The INS on the Line

The book is impeccably researched. It is adelight to find archival documents in footnote after footnote. Kang's main source is, unsurprisingly, the INS's internal files at the National Archives. But to tell the story's local context, Kang plumbed a dozen regional archives as well. The result is a deeply evidenced and convincing story. Kang did the hard work so readers can benefit from her cogent and impressive summary of a complex history. * Katherine Benton-Cohen, H-Net *
This impressively researched book enhances readers' understanding of how border residents and officials helped create immigration laws and shape the way the United States has defined and understood the border ... .Kang does an excellent job showing the creativity and flexibility employed by the Immigration Service to carry out -- with mixed results -- its difficult mandate and satisfy competing interests at the national and local levels. * Jensen Branscombe, Journal of American Ethnic History *
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 *
Kang argues that the border has always been simultaneously open and closed, responding to a panoply of competing interests mediated by the INS... Kang's excellent book raises questions about the nature and impact of administrative policy-making, often hidden from public view and operating outside of democratic processes. But it also exposes the limits of Congressional law-making when it comes to immigration policy. Immigration laws often embody the divisive immigration debates, trying to address different constituencies but pleasing none of them and leaving administrative officials to sort out the mess. * Lucy Salyer, Western Legal History *
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 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 *
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-the appropriate phrase is really "state production"-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 *
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 *
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 *