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The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-1954 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

by S. Deborah Kang (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 11 ratings
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For much of the twentieth century, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials recognized that the US-Mexico border region was different. Here, they confronted a set of political, social, and environmental obstacles that prevented them from replicating their achievements on Angel Island and Ellis Island, the most restrictive immigration stations in the nation. In response to these challenges, local INS officials resorted to the law, nullifying, modifying, and creating the nation's immigration laws and policies for the borderlands.

In The INS on the Line, S. Deborah Kang traces the ways in which the INS on the US-Mexico border made and remade the nation's immigration laws over the course of the twentieth century. Through a nuanced examination of the agency's legal innovations in the Southwest, Kang demonstrates that the agency defined itself not only as a law enforcement unit but also as a lawmaking body. In this role, the INS responded to the interests of local residents, businesses, politicians, and social organizations on both sides of the US-Mexico border as well as policymakers in Washington, DC. Given the sheer variety of local and federal demands, local immigration officials constructed a complex approach to border control, an approach that closed the line in the name of nativism and national security, opened it for the benefit of transnational economic and social concerns, and redefined it as a vast legal jurisdiction for the policing of undocumented immigrants.

The composite approach to border control developed by the INS continues to inform the daily operations of the nation's immigration agencies, American immigration law and policy, and conceptions of the US-Mexico border today.
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  1. ISBN-13
    978-0199757435
  2. Edition
    1st
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Oxford University Press
  5. Publication date
    December 1, 2016
  6. Language
    English
  7. File size
    10190 KB
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Winner of the 2018 Theodore Saloutos Book Award of the Immigration and Ethnic History SocietyWinner of the 2018 Henry Adams Prize of the Society for the History of the Federal GovernmentWinner of the 2017 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book PrizeWinner of the 2018 W. Turrentine Jackson Award of the Western History AssociationWinner of the 2018 Americo Paredes Book Award for NonfictionFinalist, 2018 Weber-Clements Book Prize of the Western History Association

Review

"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

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01MYRKCTQ
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; 1st edition (December 1, 2016)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 1, 2016
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 10190 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 294 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0199757437
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 11 ratings

About the author

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S. Deborah Kang

S. Deborah Kang

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S. Deborah Kang was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Korean immigrant parents. A graduate of the College Scholar Program at Cornell University, Kang went on to receive her M.A. from the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program and Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about law and society along the Mexican and Canadian borders and teaches immigration, legal, and borderlands history as the Anne Stark and Chester Watson Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her first book, The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-1954 (Oxford, 2017), offers one of the first comprehensive histories of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) on the US-Mexico border. She is also the editor of Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth Century America by Jon Gjerde (Cambridge, 2012), a study of immigration, religion, and national identity in antebellum America.

Customer reviews

3.8 out of 5 stars
3.8 out of 5
11 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Nick
5.0 out of 5 stars Revealing
Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2021
Verified Purchase
Overall, The INS on the Line, is a well written source documenting the complicated timeline of the US-Mexico border. It is presented in a manner that sort of flows from 1917 to 1954, yet, it doesn't hold back from referencing future events where context provides the opportunity. It is an excellent read for those trying to understand how immigration, as an institution, has gone from a bunch of horribly underfunded people trying to scan passports to this Lovecraftian faceless void that apparently has a bigger budget than, "the FBI, ATF, DEA, Secret Service, US Marshals, and the entire NYPD combined."

5/5 for Grad Students (because you'll read it anyway)
4/5 for the average reader (because its pretty dense and heavy for recreational reading.
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wildbill
3.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Historiography... Questionable Stratagem
Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2020
Verified Purchase
Thoroughly enjoyed the historiographic narrative presented by Professor Kang. Articulating and defining the vast provisions, initiatives, and development of America's authoritative stance on the borderland regions of America's borders in Professor Kang's book, "The INS on the Line", was both compelling and intuitive. She presents a scholarly assessment of border immigration and national exigencies and connects the dots between what is national news of today to the concerns, policies, and actions of a region quite nearly a century earlier. This reviewer carefully retraced much of the referenced material Professor Kang used throughout her heavily researched book and remained quite perplexed why some material was used; while yet, other significant and available resource material was not utilized. (i.e. US Supreme Court cases used to foundationalize her initial thesis were representative of the era she begins; however, more current cases were not, such as: "US v. Verdugo-Urquidez", which specifically communicate the legal concerns attributed in the current era which Kang's book also reflects.) Alumni Dr. Kang, (U of C at Berkley), as other authors from this prestigious academic institution, held strong to their political ranks to use their work to trounce political entities these authors are against, which has become expected, juvenile, and unappreciated. Apart from this questionable stratagem, Dr. Kang, may have received a full FIVE STARS from this reviewer for her work. ("The INS on the Line", by S. Deborah Kang was a required reading for a Master's of History class).
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