The Ins on the Line

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.

"For much of the twentieth century, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials recognized that the US-Mexico border region was a special case. Here, the INS confronted a set of political, social, and environmental obstacles that prevented it from replicating its achievements at the immigration stations of Angel Island and Ellis Island. In response to these challenges, local INS officials resorted to the law--amending, nullifying, and even rewriting the nation's immigration laws for the borderlands, as well as enforcing them. In The INS on the Line, S. Deborah Kang traces the ways in which the INS on the US-Mexico border made the nation's immigration laws over the course of the twentieth century. While the INS is primarily thought to be a law enforcement agency, Kang demonstrates that the agency also defined itself as a lawmaking body. Through a nuanced examination of the agency's admission, deportation, and enforcement practices in the Southwest, she reveals how local immigration officials constructed a complex approach to border control, one 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. Despite its contingent and local origins, this composite approach to border control, Kang concludes, continues to inform the daily operations of the nation's immigration agencies, American immigration law and policy, and conceptions of this border today"--

"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

"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

"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