IRCA had briefly cut unauthorized migration but apprehensions soon ticked back up. IRCA had to “fail”: a one-off legalization could never have regularized long-term migration flows. The border once again appeared to Americans as a porous made-for-television fiasco as fortified green-and-white INS buses were loaded up with detained immigrants.60
“Of course, I don’t qualify for amnesty,” said a nineteen-year-old Tijuana native detained on one bus. “None of us do. But there is still work in Los Angeles and there are still people who will hire us. Besides, having grown up as close to the border as I did, I knew life was better on this side.”61 One man had been picked up on the way to grab food with a friend. Others were nabbed at work, including several captured while picking onions in a Valencia field. “All of this is crap,” said one. “They catch you. They send you back. You come back. And then La Migra catches you again. And the boss still wants you to come back.” “We’re not a very viable deterrent,” one Border Patrol official lamented. “We see a lot more than we have officers to catch them.”62
It wasn’t just the land border. The specter of asylum seekers, particularly Haitian “boat people” fleeing widespread violence and repression after the 1991 military coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, consumed politics. President George H. W. Bush detained thousands at the US colonial military outpost in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and turned thousands more back to the island. During his presidential campaign, Clinton had condemned Bush’s inhumanity but reversed course before he even took office, pledging to continue the policy.63 In office, Clinton fought and lost a fight to indefinitely detain HIV-positive Haitians who had legitimate asylum claims at Guantanamo—in horrible conditions within what the presiding judge described as an “H.I.V. prison camp”—because US law barred HIV-positive people from entry.64
In New York, Representative Charles Schumer warned that the influx into JFK airport of thousands claiming persecution “jeopardizes our security, and it jeopardizes the people who come here legally.”65 The New York Times claimed that many were actually economic migrants gaming the system, and that “the overwhelmed asylum system cannot tell the terrorist from the terrified.”66 This was in the wake of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and it was revealed that a key suspect had entered after requesting asylum. Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) executive director Dan Stein fanned the flames on 60 Minutes: a terrorist could gain entry, he said, with “two magic words: political asylum.”67 Terrorism inspired fear. So did the entire Global South. “The issue is,” said New York INS district director William S. Slattery, “Who’s going to control the borders of the United States? … The aliens have taken control. The third world has packed its bags and it’s moving.”68 Meanwhile, the Golden Venture, a ship carrying nearly three hundred unauthorized Chinese migrants, ran aground off Long Island—provoking an enormous media spectacle.69
IRCA’s failure and high-profile conflicts over asylum made enforcement seem like the only solution. Near San Diego, the INS considered a stronger fence to replace the hole-filled one that stretched eastward from the Pacific Ocean. “It’s ludicrous,” said Herman Baca, a frequent and prescient critic of border enforcement. “We don’t need a Berlin Wall … You can’t expect to stop illegal immigration without getting at the root causes.”70
But that argument lost its hold. In 1989, gatherings of hundreds of anti-immigrant motorists staged “Light Up the Border” protests in San Diego, shining their headlights toward Mexico to ward off migrants and demand government action.71 In 1990, the Border Patrol installed stadium lights along a mile of the Tijuana River and it began to erect the first fourteen miles of modern fencing—made of ten-foot-tall welded steel landing mats from the Vietnam War—along the border at San Diego with assistance from the Army Corps of Engineers and the California National Guard. It would become the first installment of an actually existing border wall that twenty-five years later made Trump’s call to “build the wall” possible—a campaign that was premised on pretending that the wall didn’t already exist.72
Under control
In September 1993, just two months before Congress voted to approve NAFTA, the spotlight shifted 620 miles to the east of San Ysidro to West Texas. There, large numbers crossed illegally from Ciudad Juárez into El Paso, not as immigrants but as part of their daily commute. Cross-border migration, with and without authorization, was sewn into the twin cities’ fabric.73
Silvestre Reyes, chief of the Border Patrol’s El Paso sector, launched Operation Hold the Line—originally given the indecorous name Operation Blockade—deploying hundreds of agents directly across the Rio Grande from Juárez and effectively shutting down urban crossings. In doing so, he created a framework for border militarization that emphasized deterring entry over apprehending immigrants after they cross. It’s a framework that has shaped American border politics through today.74
A New York Times story gushed that Reyes had “accomplished something no other officer of the Immigration and Naturalization Service ever had. He got the border in his sector under control. Not just for a brief, flashy demonstration, but permanently.”75 It was true: he had transformed border enforcement by making the seemingly inconceivable—effective border security—suddenly seem possible.
It appeared to be the beginning of the end of border history. Reyes was celebrated as an iconoclast rebelling against Washington norms. Washington was paying close attention. All that was needed to secure the border, many quickly agreed, was the political will. The Clinton administration rushed to replicate his model, extending the El Paso crackdown along the border.76 Politicians from both major parties would thereafter quixotically strive to make permanent security a reality.
The first Hold the Line replica appeared in October 1994, when Operation Gatekeeper was implemented in the San Diego sector. Immigration dominated California politics just ahead of the vote on Prop 187, whose advocates blamed the federal government for inaction. “California cannot raise its own border patrol, but California can say we will refuse to pay for bills,” said Ira Mehlman, a California spokesperson for FAIR. Governor Pete Wilson had, as a grower-friendly US senator, denounced employer sanctions and called for a guest worker program. But like Clinton, he embraced the border war, correctly discerning that nativism was a potent campaign issue.77
One campaign ad for Wilson showed immigrants running through the San Ysidro port of entry in what was called a “Banzai run,” darting through southbound traffic. “They keep coming,” said the narrator. “Two million illegal immigrants in California. The federal government won’t stop them at the border, yet requires you to pay billions to take care of them.” In fact, the spectacle was the result of an escalation of Border Patrol enforcement making it more difficult to cross at unauthorized crossing points.78 Tanton-network groups would take advantage of the spectacle as well, organizing “border tours” to dramatize their cause. (Years later, in 2015, they even had the help of active duty agents and their union.79)
By the early 1990s, anti-immigrant activists were making the case that, as FAIR’s Dan Stein put it, “Immigrants are not all honest and hardworking. Some are here to commit crimes, while others are part of a growing number of international organized crime rings that specialize in everything from alien smuggling to computer and credit card fraud.”80
After the 1992 Los Angeles riots, far-right Republican presidential contender Pat Buchanan charged that “foreigners are coming into this country illegally and helping to burn down one of the greatest cities in America.” “I can’t understand why this Administration fails to enforce the laws and close that border,” Buchanan told a crowd of senior citizens. “If I were President, I would have the Corps of Engineers build a double-barrier fence that would keep out 95 percent of the illegal traffic. I think it can be done.”81
The uprising was centered in heavily black South Central Los Angeles. But Hispanics, who had moved into the neighborhood in large numbers, made up a significant portion of those killed and ar
rested.82 The police who swept through the city arrested immigrants and turned many over to the INS for deportation.83 INS and Border Patrol agents were also deployed to police the streets and make arrests, including of undocumented immigrants.84 For leading nativist Garrett Hardin, the riot exemplified the threat posed by black and Latino criminality alike. In a letter to Mellon heir and Tanton network funder Cordelia Scaife May, Hardin rejoiced that the riots had demonstrated that “maybe the blacks are less than saintly” while complaining that “newspapers in coastal California have neglected to point out the predominant Latinity of apprehended criminals.”85
In 1992, Buchanan lost the primary, after a surprisingly strong challenge to the incumbent George H. W. Bush. But the Republican Platform incorporated his agenda in an effort to energize its right-wing base.86 The new platform pledged to “increase the size of the Border Patrol in order to meet the increasing need to stop illegal immigration and … equip the Border Patrol with the tools, technologies, and structures necessary to secure the border.” But it also departed from Buchanan’s agenda by hitching anti-“illegal” politics to a free trade agenda, promising that “in creating new economic opportunity in Mexico, NAFTA removes the incentive to cross the border illegally in search of work.”87
Buchanan’s campaign also shaped the victorious Clinton’s border and migration agenda. In 1994, the Border Patrol created its first national strategy. Developed with help from the Defense Department’s Center for Low Intensity Conflict, it explicitly cited El Paso’s Hold the Line as the future of border enforcement.88
“Those attempting to illegally enter the United States in large numbers do so in part because of the weak controls we have exercised over the southwest land border in the recent past,” the strategy document declared. “Although a 100 percent apprehension rate is an unrealistic goal, we believe we can achieve a rate of apprehensions sufficiently high to raise the risk of apprehension to the point that many will consider it futile to continue to attempt illegal entry.” Border Patrol called this strategy “prevention through deterrence,” and emphasized that its “success … depends on continued Congressional support throughout its duration.”
Congress was more than happy to oblige. In 1992, the Border Patrol deployed 4,139 agents. That number rose to 5,942 in 1996 and to 9,212 in 2000. Between October 1994 and June 1998, the San Diego sector received a 150 percent staffing increase along with new seismic sensors, vehicles, infrared night-vision goggles, and helicopters. Permanent lighting was extended from one mile in length to six.89 San Diego and El Paso were locked down.90 The border that mattered was the Mexican one. By 1999, there were nearly seven times more agents in the San Diego sector than along the entire northern border. Before the September 11 attacks, half the country’s ports of entry with Canada were left unguarded overnight. As the United States demonized Mexico for being a conduit for drugs, the cocaine and guns entering Canada from the United States were ignored.91
In 1996, Reyes, the Border Patrol’s first Hispanic sector chief, was elected to Congress by voters in his heavily Hispanic El Paso district, becoming its first Hispanic congressman. “It is rare that any immigration issue unifies El Pasoans, but Reyes did so with his strategy,” the El Paso Times noted in its endorsement.92 What once seemed impossible now seemed achieved. “People laughed at us,” said Operation Gatekeeper architect and former San Diego Border Patrol chief Johnny Williams in 1998. “They said, ‘You’re crazy to try this.’ They just didn’t think it was possible to control the border.”93 The new faith was embraced with a convert’s zeal.
Goods and not people
NAFTA had exacerbated a pervasive fear that the United States, after winning the Cold War, had swiftly passed from world history’s protagonist to the object of globalization’s inchoate powers. Amid widespread but diffuse anti-globalization sentiment, “border security” would protect capital mobility. As senior advisor Rahm Emanuel put it in a 1996 memo to President Clinton: “We should be honest, that if we want continued public support for trade and friendly relations with Mexico, we must be vigilant in our effort to curb illegal trade (e.g., narcotics and immigrants).”94
Even as the demonization of “illegal immigrants” quietly offered political protection for NAFTA, however, proponents publicly spun the accord as a measure that would so improve the Mexican economy that people wouldn’t feel so compelled to escape it. “In a sense, the whole point of NAFTA for Mexico is to be able to export goods and not people,” said Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1993. “That means creating jobs in Mexico.”95
The Border Patrol concurred. According to its 1994 National Strategic Plan, NAFTA “should reduce illegal immigration as the Mexican economy improves.”96 Attorney General Janet Reno campaigned hard for NAFTA—an unusual assignment for the nation’s top cop—calling it “our best hope for reducing illegal immigration, in the long haul.”97
In the more than two decades since, however, Mexico’s growth rates have been sluggish, and poverty rates have remained high.98 Meanwhile, researchers have found evidence that “employment generated by manufacturing production, and maquilas in particular, may indeed reduce the level of undocumented migration to the US.”99 But maquiladoras are part of a broader economic structuring that fuels migration, Raúl Delgado Wise and Humberto Márquez Covarrubias argue. Neoliberalism deepens an asymmetric form of binational economic integration, creating a vast surplus labor force in Mexico for export, and increasing dependence on those migrants’ remittances.100 Meanwhile, foreign investment that had flooded into Mexico suddenly flushed back out after the 1994 assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, the presidential candidate for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).101 The result was the 1994–95 peso crisis, which radically devalued Mexican wealth, contributing another major push factor for migration.102
And the border crackdown—intended to quell the border anxieties unleashed in part by NAFTA, which in turn was sold as a migration deterrent—in reality served to deter many Mexicans, who would otherwise have migrated back and forth across the border, from going back to Mexico.103 Instead, they experienced a “caging effect,” and stayed in the United States.104
Meanwhile, drug traffickers found respite in free trade, “hiding their drug shipments within the rising volume of commercial trucks, railcars and passenger vehicles crossing the border.” Under NAFTA, illicit drugs became tiny needles in a growing haystack of unshackled global commerce. A single truckload was enough cocaine to satisfy the entire US market for over a month.105 And increasingly, those drugs were coming across the southern border because US policy assisted Mexican cartels in diversifying and growing their business. By the mid-1990s, the United States had squeezed the cocaine-smuggling route that had run from Colombia through the Caribbean to Florida. The result was that Colombian traffickers began to route cocaine through Mexico. The power and economic clout of Mexican cartels grew, and they leveraged their critical intermediary role to demand payment not in cash but with a cut of the cocaine. Mexican traffickers, the Congressional Research Service found, evolved from being “mere couriers for the Colombians to … wholesalers.”106
The result was that the Gulf, Tijuana, Sinaloa, Juárez cartels and others bloomed into massive criminal enterprises that helped plunge Mexico into a murderous bloodbath.107 Meanwhile, the destruction of the Medellín and then Cali cartels did nothing to stop cocaine: Colombia was recently estimated to supply roughly 90 percent of the US market.108 The result was a gruesome drug war death toll for Mexicans, with murders nearly tripling over the five years that followed President Felipe Calderón’s 2006 US-backed deployment of military forces into the streets, according to one measure.109
The outcome was entirely foreseeable. The political response, however, was not to rethink interdiction as a strategy. Using legalization and regulation to seize the market from criminal actors was and remains taboo, with the exception of marijuana. Rather, policymakers doubled down. Government turned to more enforcement in the hope
that a surge in officers and technology could accomplish the impossible—or at least convince Americans that they were trying.110 Perversely, more drugs flowing across the border made it easier to accomplish and celebrate large seizures, redounding to the benefit of Clinton and Salinas, the two NAFTA-boosting presidents.111
In response to deepening integration, as political scientist Peter Andreas notes, politicians, officials and journalists turned the border into a stage upon which security was performed. “Border policing” became “not simply a policy instrument for deterring illegal crossings but a symbolic representation of state authority; it communicates the state’s commitment to making and maintaining the borderline.”112 It was, like prison expansion, a way for a government that failed to ensure social and economic welfare to use repression as a means to present itself as an energetic protector of the public good. The ostensible purpose of border enforcement is to send a message to Mexicans that they are unwelcome. But the performance’s greater purpose is to assure Americans that the government is sending that message to Mexicans. And that, despite appearances to the contrary, everything was going to be all right.
Neoliberalism “promised freedom and self-determination,” sociologist Dylan Riley writes.113 It created radical insecurity and uncertainty instead, a sense that people no longer had control over their lives. Opposition to “illegal aliens” and growing interest in aliens from other planets surged side by side during the 1990s as Americans searched out stories that explained who ran the world—because they plainly didn’t. Xenophobia was at the core of a flourishing but still inchoate conspiracist culture that would, a couple decades later, merge into a total and paranoiac right-wing worldview anchored by the likes of Alex Jones and President Trump.
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