-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Patrick Ettinger, S. Deborah Kang. The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917–1954., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 246–247, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.246
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
A generation ago, relatively little professional historical scholarship existed on the intertwined histories of American immigration policy, border enforcement efforts, and undocumented immigration. With her excellent monograph The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917–1954, 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.
Her book offers an institutional history of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) during the critical years between World War I and the early 1950s. Kang focuses closely on several generations of leaders of the INS as they wrestled with shifting responsibilities, highly politicized expectations, and constant enforcement dilemmas on the nation’s borders. Some problems resulted from statutes, administrative regulations, and legal decisions, which were often conflicting or ambiguous. But enforcement quandaries were nurtured as well by the political pressures exerted by agricultural interests, by deeply vested and vociferous borderlands stakeholders, and even by immigration inspectors and U.S. Border Patrol officers working at “cross-purposes” (7).
