The present state of the U.S. southern border as the accumulation of 175 years of specific decisions — the enforcement apparatus, the asylum system, the political economy that sustains the crisis, and the question of what the policy debate looks like when the full chain is visible versus when it...
U.S. foreign policy in Central America and its migration consequences — how CIA-backed coups, civil war funding, militarization, and mass deportation policies from the 1950s through the 1990s produced the Northern Triangle crisis and the asylum-seeking migration that the U.S. border enforcement...
The maquiladora economy and the geography of movement — how the Border Industrialization Program of 1965 transformed the U.S.–Mexico border from a sparsely populated frontier into a densely urbanized industrial corridor, positioning millions of workers at the threshold of the United States and...
NAFTA and Mexican agricultural displacement — how the elimination of corn tariffs displaced two million subsistence farmers and transformed migration from circular seasonal labor into permanent family settlement
The termination of the Bracero Program in 1964 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 — how two reforms driven by labor and civil rights principles converged to close the legal migration paths from Mexico at peak volume, converting legal workers into undocumented workers and creating...