The destination episode of an eight-link Retroplot tracing 175 years of specific, traceable decisions from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 to the present-day U.S. southern border — examining the enforcement apparatus, the asylum system, the political economy, and the question of what...
U.S. foreign policy interventions in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras from the 1950s through the 1990s and the downstream migration consequences — the deportation circuit, the emergence of the maras, and the Northern Triangle asylum-seeking migration arriving at a border system designed...
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...
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...