"Today the United States is home to more unauthorized immigrants than at any time in the country's history. As scrutiny around immigration has intensified, border enforcement has tightened. The result is a population of new Americans who are more entrenched than ever before. Crossing harsher, less porous borders makes entry to the US a permanent, costly enterprise. And the challenges don't end once they're here. In The Border Within, journalist Kalee Thompson and economist Tara Watson examine the costs and ends of America's immigration-enforcement complex, particularly its practices of internal enforcement: the policies and agencies, including ICE, aimed at removing unauthorized immigrants living in the US. Thompson and Watson's economic appraisal of immigration's costs and benefits is interlaid with first-person reporting of families who personify America's policies in a time of scapegoating and fear. The result is at once enlightening and devastating. Thomspon and Watson examine immigration's impact on every aspect of American life, from the labor force to social welfare programs to tax revenue. The results paint an overwhelmingly positive picture of what non-native Americans bring to the country, including immigration's tendency to elevate the wages and skills of those who are native born. Their research also finds a stark gap between the realities of America's immigrant population and the policies meant to uproot them: America's internal enforcements are grounded in shock and awe more than any reality of where and how immigrants live. The objective, it seems, is to deploy "chilling effects" -- performative displays aimed at producing upstream effects on economic behaviors and decision-making among immigrants. The ramifications of these fear-based policies extends beyond immigrants themselves; they have impacts on American citizens living in immigrant families as well as on the broader society"--

For whom and why are borders drawn? What are the symbolic projections of these physical realities? And what are the symbolic projections of these physical realities? Constituted by experience and memory, borders shape a "border image" in the minds and social memory of people beyond the lines of the state. In the case of the Turkey-Georgia border, the image of the border has often been constructed as an economic reality that creates "conditional permeabilities" rather than political emphases. This book puts forward the argument that participation in this economic life reshapes the relationship between the ethnic groups who live in the borderland as well as gender relations. By drawing on detailed ethnographic research at the Turkey-Georgia border, life at the border is explored in terms of family relations, work life, and intra- and inter-ethnic group relations. Using an intersectional approach, the book charts the perceptions and representations of how different ethnic and gendered groups experience interactions among themselves, with each other, and with the changing economic context. This book offers a rich, empirically based account of the intersectional and multidimensional forms of economic activity in border regions. It will be of interest to students, researchers, and policy makers alike working in geography, economics, ethnic studies, gender studies, international relations, and political studies.

In Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, men and women in low- and middle-income neighborhoods manage to sustain their lives, straddling an international border. Political scientist Kathleen Staudt offers insights to readers as the globalized economy spreads and engulfs the heartlands of both the U.S. and Mexico. Staudt shows that people's everyday victories in countering petty regulations can either counter or feed the greater global hegemonies. 14 photos. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

"Using a combination of economic history and economic analysis, the work explores how the location of U.S. and Mexican communities on the border are shaped by forces that originate on the other side"--