historical
Quarterly
"With her excellent monograph...S. Deborah Kang joins what is now
an expansive and expanding historical conversation on these topics
as they relate to the U.S.-Mexican border....Kang makes an
intelligent and thoroughly convincing argument with regard to the
halting and provisional state-building efforts of the INS in this
period. American border enforcement, in practice, has always been
something of a muddle....Kang provides a clear and nuanced tour of
the
individuals, ideas, and forces that shaped enforcement strategies
still practiced on the contemporary border. Her work deserves the
attention not only of legal and immigration historians but also of
policy
historians, scholars of the U.S.-Mexican border region, and
borderlands specialists across regions, fields, and
disciplines."--Patrick Ettinger, American Historical Review
"Kang's deeply researched book yields powerful insights about the
importance of studying immigration law in action, shifting our
focus from Congressional policy-makers in the nation's capital to
low-level immigration officials on the nation's southwestern border
with Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century. Short on
resources and torn between competing interests, immigration
officers used their most powerful weapon--administrative
discretion--to
devise procedures that ultimately became national policy. Want to
understand what made today's militarized border possible? Read this
book!"--Lucy E. Salyer, author of Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese
Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law
"The INS on the Line is a superb book. Kang provides an
institutional history of the Immigration and Naturalization Service
on the US-Mexico border that is engaging and deeply illuminating.
She illustrates the myriad ways in which rank and file agency
officials stationed in California, Arizona, and Texas not only
implemented federal immigration law, but also helped craft the law
itself, demonstrating that they did so not only to better reflect
the
complex realities of border life but also to better serve the
agency's own interests. Though focused on the first half of the
twentieth century, the book contains critical insights for our
understanding of
contemporary immigration policy. This timely book is a must-read
for scholars interested in immigration policy, borderlands studies,
and the American administrative state."--Cybelle Fox, author of
Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare
State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal
"In this meticulous legal history, Kang reveals how immigration
officers on the US-Mexico border not only enforced national
regulations, but also shaped and gave meaning to US immigration
law. For anyone trying to understand the origins of the tangled
bureaucracy, deportation raids, and overcrowded detention centers
that make up the modern American immigration system, this is the
place to start."--Rachel St. John, author of Line in the Sand: A
History of
the Western U.S.-Mexico Border
"This book is an important contribution to our understanding of the
history of border policing. It stands alone in the historiography
for its depth of research and understanding of the fine-grained
procedural aspects of early INS and Border Patrol history...This
book would be useful to assign in undergraduate classes about the
border, and it could serve as a valuable example to graduate
students of how to conduct effective legal and institutional
history."--C.J. Alvarez, Western History Quarterly
"The genius of Deborah Kang's The INS on the Line is that it shows
in painstaking detail how very little Trump's simplistic fantasy
has to do with the actual history of the US-Mexico border. Kang
offers us a highly original account of state regulation...of the
border between 1917 and 1954. She shows how the US-Mexico border
emerged as a complex and extended negotiation between the forces of
nativism and the concerns and interests of border communities;
between
the US and Mexico; between 'law on the books' as established in
Washington, DC, and 'law in action' in California, Texas, and
Arizona; and among the multiple agendas of legislatures, agencies,
courts,
border residents, employers, and migrants."-- Kunal M. Parker,
H-FedHist
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