| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide. By Peter Andreas. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. xiv, 158 pp. $26.00, ISBN 0-8014-3796-2.)

The busiest land border in the world, the shared U.S.-Mexico border, may also be the most perplexing. As a result of an incongruent set of political goals in the 1990s—a desire to participate in international trade liberalization, on the one hand, and a desire to appease voter concerns over drug smuggling and undocumented immigration, on the other—the United States found itself refashioning its southern border simultaneously into a profitable bridge and into a protective barrier. Peter Andreas, a political scientist at Reed College, has written a slim, smart book that explains the paradoxical developments that have gripped the border since the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). 1

The book's focus is on the rapid escalation in the 1990s of U.S. border-policing activities designed to stem flows of illegal drugs and undocumented immigrants into the United States from Mexico. Drawing on an array of sources gathered from both sides of the border, Andreas details the enforcement initiatives that captured headlines, including the Immigration and Naturalization Service's (INS) Operation Hold-the-Line and Operation Gatekeeper, which sought to deter undocumented alien entry near El Paso and San Diego, respectively, in the early 1990s. But Andreas is less interested in simply detailing these enforcement initiatives than in explaining the "symbolic dimensions" of border enforcement that, in fact, led to their creation. Why the sudden sharp escalation of border enforcement? . . .

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