Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond

Joseph Nevins is an associate professor of geography at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. His writings have appeared in publications such as The Boston Review, Counterpunch.org, The International Herald Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Washington Post, and Z Magazine. His previous books include A Not-so-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor, and Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid.

"...an exaustively researched and well-organized compendium of information on the history and making of the Mexico-U.S boundary...The book's strength lies in its conceptual emphasis on immigration policy as a political-economic process rooted in deep-seated sociocultural agendas that materialize across time and space. [This] book will be helpful in bringing the illegal immigration debate into the larger discourse about globalization and the post 9/11 future of the Mexico-U.S border." -- International Migration Review, Vol. 36, No. 4 Winter 2002"Nevins' research is highly original...skillfully introduces academic material within a compelling narrative. The ideas are fresh, the scholarly debates are fully engaged, and the storyline never lags." -- Annals of the Association of American Geographers"Bill Clinton launched Operation Gatekeeper in 1994...Nevins demonstrates how this politcally motivated policy failed to significantly reduce unauthorized border crossings." -- Foreign Affairs"...a richly descriptive historical volume about the US Border Patrol strategy to enhance the enforcement of boundaries since 1994." -- Choice"Nevins meticulously deconstructs this political, and above all, human phenomenon in a thorough and penetrating text. Operation Gatekeeper could not be more timely: literally, there are lives on the line." -- Rubén Martínez, author of Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail"Operation Gatekeeper gives a forensic-like analysis of the U.S.-Mexican border, and efforts to control the human resources on both its sides. Indispensable to scholars and anyone wanting to know why the border is still contested ground." -- Rodolfo F. Acuña, author of Occupied America: A History of Chicanos"An important and timely book. Not only does Nevins provide a convincing indictment of U.S. policy on the Mexican border (a policy that has increased deaths, driven down wages, and shown the U.S. to be anything but the open, tolerant society is likes to proclaim itself to be). He also provides a rich account of the historical and contemporary context that has made Operation Gatekeeper central to rising American Nationalism." -- Don Mitchell, author of The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape"Add[s] significantly to the literature on Mexican migration... free of the uninformed claims and inflammatory language that characterizes so much of the literature on this topic." -- Political Science Quarterly"Well-researched and important." -- American Historical Review"The book was highly successful in these semesters. Students were thrilled to be reading the latest immigration scholarship and Nevins' prose is accessible, serious, and measured. Students felt like they were reading the "real deal" on immigration, which is often bloated on all sides of the debate with hyperbole, polemics, and misinformation. Nevins' text is not only carefully researched, it's policy analysis that bears fruit. He provides historical background, theoretical underpinnings, and a sense of the local that is key to understanding the borderlands." David Hernandez, UCLA"I thought Gatekeeper was very useful as did my students. We all agreed that it was an extremely insightful book, especially since it raised some important questions that we could then ask about the particularities of Operation Safeguard in AZ where we see the effects of firsthand, increased border violence, militarization of our communities, unprecedented migrant deaths in the desert that rise exponentially each year, but also importantly set ithem within larger global processes. Although there are other books that look historically at immigration – and we used Chacon and Davis for understanding farm worker migration to California and its historical antecedents - what Gatekeeper does and does very well is look at a particular socioeconomic and political context, that is the US- Mexico boundary, its relationship to more global set of forces as well as how they play out on the ground, that includes the contradictions that emerge both empirically and conceptually." Linda Green, Anthropology, University of Arizona"I will begin teaching a course called Migration Politics in a Globalizing World next year, and I would probably want to use it for that. I don’t think there’s anything that can compete with it within the same topical area. In geography there is a real lack of and need for books for undergraduates that are readable and theoretically challenging at the same time." Mary Washington, Geogrqphy, University of New Mexico

• 1. Introduction 2. Nation-building in the Borderlands: Constructing the U.S.-Mexico Boundary 3. Generating Difference in San Diego-Tijuana 4. Sharpening the Divide: From Border to Boundary 5. Producing the Crisis: The Emergence of Operation Gatekeeper 6. The Ideological Roots of the Illegal as Threat and the Boundary as Protector 7. The Effects and Significance of the Bounding of the United States 8. Security in an Age of Global Apartheid