Josiah Heyman

Overview of the 20th Report
This report addresses unmet drinking water and wastewater needs—as well as related issues of stormwater, watershed and wetlands management—for millions of Americans along the U.S. border with Mexico. This region includes the counties immediately adjacent to the U.S.–Mexico border or located partially within the zone that extends 60 miles (100 kilometers [km]) north of the international boundary. This area is the poorest region of the country, with per capita incomes, health outcomes and education levels well below the national average. Approximately 10 million U.S. residents, mainly Hispanic, live in this region, including approximately 800,000 individuals in colonias and rural areas. About 400,000 Native Americans, 300,000 colonias and rural residents, and more than a million people in cities adjacent to the international boundary are underserved in terms of water and wastewater infrastructure and services. The intersection of poverty, ethnicity, and lack of
basic water and sanitary services has created persistent inequities and an environmental and public health crisis along the southern border.
The Good Neighbor Environmental Board (GNEB) recognizes the progress that federal agencies and their partners at the tribal and state levels have made in addressing unmet water and wastewater infrastructure needs and related watershed and wetlands issues. This momentum has accelerated with significant new infrastructure funding from Congress and a renewed focus by federal agencies on underserved populations throughout the United States and in the border region. However, continued attention by federal agencies is necessary, especially to benefit smaller communities with limited resources and communities on the international boundary that are impacted by transborder sewage flows.

Recommendations of the 20th Report
GNEB provides the following 10 recommendations for general and specific federal actions throughout this report:
1. Continue to expand federal partnerships to make water and wastewater infrastructure funding and other water-related funding accessible to marginalized and underserved border communities as a priority of the
administration and federal agencies. Proactive outreach by collaborating federal agencies is essential for reaching rural, peri-urban and tribal communities that have been left behind with previous efforts. Funding
must include grants, as well as support for operations and maintenance.
2. Provide targeted technical assistance to aid and expedite underserved border communities, including tribal governments, to take advantage of the resources provided by such federal investments as the Infrastructure
Investment and Jobs Act (commonly known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, or BIL), the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 and other sources that include funding for water and wastewater projects and watershed
and wetlands management. For example, BIL incorporates a requirement that 49 percent of certain federal funds provided to states through the Drinking Water Revolving Funds and Clean Water Revolving Funds must
be distributed as grants or 100 percent principal forgiveness loans. The federal government should work with border communities and border states so that state grants and loans with 100 percent principal forgiveness are
directed to underserved communities, many of which are border communities. The administration should also evaluate whether additional grant funds can be made available to poor communities, particularly because BIL funding will extend only through fiscal year (F Y ) 2026.
3. Develop a grant program to assist border communities with ongoing operations and maintenance of public water systems. The Drinking Water Revolving Funds and the Clean Water Revolving Funds are focused
primarily on construction of infrastructure and cannot be used for ongoing operations and maintenance of systems, but these costs are prohibitive for many poor communities. Amend the Safe Drinking Water Act to allow irrigation districts to be eligible for funding similar to public water systems that receive Drinking Water Revolving Fund monies. Many poor communities obtain domestic water through irrigation districts, and the expansion of eligible entities for funding with respect to the drinking water service they provide will aid in the distribution of funds to rural and underserved populations.
4. Provide guidance to clarify that authorized uses of Clean Water Revolving Funds include measures to manage, reduce, treat or recapture stormwater, as well as development and implementation of certain watershed pilot projects. The administration should clarify that under these provisions, Clean Water Revolving Funds may be used to develop green infrastructure for urban stormwater collection and runoff and watershed restoration.
5. Provide funding to the International Boundary and Water Commission (I B W C ) for the levees and flood infrastructure on the border that only I B W C has the jurisdiction and responsibility to repair and maintain.
6. Provide guidance to clarify that authorized uses of BIL funding to state and local governments for levees and dam repair also include other flood infrastructure and ongoing sediment removal.
7. Convene a task force of the relevant federal, state, local and international agencies to devise a long-term institutional solution for chronic and predictable environmental problems, such as cross-border flows
of contaminated water and sewage. The charge of the task force should include redefining the roles of agencies and developing long-term funding streams. The North American Development Bank (NADBank) should be central to these discussions, along with I B W C , the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and relevant Mexican agencies. A key goal of this effort should be the ability to plan and prioritize water and wastewater infrastructure and related needs based on science-based transborder analysis. U.S. communities located on the international boundary face ongoing flows of wastewater and stormwater from Mexico that affect quality of life and compromise public health. The current reactive approach to these problems does not work because solutions are often delayed a decade or more, populations are continuing to grow, and the costs are much higher than necessary.
8. Fund the U.S.–Mexico Border Water Infrastructure Program (B W I P ) at the $100 million level in the years to come to address the water and wastewater infrastructure deficit of border communities. On an annual basis,
Congress appropriates funding to EPA for B W I P , which is designed to fund the development, design and construction of water and wastewater infrastructure projects within the region 62 miles (100 km) north and
south of the U.S.–Mexico international boundary. In the mid-1990s, Congress appropriated $100 million on an annual basis from 1995–1997; however, from 2012–2016, Congress appropriated a mere $5 million annually. To date, B W I P has been very successful in channeling more than $700 million for basic water and sanitation infrastructure on both sides of the border. In addition, B W I P has been leveraged at a ratio of 2:1 by mobilizing local and state resources.
9. Provide a funding stream to I B W C for capital and repair projects that are critical for the health and safety of millions of border residents. The large backlog of projects includes the South Bay International Wastewater
Treatment Plant upgrade (potentially $910 million for plant expansion and rehabilitation); the Rio Grande Flood Control Project ($946 million for 158 miles [254 km] of levees, of which $70 million is for projects where a high levee failure risk exists); Tijuana River Levee Rehabilitation ($100 million for levee construction and sediment removal); and Amistad Dam Seepage Correction ($80–$276 million). These projects are not eligible for BIL financing. The administration, acting through the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Section of I B W C , should also negotiate a cost share with Mexico for the pending capital and repair projects. Congress should also approve the President’s budget request giving the U.S. Section of I B W C additional authorities to receive funds from federal and non-federal entities all along the U.S.–Mexico border, which is not currently permitted.
10. Direct I B W C and other agencies to initiate and continue as long as necessary discussions with U.S. and Mexican agencies to develop minutes to 1944’s Utilization of Waters of the Colorado and Tijuana Rivers and of the Rio Grande Treaty Between the United States of America and Mexico (1944 Water Treaty) for governance of each of the critically important transboundary aquifers. Long-term drought, decline of surface-water sources and growing demands for water are putting more pressure on aquifers that underlie the border. Critical transborder aquifers have experienced excessive pumping and deterioration of water quality due to intrusion of saline waters, threatening the water security of millions of border residents. Because U.S. border states control underground water in their jurisdictions and the Mexican federal government controls underground water in its jurisdiction, a comprehensive U.S.–Mexico ground water treaty is likely not achievable. To support this effort, GNEB recommends that the administration direct
available resources to continue the U.S.–Mexico Transboundary Aquifer Assessment Program to properly characterize the international aquifers.

Across the globe, states have long aimed to control the movement of people, identify their citizens, and restrict noncitizens' rights through official identification documents. Although states are now less likely to grant permanent legal status, they are increasingly issuing new temporary and provisional legal statuses to migrants. Meanwhile, the need for migrants to apply for frequent renewals subjects them to more intensive state surveillance. The contributors to Paper Trails examine how these new developments change migrants' relationship to state, local, and foreign bureaucracies. The contributors analyze, among other toics, immigration policies in the United Kingdom, the issuing of driver's licenses in Arizona and New Mexico, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and community know-your-rights campaigns. By demonstrating how migrants are inscribed into official bureaucratic systems through the issuance of identification documents, the contributors open up new ways to understand how states exert their power and how migrants must navigate new systems of governance.

Contributors. Bridget Anderson, Deborah A. Boehm, Susan Bibler Coutin, Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, Sarah B. Horton, Josiah Heyman, Cecilia Menjívar, Juan Thomas Ordóñez, Doris Marie Provine, Nandita Sharma, Monica Varsanyi

The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region presents advanced anthropological theorizing of culture in an important regional setting. Not a static entity, the transborder region is peopled by ever-changing groups who face the challenges of social inequality: political enforcement of privilege, economic subordination of indigenous communities, and organized resistance to domination.
 
    The book, influenced by the work of Eric Wolf and senior editor Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez, centers on the greater Mexican North/U.S. Southwest, although the geographic range extends farther. This tradition, like other transborder approaches, attends to complex and fluid cultural and linguistic processes, going beyond the classical modern anthropological vision of one people, one culture, one language. With respect to recent approaches, however, it is more deeply social, focusing on vertical relations of power and horizontal bonds of mutuality.
 
    Vélez-Ibáñez and Heyman envision this region as involving diverse and unequal social groups in dynamic motion over thousands of years. Thus the historical interaction of the U.S.-Mexico border, however massively unequal and powerful, is only the most recent manifestation of this longer history and common ecology. Contributors emphasize the dynamic "transborder" quality—conflicts, resistance, slanting, displacements, and persistence—in order to combine a critical perspective on unequal power relations with a questioning perspective on claims to bounded simplicity and perfection.
 
    The book is notable for its high degree of connection across the various chapters, strengthened by internal syntheses from notable border scholars, including Robert R. Alvarez and Alejandro Lugo. In the final section, Judith Freidenberg draws general lessons from particular case studies, summarizing that "access to valued scarce resources prompts the erection of human differences that get solidified into borders," dividing and limiting, engendering vulnerabilities and marginalizing some people.
 
    At a time when understanding the U.S.-Mexico border is more important than ever, this volume offers a critical anthropological and historical approach to working in transborder regions.

Contributors:
 
    Amado Alarcón
    Robert R. Álvarez
    Miguel Díaz-Barriga
    Margaret E. Dorsey
    Judith Freidenberg
    Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz
    James Greenberg
    Josiah Heyman
    Jane H. Hill
    Sarah Horton
    Alejandro Lugo
    Luminiţa-Anda Mandache
    Corina Marrufo
    Guillermina Gina Núñez-Mchiri
    Anna Ochoa O'Leary
    Luis F. B. Plascencia
    Lucero Radonic
    Diana Riviera
    Thomas E. Sheridan
    Kathleen Staudt
    Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez

Tabla de contenido
I. Geoinformatics, LULC, and Physical Geography
I.1 Vulnerability of Irrigated Agriculture to a Drier Future in New Mexico's Mesilla and Rincon Valleys . . . . .
I.2 Impacto del cambio climático en el índice de áreas verdes para un futuro cercano 2030 en Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua
I.3 Cambios de coberturas y uso de suelo del río Bravo (1990-2015): temporal y espacial vs. NDVI .
I.4 Análisis de evolución piezométrica del acuífero Palomas-Guadalupe Victoria (0812) en la cuenca baja del río Casas Grandes, Ascensión, Chihuahua
II. Geopolítica y la colaboración binacional para la sustentabilidad hídrica
II.1 Transboundary Scientific Collaboration in Water Security Research: A Case Study on the U.S.-Mexico Border in the Paso del Norte Region
II.2 Gobernanza en la cuenca transfronteriza del río Bravo y el tratado de 1944. Análisis de la situación en el río Conchos: datos, hidrometría y estrategias
II.3 Advancing Transboundary Groundwater Resiliency Research through Systems Science
III. Modelación hidrológica (aguas superficiales y subterráneas)
III.1 Simulación del flujo del agua subterránea de la porción mexicana del acuífero Valle de Juárez-Bolsón del Hueco
III.2 New Conceptual Models of Groundwater Flow and Salinity in the Eastern Hueco Bolson Aquifer
III.3 Estimación de la transmisividad de un acuífero en un solo pozo
III.4 Assessment of water availability and water scarcity in an irrigated watershed using SWAT
III.5 Aspectos de modelación del balance hídrico y recarga para el acuífero Valle de Juárez, incorporando escenarios de eficiencias de riego, cultivos agrícolas y escenarios de recarga inducida
IV. Datos en red y mapas digitales
IV.1 Monitoring crops water use with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
IV.2 Una plataforma bilingüe basada en web para el modelado y la visualización de datos para la sustentabilidad de recursos hídricos
V. Special chapter: Conservation of shared groundwater resources in the binational Mesilla Basin-El Paso del Norte region – A hydrogeological perspective

US political discourse characterizes the US-Mexico border as a site of threat and, of necessity, exclusion. This frame ignores the importance of borders to economies, families, and culture in our increasingly interconnected world. Moreover, it leads to policies that place people at risk of victimization and death. In conceiving of the border solely in terms of exclusion, nations forego the opportunity to strengthen relationships across borders. This paper argues that the politics of humane migration require a vision of borders as sites of encounter, engagement, and relationship, rather than solely exclusion. This reconceptualization of the US-Mexico border, in particular, would strengthen relationships across borders, and prioritize cooperation between Latin America/the Caribbean and the United States, starting with regulated legal flows. It would also respond to the shared contexts of migration, including contraband in arms and drugs, criminal violence, and climate change. It articulates an alternative vision of borders as a "commons" in which mutual needs can be addressed (a commons is an issue or resource in which every one has access and involvement). Migration itself provides a perfect example of such a need. It takes place in a political climate partially but powerfully shaped by racism and classism. Thus, it has become a polarized "issue" that it appears insolvable. In fact, it may not be a problem at all. Rather, in our current demographic-economic situation, as well as for our cultural well-being, migration should be treated as an asset. Insofar as it needs to be addressed, this paper delineates many possibilities. The options are not perfect and magical-the challenges are hard and diverse-but they an advance a vision of a shared cross-border space on migration. That might be a crucial move, not only for migration, but along a path that recognizes relationships and commitments of many 1 kinds across the hemisphere and world. Recognition is not enough; real change in resources and power needs to follow. But a vision of connection rather than exclusion provides the political starting point needed for change to happen. In every political instance in which borders are used to frame migration in terms of who, how, and how much to exclude, connectedness loses ground. A politics of humane migration can only emerge if rooted in a positive vision of borders as sites of engagement and encounter.

Researchers’ knowledge alone, no matter how good, is not likely to alter stakeholder actions or probable outcomes. It will be stakeholder preferences and choices based on a myriad of factors—not just science based information—that will determine the actual outcomes. The seemingly intractable “wicked problems” relating to water sustainability seem to persist in the face of new information and advancing science produced by research. Many of the challenges that arise in wicked problems cut across traditional boundaries (both physical and figurative), including disciplinary, biophysical, sectoral, social, and jurisdictional ones. We propose that actively identifying these boundaries and consciously developing strategies for bridging them is essential for meaningful results from integrated research and desirable real-world progress in water sustainability. We do not provide our experience as a recipe or perfect formula for success. The individual building blocks (or actions) for bridging are not new or particularly novel. Instead, we contend that our experience provides insight into how to identify and approach boundaries in large-scale, holistic water sustainability projects, using the borders metaphor. Familiar approaches and tools can be used in the construction of “bridges,” providing platforms for communication and negotiation that can breach common boundaries. The usefulness of this approach in a broader context and in other situations is to be determined, but we have provided a roadmap for conceptualizing and breaching boundaries in large-scale integrated research, essential to water resources sustainability.

The US–Mexico border has influenced social-cultural theory by drawing attention to hybrids that stand apart from supposedly cohesive wholes. This point, albeit important,
does not exhaust the lessons to be learned from the US–Mexico border region. It also
displays highly unequal power relations. Adjacent, interactive, but profoundly asymmetrical border city pairs are key sites for analyzing unequal relationships between the so-called global South and global North. This social relationality of apparently contrastive endpoints, and the cultural frameworks and practices that mediate the connections, is yet another lesson from the US–Mexico border. Culture occurs in a matrix of often highly unequal social relationships. Culture is made and reproduced at relational meeting points between differentiated positionalities, even when there is an apparently exclusionary border in between.

Border policies and practices emerge out of two intersecting processes: racist politics of exclusion, and capitalist arrangements of labor, collective redistribution, and wealth geography. Border policies, in turn, shape worker exploitability and division. These two processes are interwoven, but not identical; while they are mutually causative, it is important to sort them
out conceptually. We should not lose track of racism in doing a capitalism- focused analysis. This synthetic chapter addresses both the expansion outward across borders of the search for cheap labor in production, and the ambivalent and conflictive politics of migration inward across borders.

Across a number of issues, nation-state borders work to reduce feelings (imaginations) of mutual belonging and shared fate, and together with this, reduce equitable and practical collective decision-making and action requiring these basic assumptions. I proceed by identifying specific processes and mechanisms by which nation-state borders produce separation. I also address processes of mutual recognition that occur at borders, arguably because borders concentrate people and activities that favor or even require creation frameworks for mutual decision-making and action. This would involve dialogues, decisions, and practical administrative interactions suited to the phenomenon, rather than arbitrarily limited and obstructed by singular bounded state institutions. By creating diverse arenas and spaces of interested participants having shared practical concerns, and by imbuing these with a social imaginary of being a commons, it might be possible to address this problematic effects of bounded nation-states.

We propose that usable water is becoming more costly and difficult. The term “difficult” in
this phrasing refers to the increased effort needed to access and process water. An example is desalination. “Costly” is a characteristic consequence of resorting to more difficult ways to supply water. These changes occur in the context of climate change, which in some cases reduces river flows. They also occur in the context of fresh groundwater depletion, meaning that nearby, inexpensive resources cannot meet demand. Water will not simply run out in most cases, but rather replacement supplies will be more costly and difficult.

Reduced river flows and groundwater depletion as a result of climate change and population growth have increased the effort and difficulty accessing and processing water. In turn, residential water costs from municipal utilities are predicted to rise to unaffordable rates for poor residential water customers. Building on a regional conjunctive use model with future climate scenarios and 50-year future water supply plans, our study communicates the effects of climate change on poor people in El Paso, Texas, as water becomes more difficult and expensive to obtain in future years. Four scenarios for future water supply and future water costs were delineated based on expected impacts of climate change and groundwater depletion. Residential water use was calculated by census tract in El Paso, using basic needs indoor water use and evaporative cooling use as determinants of household water consumption. Based on household size and income data from the US Census, fraction of household income spent on water was determined. Results reveal that in the future, basic water supply will be a significant burden for 40% of all households in El Paso. Impacts are geographically concentrated in poor census tracts. Our study revealed that negative impacts from water resource depletion and increasing populations in El Paso will lead to costly and difficult water for El Paso water users. We provide an example of how to connect future resource scenarios, including those affected by climate change, to challenges of affordability for vulnerable consumers.

This article analyses the role of linguistic skills in the process of defining professional classifications in Spain during 1919-1980. The aim is to determine the social evaluation of the skills involved. To retrace the classifications, a total of 114 official documents were examined, establishing a chronological division into three major stages: 1920–1940, 1940–1960 and 1960–1980. The first period (1920–1940 shows efforts toward the initial objectification of working conditions and salary scales, revealing social prejudices and tacit conventions shaping the employment hierarchy, while
the second one (1940–1960) indicates the extent to which office work stood out over manual work. Finally, the third stage (1960–1980) shows processes of language rationalisation, which entailed attempts to standardise positions based on required skill sets.

Contemporary borders have two effects on labor availability and exploitability. One is to relegate large communities of potential labor outside the borders of prosperous countries. There, they are available for high productivity, low-wage work in assembly plants, call centers, and other such industries. Capital and management can move fluidly back and forth across borders to take advantage of such working communities. The other is to impose legal status categories and unequal treatment on border crossers (immigrants and commuters); these impose various conditions of labor exploitability. The best-known case is illegality, but legal migration with various employment, location, and time restrictions is also important. One view of these two effects is that they constitute systematic state control of labor on behalf of capitalism. However, this neglects the importance of racism and relatedly, xenophobia, within concrete historical capitalisms. The chapter suggests that borders be analyzed as processes emerging from complex political struggles between racism, capitalist labor management, and social justice struggles.

The US-Mexico borderlands are disproportionately targeted by detection technologies, data tracing, and policing. Such technologies are applied to a population of millions who largely are racialized as Mexican in the United States. Bowker and Star (2000) explore how technologies of classification and applications stemming from them embody important racial divides in their study of apartheid in South Africa. This article moves the examination of racialized technologies from the micro to the macro scale by looking at the framing of a distinctive region, and the people most characteristic of it, as a surveillance and enforcement target.

La creación de modelos científicos es una tarea común en todas las regiones del mundo para informar el manejo de recursos naturales limitados, por ejemplo, el suministro del agua basado en el ciclo del agua. Sin embargo, el desarrollo de modelos y comunicación de sus resultados bajo un marco unificado son un desafío para sistemas hídricos compartidos que cruzan límites territoriales y áreas jurisdiccionales y que también unifican aguas superficiales y subterráneas. Este desafío implica considerar múltiples márgenes de gobernanza y diversos estándares, idiomas y culturas. Para atender dicha problemática, la plataforma bilingüe basada en web, SWIM, fue creada para que los usuarios interactúen con modelos científicos hídricos y visualicen sus resultados. Esta plataforma tiene la finalidad de facilitar el acceso y uso de modelos complejos y facilitar potencialmente la colaboración entre usuarios. En este capítulo se describe el desarrollo de la interfaz web de la plataforma SWIM y la funcionalidad en su versión actual. La plataforma SWIM se enfocó inicialmente en los modelos de agua
concebidos como parte del proyecto binacional de Sustentabilidad de Recursos Hídricos entre México y Estados Unidos en la región de El Paso del Norte.

The Rio Grande/Rio Bravo River Basin in the United States (U.S.) and Mexico is one of the most threatened basins in the world (Hoekstra et al. 2012). Surface waters are declining due to diminishing snowpack in the headwaters in Colorado in the U.S. (Mote et al. 2018) combined with increasing demands for water intensive crops (Booker et al. 2005) and growing urban populations (MacDonald 2010).The region has recently suffered persistent drought; 2000-2018 has been the driest 19-year period since the late 1500s (Williams et al. 2020). Climate projections indicate the region will be prone to more frequent and severe droughts, with declining surface water availability (MacDonald 2010; Townsend and Gutzler 2020). In addition, freshwater
aquifer levels are declining and saline waters are intruding (Sheng 2013). These changes threaten both U.S. and Mexican regional economies, water and food security, and aquatic biodiversity (Hoekstra et al. 2012). While a uni!ed view of the entire basin water system is needed, it is largely missing. In view of these issues, it is imperative that scientists collaborate to better understand the situation and assess plausible paths forward. This requires crossing national and state political boundaries, in addition to integrating knowledge across social, biophysical, economic, and engineering disciplines.
Such transboundary-transdisciplinary scienti!c collaborations are exceedingly complex and challenging (Cundill et al. 2018; Mathieu et al. 2019; Steger et al. 2021). This article reports on a six-year collaborative scientific research effort, funded by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), that involved researchers from multiple disciplines from the U.S. and Mexico aimed at
improving the sustainability of water resources in the challenging Rio Grande/Rio Bravo Basin.

This chapter synthesizes the asymmetrical violence on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border. It includes open violence in Mexico, and hidden violence in the United States. By violence I mean both direct physical violence, including mental health, and so-called structural violence (Galtung 1969). The latter term includes reduction of human capacity caused by broader societal conditions. For example, U.S. refusals of asylum-seekers make them wait in places where violent criminals victimize them; the violence is done by the U.S. government as well as the criminals in Mexico. As Slack et al. (2018: 85–87) point out, so-called U.S. border “security” policy actually makes
many migrants insecure, to deadly effect. Here I build on that insight. I propose that it occurs through processes of hiding of violence in the United States and displacement of violence into Mexico. Both sides are thus implicated in violence. A central argument at the core of my work (Heyman 2017) has been that at the U.S.–Mexico border, safety and wealth accumulate on the U.S. side, and poverty, risk, and insecurity on the Mexican, but they constitute one dynamic whole. This unifying pattern of uneven and combined development (Smith 1984) cuts across specific phenomena: money, drugs, guns, migration, etc.

The National Covid-19 Resiliency Network coordinates a strategic and structured network to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 on racial and ethnic minority and rural populations. From December 2020 to May 2021, community based organizations who mobilize community outreach leaders have been reaching food production workers (farmworkers, dairy and meat packing workers) to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate Covid-19 information and protective material, register for the Covid-19 vaccine, and access to vaccination clinics. We present qualitative and quantitative information collected on an outreach project with predominantly Hispan- ic food production workers that are at or are connected to the u.s.–Mexico border.
La Red Nacional de Resiliencia covid-19 coordina una red estratégica estructurada para mitigar el impacto de la covid-19 en las poblaciones rura- les y de minorías raciales y étnicas. De diciembre de 2020 hasta mayo de 2021, las organizaciones comunitarias que movilizan a líderes de alcan- ce comunitario han logrado colaborar con tra- bajadores del sector alimenticio (trabajadores agrícolas y de plantas de productos lácteos y em- pacadores de carne) para proporcionar material cultural y lingüísticamente apropiado con información acerca del registro y el proceso de vacu- nación, así como de las clínicas a las que pueden asistir con el objetivo de protegerlos ante la pandemia de la covid-19. Presentamos aquí información cualitativa y cuantitativa recopilada a partir de un proyecto de divulgación con trabajadores del sector alimenticio, predominantemente his- panos, que viven en la frontera entre Estados Unidos y México o tienen vínculos con ella.

I present here selected articles that originated from the Simposio de antropología "entre lo legal y lo illegal" in Monterrey, Mexico, November 2019. These articles focus on Latin American borders: the U.S.-Mexico border, the Brazil-Paraguay border, and the Argentina-Bolivia border. These Latin American scholars resist the top-down agenda of seeing threat in everything that has been illegalized, because as they show, many smuggled goods are normalized and present few risks and many benefits to civilians. Yet at the same time, they draw attention to the terrible levels of criminal and state violence that do occur around intensely illegalized commodities. They do not offer a solution, but they do offer insights for progress on this crucial question.

https://www.borderlines-cssaame.org/posts/2021/7/29/reflections-on-the-value-of-malini-surs-jungle-passports-2021

Borderlines begins its second book forum, titled “Jungle Passports,” with a discussion on borderlands, mobility, and citizenship by different scholars. This essay is the first part of the book forum which engages with the ideas within Malini Sur’s book: “Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the North-East India-Bangladesh Border.”

I write from a university on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexico border. For me, as for readers all over the world, there are valuable ideas and orientations in Jungle Passports. I think it likely that the dominant mental image of borders are rigid physical barriers against the protean human urge to move. There is considerable truth in this. This idea, however, renders borders essentially prohibitive, devices that aim to stop things from happening (migrating, shopping, socializing). But Sur, along with myself and other border scholars, find that borders are generative; beyond obstructing and prohibiting, they motivate important new movements and lifeways, or inflect already occurring peoples and processes.

Regions (nations, places) will become increasingly rigid in terms of social and economic roles, and that most people will be required to remain inside them. The key function of borders will be to demarcate the sites, and to filter movement between them. Only the privileged will move back and forth across borders. Who is privileged – and thus mobile – will be an important social and political question. It might include capitalists and others of wealth, business managers needed for transnational production and trade (which will continue), wealthy tourists and consumers, some academics and maybe some students, and others of that sort. It will also include selected workers, often in managed labor migration programs. On the other hand, commodities and information will be free to move across borders, though they will be registered, tracked, and surveilled there. This seems to be a reversion to nationalist projects of the twentieth century, but the new order will differ in that borders are not aimed to separate and build national economies and polities, but rather to regulate more firmly differentiated and unequal but highly connected economies and societies in a global division of labor.

There are a considerable number of studies that analyze the benefits of language(s) in the labor market. It is a sensitive topic because of its relevance for language maintenance, and therefore, for the selective acculturation of immigrants in host societies. In this paper, the effect of non-English language fluency on the occupational attainment of immigrants and natives is analyzed, both in terms of occupational wages and socio-economic status. Results indicate that there is no advantage associated with non-English language fluency, either for natives or immigrants. Rather, a penalty for the specific case of Spanish fluency among immigrants was found. Three explanations from previous literature regarding the benefits of bilingualism in the labor market – human capital, devaluation and discrimination— are discussed in relation to the obtained results. The paper concludes with some recommendations about the recognition of language diversity in the labor market and policies aimed at the integrative acculturation of immigrants.

In the long term, immigration is more positively than negatively viewed for the first time in Gallup’s long time-series of opinion polling. This is a trend we can build on to change the scenario described in The President and Immigration Law. Legislating generous and fair future legal immigration, refuge, and asylum, by reducing the size of unauthorized migration flows, will reduce the enforcement burden on the border. But less dramatically, Congress, the Courts, and the executive branch all need to address, in many detailed ways, a key tendency. We have treated the U.S. borderlands almost as if it is an unpopulated enforcement zone, as if it were external to the country, even when it is filled with U.S. residents and visitors, going about their daily lives. The latter understanding encourages us to limit unbounded executive discretion through reviving rights, respect, and accountability in ways powerfully indicated in this book. Our borderland needs to be valued as a place of relationship, rather than racialized fear, and U.S. borderlanders viewed as full members in the national society.

Importantly, we learn about the perverse consequences of U.S. border and deportation processes and Mexican governance. Perverse is a harsh term, one I use deliberately to point to harmful intentional and accidental consequences of policies that on the surface claim to seek the public good. Some of these per- versities are deliberate and others are unintentional by-products (see Heyman 2012), but all are harmful and merit documentation, analysis, and change. The backdrop is the crimogenic and violence-inducing “war on drugs” in the United States and Mexico. While drug policies are not directly the subject of this book (see Campbell 2009; Payan, Staudt, and Kruszewski 2013), their side effects are critical to the material it presents. United States policies that perversely raise the price of and the profit from illegal drugs through border interdiction have induced an extensive, dangerous web of criminal organizations on both sides of the border but that are overtly active in Mexico. Mexico’s legacy of corrupt arrangements with violent regional warlords and hidden income streams, in turn, promotes these nefarious power centers (Bailey and Godson 2000; Ast- orga Almanza 2005; Flores Pérez 2013). The United States, of course, is pleased to have a deferential, authoritarian neighbor. Indeed, this political economy is best described not as drug smuggling alone but as a triangular set of exchanges: deadly guns and munitions to Mexico, harmful drugs to the United States (also sold within Mexico), and unaccountable money orchestrating it all (Hey- man 2011). Labor migrants and refugees typically were and are unconnected to these activities, but this book shows increasing capture of migration pro- cesses by criminal organizations, a perverse rearrangement with terrible human consequences.

El COVID-19 ha dejado al descubierto la violencia que se vive en la frontera de México con Estados Unidos (EE.UU.). La administración Trump continúa apuntando a terminar con la inmigración y el otorgamiento de asilo a personas provenientes de América Latina y otros lugares. La emergencia sanitaria refuerza los poderes del poder ejecutivo (los que ya son extremos en la frontera) y le proporciona una cobertura retórica en términos de miedo al exterior. El Departamento de Seguridad Interior ha empeorado sus nocivas prácticas, a la vez que desampara a los solicitantes de asilo. Mientras, la Patrulla Fronteriza ha suspendido el asilo y devuelve rápidamente a todos los detenidos a la frontera.

This episode of CMSOnAir features an interview with Josiah Heyman, Professor of Anthropology, Endowed Professor of Border Trade Issues, and Director of the University of Texas, El Paso’s Center for Inter-American and Border Studies. CMS’s communications coordinator Emma Winters asks Josiah Heyman about a CMS Essay he authored with Jeremy Slack and Daniel E. Martínez. The essay, titled “Why Border Patrol Agents and CBP Officers Should Not Serve as Asylum Officers,” examines findings from the Migrant Border Crossing Survey and concludes that US Border Patrol agents and other CBP officers should not serve as asylum officers because they “abuse migrants, physically and verbally, with significant frequency.” In the episode, Josiah Heyman also presents a positive vision of the US-Mexico border and lifts up Annunciation House as an example of the openness and generosity of border communities.

How can anthropologists and sociologists share ideas and knowledge on the Mediterranean and U.S.-Mexico borders to deepen insight and understanding? The best-known comparison is militarized border enforcement, plus humanitarianism, posed against asylum seeking and irregular migration. But, more complex mobility occurs at these borders, including privileged and other differentiated and sorted mobilities. Interwoven with these mobilities, commerce of many scales and degrees of legality occurs, supporting complicated cultural worlds of informality and exchange. Borders require not just a political analysis, but also attention to capital. Importantly, borders (immediate and extended) have become increasingly important sites of export-oriented production in the world economy. The processes of interchange at borders, in turn, support important urban zones and other communities that merit close ethnographic study for their social and cultural complexity.

The article shows how linguistic criteria have become central
when defining job categories in the outsourced call centre sector
in Spain. Language occupies a central role in the production
processes of informational capitalism: in call centres, language
functions as the raw material, scripts as tools and conversations
as a product. Yet the ways in which linguistic production
affects key elements of job categories have received little
attention. Drawing on in-depth interviews in the call centre
sector, the analysis of scripts and collective agreements, this
article shows how trade unions and workers are pushing to
adapt Fordist arguments based on job autonomy to informational
production, arguing that job categories may depend on
linguistic autonomy from the scripts during the labour process.

El 5 de junio de 2014, el sitio web de la derecha Breitbart News publicó fotos de los centros de detención del sur de Texas llenos de mujeres y niños. El titular, “Fotos filtradas revela a niños almacenados en celdas de EE. UU. Atestadas, patrulla fronteriza abrumada”, demuestra el papel de la contestación en la configuración de las políticas fronterizas. Esta publicidad provocó un giro importante en el fortalecimiento de la vigilancia de la frontera y brindó un símbolo político de importancia nacional, tanto en el momento como en las elecciones de 2016. Comprender el impacto total de este evento y la vorágine circundante de las respuestas humanitarias y antiinmigrantes al aumento en las familias de refugiados centroamericanos requiere un análisis holístico y multiescalar de los actores contendientes y cómo cambiaron y reprodujeron lo que llamamos la "frontera". A pesar del aumento en Centroamérica, los arrestos totales en la frontera sur de los Estados Unidos han disminuido, pero la aplicación de la ley de inmigración en la frontera ha continuado, y de alguna manera ha aumentado. Esta es la paradoja central que deseamos explorar: a la luz de las reducciones drásticamente reducidas, y la prevalencia dentro de ese grupo de aprehensión de solicitantes de asilo respetuosos de la ley, nos preguntamos ¿por qué ha aumentado la imposición de inmigración en la frontera, no ha disminuido? La evidencia empírica reciente ha vinculado estos discursos en conflicto sobre las fronteras y la inmigración a los medios especializados de la derecha y a la elección de Donald Trump. Los temas que planteamos aquí: la discusión en torno a la migración centroamericana de familias y niños no acompañados, la construcción política de la "crisis" fronteriza y la prominencia simbólica y material de la frontera entre EE. UU. Y México en los debates sobre inmigración continúan siendo centrales en la administración de Trump .

Nuestro enfoque teórico para responder a estas preguntas tiene dos objetivos. Una es que el mundo social se construye a través de políticas contenciosas, aunque tal contención ocurre dentro de un contexto estructural más amplio. La impugnación involucra a múltiples actores que se unen y entran en conflicto para buscar resultados sociales y políticos. Tales resultados son contingentes, con múltiples factores y actores que entran en juego, y pueden no ser lo que se buscó o predijo, incluso por los "ganadores". La otra es que las fronteras no son hechos simples sobre el terreno, sino que son resultados del estado y Acción social que continuamente se produce, se reproduce o se cambia. Este enfoque se resume con una palabra de proceso, "bordeando". Los académicos han
exploró este concepto de procesos limítrofes (como la vigilancia de la seguridad interior, el control consular de visas exteriores) apartado de los límites geopolíticos convencionales. Sin embargo, al borde no solo se agregan tales prácticas a sitios nuevos. El empuje para moverse más allá de la frontera a través de la expansión de los criterios de cómo vemos los viajes no resta la necesidad de comprender cómo el lugar específico en el que se encuentra la frontera se rehace mediante el conflicto, un proceso que tiene ramificaciones directas más alejadas. Sostenemos que la perspectiva del proceso limítrofe también se aplica a las fronteras formales del estado-nación. Las especificidades de estas fronteras tradicionales no son solo cualidades inherentes de las líneas geopolíticas en un mapa. Las geografías de poder establecidas desde hace mucho tiempo, como la frontera entre EE. UU. Y México, se construyeron históricamente, y pueden mutar nuevamente a través de procesos de lucha y transformación, o tener prácticas de poder características reautorizadas, reajustadas y con recursos. Sus arreglos socio-políticos requieren, por lo tanto, una reproducción o reelaboración continua, moldeada por políticas contenciosas dentro de dominios sociales más amplios.

The study of borders draws on, and is a significant contributor to, important theoretical developments in the social sciences. We have moved away from envisioning societies and cultures as pure, bounded units, for which we identified inner essences (cultural patterns, social structures), toward envisioning them as internally and externally varied webs of relations, for which we trace connections and changes over time (Wolf 1982). Borders present precisely such mixtures and interactions. The agenda of this chapter, then, is to draw out theoretical lessons from work done on the U.S.-Mexico border. While grounded in a review of the literature on this region, the theoretical lessons are clear and transportable, both to other borders and to complex social and cultural situations generally. My approach derives from place-based science, which rejects abstract, timeless, and placeless theorizing in favor of building theory upward from particular places and times via nested generalizations; those generalizations can be transported and recontextualized for other places and times. I likewise draw on non-dogmatic Marxian theory, attending to the constitutive role of unequal relationships unfolding across historical time. No one border can do justice to all borders, and different lessons would be drawn from other sites; the point is not to hold this region as quintessential but to ask if ideas suggested here are informative and helpful as we range about the social world.

The chapter begins by examining major definitions of neoliberalism, noting that they cover some but not all of the relevant history of Mexican/Central American- United States migration. In particular, they lack historical depth and process. In this chapter, I take note of a long historical pattern in labour flows from Mexico and Central America to the United States that mixed guest workers, unauthorized workers, asylum seekers and others. This is a deeper and more comprehensive view of this relationship than the recent emphasis on illegality. Compared with open, formal capitalist relations of labour recruitment, these arrangements are best communicated with three phrases: alternative, subordinate, and racially stigmatized. They have existed side by side with several different periods of what have commonly been considered standard capitalist labour relations. They thus appear to deviate from standards at each moment in history, but in fact articulate with them.
In overview, then, I argue that unauthorized and guest-worker migrants from Mexico and Central America, and their employment in the United States, were reinforced by neoliberalism but were not a product of it. Rather, they existed before the rise of neoliberalism and contributed to its rise. I propose, based on this argument, that neoliberalism is best seen as an attack on labour bargaining power and societal redistribution mechanisms of the sort that have been called social democracy, Keynesianism and Fordism. In some instances, these attacks do have a free-market orientation, but in others they do not; equally, they do not necessarily occur in the historical period associated with neoliberalism. In the present case, these attacks utilize various arrangements of partially unfree labour that lurked as a pre-existing possibility in the historical relationship between the United States and Mexico. Drawing on the arguments of Gomberg-Muñoz (2012, 2017), what I will describe may best be understood as an unfree labour arrangement reflecting race or national origin. This unfree system has varied in significance over time, but it has coexisted with the dominant free labour regimes in US and Mexican capitalism since the 1880s. As such, racialized unfree labour is distinct from, but articulated with, several different capitalist regimes – the classically liberal, the Fordist, and the neoliberal. So, while it may appear deviant from the perspective of the dominant regime, it actually is part of the wider system.
      I have referred both to guest workers and to unauthorized workers, even though guest-worker programmes do not entail legal wrongdoing in terms of border entry, presence in the country or employment. However, guest workers and unauthorized workers should be considered together for two reasons. One is the patterned alternation between the two modes of migration in US–Mexican history. The other is that, like unauthorized workers, guest workers are not free labour, for they are bound to specific contracts and employers, and can be deported if they step outside those bounds. Indeed, unauthorized workers may be freer, as they can look for work without contractual limitations, although they are subject to arrest and deportation if the authorities find out about them. Comparable to guest workers are asylum applicants, who are in a legal limbo during the (often extended) adjudication of their applications, during which time they are authorized to work, but that authorization can easily be removed; this particularly applies to recently increasing Central American flows. In addition, recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals permits, other deferred enforcement statuses and temporary protected status have tentative legal status but are still constrained by the possibility of loss of residence and work rights and deportation from the country (see USCIS n.d.a, n.d.b). Hence, migrant legal wrongdoing arising from economic motivations is part of the analysis in this chapter, but it is secondary to the central theme of partially unfree labour (Gomberg-Muñoz 2012).
    This history informs us about the intersection of specific kinds of class exploitation with racial and national inequality, which together produce the social fiction ‘commodity Mexican’. That fiction is a unit of obtainable and disposable labour that is seen as less than fully human and as inferior to citizens, who are held to be White and to belong to the dominant society (Vélez-Ibáñez 1996: 70–87). It also helps to illuminate emerging patterns of the use of partially unfree labour, such as new waves of guest workers, prisoners and so forth, which may emerge as an important component of future capitalism in North America and elsewhere.

Drawing on Charles Tilly’s seminal work on citizenship, I propose that we refocus our approach to immigration by combining in one single view the historical development of nation-state membership (termed “citizenship”) and internal and international migration.  I argue that the characterization of newly arriving outsiders (“immigrants”) only makes sense in contrast to the gradual definition and clarification of insiders (“citizens”).  I am thus critical of social, economic, and political accounts that focus only on immigrants or only on citizens, without seeing them as outcomes of simultaneous if contrastive processes.  These social positions are partly a result of the gradual rise of nation-states, which is obvious, but they are also affected directly and indirectly by capitalism, including the attraction of immigrant populations into growth centers, the movement of capital to new sites of production (sometimes glossed as globalization), and the decline of old sites of capital investment.  State formation is likewise funded by revenues from the capitalist economy.  I thus suggest we need to envision three interweaving processes: human migration, internal and international; nation-state consolidation and the rise of citizenship regimes; and capital mobility, accumulation, and withdrawal.

My argument has four parts:
(1) Immigration (in particular the targets I frame here, immigration politics and host-immigrant relations) should not be considered mainly in terms of immigrants and their effect on the receiving society.  We also should consider the long-term development of citizenship, both generally and in specific national histories.  We should define the core subject as the dual emergence of insiders and outsiders across social and political history.
(2) Polities (states and political arrangements) aim to stabilize around particular formations of who is included as citizens. Yet these formations are continuously disrupted by capital's abandonment of older, better established labor with stronger rights and organizations, and by the recruitment of new pools of migrant, relatively exploitable labor.  Neither of those are directly political processes, but the former pressures existing citizens' sentiments and behaviors, while the latter brings new populations into the societal mix. 
(3) Internal and international migration need to be viewed together, in a single processual history.  Only over time does the internal/international distinction emerge, as bounded nation-state identities strengthen.  The dynamic capitalist search for new labor sources and new production sites stimulates both internal and international migration.
(4) My inquiry aims not at immigration or international borders alone, but at inside-outside boundaries (Tilly 2005) in modern states.  This includes citizenship and host/newcomer distinctions, which intersect other social boundaries such as race, internal region, and so forth (Fassin 2011).  My immediate agenda within insider/outsider politics is how the frame of contention “immigration politics” emerges and evolves over time, and the processes and results of demands for inclusion by immigrants and especially their descendants as citizens.
To illustrate these points, I begin with an ideal-type model of the interactions among the three processes of capitalism, labor migration, and state formation.  With this simplification, it is easier to envision the complex dynamics.  I then explore this approach more deeply with a case study of United States internal and external migration history.  The U.S. case has a rather complicated history, with reversions between internal and external labor sources, and likewise internal and external relocations of capital investment.

The work of Marx and Engels Marxism stems from the work of Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels. Marxism (sometimes called "political economy") provides anthropology with fundamental theoretical concepts, especially with regard to deep human history and social change, conflict, social inequality, economics, and labor. Marxism is "a way to know the world, as a critique of the world, and as a means to change the world," as Randall McGuire puts it (2006, 62, citing Patterson 2003). Marx and Engels were revolutionaries, whose theory and empirical work was developed in an explicitly activist context. They aimed to understand the world emerging in front of them, wage labor capitalism, but their work provided not just characterization but also critique. Their critique exposed systematically hidden dimensions and pointed out ways in which the social world could be arranged differently. While anthropology, as a scholarly enterprise, mainly uses Marxism as a way to know the world, engaged anthropology is inspired by its combination of knowing, critiquing, and changing, termed "praxis."

A concise essay on how border thinking can tend toward polarization and closure.  It diagnoses key features of border thinking seen in the politics of Donald Trump.  It also proposes an alternative vision of borders, based on relationships and mutual moral engagement.
https://nacla.org/blog/2017/02/27/border-thinking-exclude-or-relate

Dr. Josiah (Joe) Heyman is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Inter-American and Border Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. Over the past few months, Dr. Heyman and I have spoken about his thoughts in preparation for the upcoming Kearney lecture, which will be held Thursday afternoon, April 5 at the Loews Hotel in Philadelphia. For those looking to understand the controversies surrounding the Mexican border more deeply, his lecture promises to be both thought-provoking and timely; meanwhile, as this interview demonstrates, Dr. Heyman and his own work embody the inspiring legacy of Michael Kearney.

http://sfaa.net/news/index.php/2018/feb-2018/annual-meeting-philadelphia-2018/michael-kearney-memorial-lecture/

The United States has pursued a number of policies to deny migrants access to its asylum system. It has supported migrant interdiction programs in Mexico. US border officials have refused to allow many asylum seekers who are subject to expedited removal to pursue asylum claims, even when they request asylum or express a fear of return. The administration has criminally prosecuted and detained asylum-seekers in order to deter others from coming. It has separated children from parents at the border, and it now proposes to reunify these families, albeit in detention facilities. It has even raised the possibility of declaring Mexico a " safe " third country, thus barring asylum claims from migrants that first pass through Mexico. Most recently, it has returned non-Mexicans to Mexico to wait on asylum adjudication in the US, so called Remain in Mexico. This essay, written before Remain in Mexico, applies equally to it.

Although the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has insisted that asylum-seekers pass through ports-of-entry (POEs), rather than between them, it has denied potential non-Mexican asylum seekers access to the inspection area at POEs, and left them stranded in Mexico.[1] CBP has done this by initial questioning and turn aways of some pedestrians at the international boundary line—ones who do not have admission documents, and who express a desire to present themselves for asylum. The operating legal theory seems to be that if such people do not enter the territory of the United States, they cannot begin the asylum process by expressing fear to a border inspector. This legal theory – which certainly violates the spirit, if not the letter of the law – is an important topic for research and debate, but our concern is the serious potential harm of forcing non-Mexicans back into the northern Mexican border region, a highly dangerous area. The turn away policy has been used sporadically for several years at the border, often targeting specific groups, such as Haitians attempting to enter at San Ysidro.[2] What is notable currently is that it applies to all border ports and asylum-seeking nationalities, with particular implications for Central Americans who arrive in substantial numbers through Mexico. The fundamental issue is that by turning away vulnerable people at the border, US authorities seriously worsen the risks they face.[3] When asylum seekers are blocked at POEs, they are forced to return into Mexican border cities; often they are homeless there, having little or no money, with migrant shelters sometimes far off (an expensive cab ride), resorting in some cases to sleeping in the open on bridges or in areas around their entrance. They are trapped between an inaccessible goal (the US port) and a largely inhospitable urban environment. The place in which they are stalled, the northern Mexican border region, has a high level of death, violence, and criminal exploitation. It is risky for migrants who lack local knowledge and ties, and especially for non-Mexican migrants, who make up most of the asylum seekers. Many are alone, or have casual migration partnerships of uncertain trustworthiness. Without Mexican citizenship, such people often lack real official protection (despite the law), and are targets for criminals and exploitative officials. Mexicans sometimes hold prejudicial stereotypes about non-Mexicans from the main asylum seeking countries, such as the northern triangle of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) and black-skinned people.

A public policy report that addresses a major element of the Trump administration's border and immigration plans.

https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/why-caution-needed-hiring-additional-border-patrol-agents-and-ice-officers

The last time the Border Patrol received a large infusion of money to hire thousands of new agents, cases of corruption and misconduct spiked in the agency. New hires were not sufficiently vetted, novice agents were not adequately supervised, and agents who abused their authority acted with impunity. Now the Trump administration wants to repeat history by hiring thousands of additional Border Patrol agents, as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, without introducing the reforms and safeguards needed to avoid the abuses and scandals of the past. Corruption is likely to ensue from such a rapid acceleration in hiring, problems which could easily be averted with rigorous hiring practices.

The administration’s plans are encapsulated in two memos issued on February 20, 2017, by Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly. The memos implement President Trump’s executive orders on border security and immigration enforcement and call for hiring 5,000 additional Border Patrol agents  within Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and 10,000 additional ICE officers—ostensibly as a means of enhancing public safety and national security.  But these two branches of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are poorly prepared to recruit, train, and supervise new personnel. While the Border Patrol experienced some improvements in the aftermath of its last expansion, most recommendations for reform remain unimplemented.

Given this history, there are serious concerns that rapid expansion will bring about a resurgence of problems in the Border Patrol and also cause similar problems in ICE. The proposed surge is also stunningly expensive. Yet there is little justification for this expense at a time when undocumented immigration has fallen to historic lows. If the goal is to enhance border security, this money would be better used in many other ways.

The language of emergency creates panic around the border and does not serve the public good. As scholars and residents of the border, we could reply that the U.S. side is safe and that migrant apprehensions are historically low, though rising. But that is insufficient. We know real insecurities exist, but not ones that a wall will solve.
To enhance border security, we must address problems, not symptoms. We need to untangle the knot of criminality, violence, guns, drugs and migration tying the United States and Latin America. Strategic initiatives can improve safety and well-being, and it is toward these that we should dedicate our billions in public money.

Focus on Processing not Enforcement
The DHS Advisory Council Panel on Families and Children Care Emergency Interim Report (April 16, 2019) (“the Report”) proposes an enforcement-based approach to the current situation at the border that focuses on detention, limitations on access to asylum, restrictions on due process and a presumption that arriving Central American families present a threat. Such an enforcement focus is unwarranted and is doomed to be ineffective.1
A vastly more effective border policy would recognize the humanitarian challenges presented at the border and would focus on approaches that allow the government to fairly and efficiently process Central American families, many of whom are fleeing violence and are likely to qualify for asylum if the law is properly interpreted. At the same time, an effort should be made to develop long-term solutions so that Central Americans do not need to leave their home countries in large numbers to save their lives.
These responses would be in line with our international and domestic obligations to offer safe haven to those fleeing persecution. For more than 50 years, the United States has been a party to the 1967 Protocol to the UN Refugee Convention. The resulting obligations were codified into U.S. law in 1980 through the creation of a well-developed asylum system that mandates protection for those who arrive in the U.S. and meet the refugee definition.2 Now is not the time to turn our backs on that system or on Central American families seeking the rule of law and protection in this country.

Final Version, Aug. 23, 2018. Policy important topics for immigration and/or border scholars. A limit is that these over-represent the U.S.-Mexico border and analogous and different topics are needed from around the world. Thinking of quick synthesis, documentation, gathering of key knowledge, rather than longer term research projects (but that is good also).  Thanks to everyone who has contributed! Let’s keep working on this and go do the research, synthesis, publication (in policy accessible sites/forms). 
Josiah (Joe) Heyman  jmheyman@utep.edu  Aug. 23, 2018

Restrictive U.S. immigration policies and enforcement have led to concerns among providers about how these changes affect service utilization among Latinx and immigrant communities. This study outlines perceptions from twenty service providers in health care, mental health, legal affairs, and immigrant advocacy in El Paso, Texas. Nearly all respondents stated that their work has been negatively affected by immigration enforcement policies under the current federal administration. Most reported changes in utilization among undocumented immigrants and families of mixed immigration status, as well as legal permanent and temporary residents, refugees or asylum seekers, and U.S. citizens. Negative effects were related to immigration-related fear and uncertainty in the community, a need for public education about policies and individu-als' rights, and changes in immigration policy enforcement. Further research about the impacts of immigration enforcement policies on service utilization is needed. To protect the well-being of immigrant communities, policy makers should be aware of the human rights implications of immigration enforcement policies with regard to service utilization. In a global environment of increasing nationalism and xenophobia, nations must carefully consider the implications of harsh anti-immigrant narratives and strict immigration enforcement on the well-being of minority and immigrant populations.

To determine the barriers to health care access by chronic disease and depression/anxiety diagnosis in Mexican
Americans living in El Paso, TX. Design: A secondary analysis was conducted using data for 1,002 Hispanics from El Paso,
TX (2009-2010). Logistic regression was conducted for financial barriers by number of chronic conditions and depression/
anxiety diagnosis. Interaction models were conducted between number of chronic conditions and depression or anxiety.
Results: Depressed/anxious individuals reported more financial barriers than those with chronic conditions alone. There
were significant interactions between number of chronic conditions and depression/anxiety for cost, denied treatment
because of an inability to pay, and an inability to pay $25 for health care. Conclusion: Financial barriers should be considered
to maintain optimal care for both mental and physical health in this population. Implications for Practice: There should
be more focus on the impact of depression or anxiety as financial barriers to compliance.

A very brief essay summarizing social movements, and applied anthropologists working with them, on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.  The issues were current as of summer 2015.  They include violence and criminality in Mexico, and Central American and Mexican refugees.  The idea of transborder politics/solidarities is examined, with some issues and initiatives spanning both sides of the border, and national arenas for politics continuing to have applicability for other issues.

This chapter examines the contribution of new production processes and markets in the information economy to the redefinition of national linguistic ideologies in the context of the U.S.-Mexican border, specifically in El Paso, Texas. We focus on the call centre sector – an industry whose basic work material is language and whose product is conversations – in El Paso, a bicultural border locale with a Mexican-origin population majority, linguistically diglossic in English and Spanish, with a variety of individual repertoires in the two languages. 
An important theme in the literature on call centres and language is nationalistically encoded tensions and accommodations between clients in one country and workers in other countries over language performance and ideology, often concerning varieties of English. The case of bilingual call centres based in the U.S.-Mexican border region adds new inquiries in interesting ways. In this site Latin American immigrant and second-generation clients have few linguistic performance and ideology conflicts with call centre operators. However, this positive production of value in the communicative economy goes largely unrewarded, as Spanish speech and English-Spanish bilingualism are treated as natural outcomes of the border environment, unworthy of extra compensation, training, and certification. Indeed, border speech is useful to corporations as a marker of low wages, disposability, and thus exploitability.
While tensions with clients are mostly subdued, call centre workers do conflict with guardians of nationalistic language purism and educated standards within their own corporations. Border bilinguals confront nationalistic Mexican language ideologies that prioritize educated standards over their own oral, peasant-worker, and English-mixed or -influenced speech. These include everyday interactions in the border region, some specific work functions (such as text translation), and a few (but increasingly important) cases of corporate Hispanic promotion. Likewise, mainly English-monolingual U.S. central corporate offices distrust and stigmatize border English speakers, though that does not prevent them from hiring them. This emerges most strongly as an issue when front-line operators seek to rise into management, a fortress of ideologies of U.S. English linguistic superiority. In important instances, persons of Mexican origin in the United States are thought of as useful but low-value labour, associated with the border. 
We can think of the situation of the border linguistic situation, and the wider border cultural situation of which it is part, in terms of “national monuments,” a term derived from Renato Rosaldo’s magisterial book Culture and Truth (1989). Rosaldo sees the border condition as occurring in all social-cultural spaces between or outside these massive, solid “monuments.” However, unlike the romantic connotations of his analysis, and generally of people who read him, the border condition cannot simply be celebrated. The border bilingual call centre operators are taken for granted, poorly paid and poorly cultivated, easily disposed of, and move through a complicated field of conflict, usually in a stigmatized and powerless position, though with some performances of critique and resistance. Nor should we forget that this is not just a matter of identities and nationalistic ideologies, for also involved are capitalist relations of value transfer from workers to corporations, within which “heritage Spanish at zero cost” is crucial.

Various sectors of stakeholders (urban, agricultural, policymakers, etc.) are frequently engaged in participatory research projects aimed at improving water resources’ sustainability. However, a process for comprehensive and integrative identification, classification, and engagement of all types of water stakeholders for a region or river basin, especially in a transboundary context, is missing for water resources research projects. Our objective was to develop a systematic approach to identifying and classifying water stakeholders, and engage them in a discussion of water futures, as a foundation for a participatory modeling research project to address the wicked water resource problems of the Middle Rio Grande basin on the U.S./Mexico border. This part of the Rio Grande basin can be characterized as having limited and dwindling supplies of water, increasing demands for water from multiple sectors, and a segmented governance system spanning two U.S. states and two countries. These ...

This article explores the effects of post-9/11 security programs on mobility into and within the United States. Specific programs such as retinal scanning and vehicle preclearance are analyzed according to the differential effects they generate in terms of risk, rights and speed of movement. These differentiations suggest that individuals and groups will be identified in unequal ways, and that they will in turn experience their mobility differently. In the end, the analysis provided here adds complexity to current theorizations about citizenship and identity: it shows that while individuals make claims to new and different kinds of citizenship, state power also makes claims on individuals that do not always depend on citizenship. In view of the manifest inequalities resulting from the mobility control practices currently in use, rethinking of those practices is warranted, and an emphasis on shared burdens would be more productive.

To determine the barriers to health care access by chronic disease and depression/anxiety diagnosis in Mexican Americans living in El Paso, TX. A secondary analysis was conducted using data for 1,002 Hispanics from El Paso, TX (2009-2010). Logistic regression was conducted for financial barriers by number of chronic conditions and depression/anxiety diagnosis. Interaction models were conducted between number of chronic conditions and depression or anxiety. Depressed/anxious individuals reported more financial barriers than those with chronic conditions alone. There were significant interactions between number of chronic conditions and depression/anxiety for cost, denied treatment because of an inability to pay, and an inability to pay $25 for health care. Financial barriers should be considered to maintain optimal care for both mental and physical health in this population. There should be more focus on the impact of depression or anxiety as financial barriers to compliance.

ABSTRACT A pdf is available by request from jmheyman@utep.edu . Offers a fundamental model of intersectionality, and applies it to complex consciousness. Class in an abstract sense is the relationship through which labor is mobilized into specific relations of production, But the means through which such labor is categorized and mobilized is historically diverse, and includes nationality/citizenship, race, gender, class in a more superficial sense, and so forth. Thus, class in the setting of the U.S. southwest is enacted through race (Mexican/Anglo) and more recently nationality/immigration status (citizenship). This helps to understand empirical material that borderlanders (most but not all U.S.-side in origin) tend to merge their class understandings of the border into a discourse of labor and poverty being Mexican (as previously documented by Pablo Vila). Yet they do have some penetrations of deep class processes. The notion of a simultaneous view of abstract labor mobilization (abstract class) and empirical, social organization of such labor (surface inequalities) thus enriches the study of intersectionality and consciousness.

ABSTRACT A pdf of this chapter is available by request to jmheyman@utep.edu . This article surveys political economy in anthropology with an emphasis on emerging developments and challenges. It looks at how political economy brings the analysis of power into anthropology, but how anthropological political economy also contributes and challenges to other approaches to power, such as Foucaultian perspectives. It argues that the anthropological concern with distinctive cultural frameworks and social relations is central to understanding fundamental political economic arrangements, and cannot be marginalized as addressing the minor, informal, local, complicated, and so forth. To do this, it urges us to revisit Marxist feminism, reproduction, and articulation of relations of production (and reproduction). It also links recent interest in consumption and political ecology to this social-cultural power core. It then asks how we can build from this anthropological core toward middle-range political economy typical of other disciplines, including states and corporations. In the process, it critically reviews the recent fascination with neoliberalism, suggesting that it may just be a recent phase of capitalism as such in which there has been an attack from above on subordinate social groups designed to shift increasing proportions of the social surplus toward the dominant classes. The chapter then considers the relationship of anthropological political economy, normative values, and social struggle, arguing for explicit dialogues over political-ethical values and a stringent self-critique of academic "would be" radicalism.

ABSTRACT A pdf is available by request from jmheyman@utep.edu . A synthetic overview of the border region. Political economy is the study of power in human affairs, including politics, economics, and ideology. Three border processes are examined in terms of these three elements. They are border crossing processes, border-reinforcing ones, and, a third category crucial to borders, uneven and combined relations. The latter involve both connections and also the maintenance or reinforcement of differentiation. The border is a subordinate region in the political economy of North America, though also a crucial point of production and exchange due to combined and uneven relations. This is explored through application of the concept of dependency to politics, economics, and ideas. Examples are taken from the domains of migration, smuggling, and industrialization, and the topic of regulated, unequal mobility is explored. Finally, the challenge and possibilities for social justice struggles of this highly unequal scenario of political economy are explored.

ABSTRACT Hispanic American Historical Review 82.1 (2002) 196-197 Coal mining lasted a short time in Texas, while Coahuila's coal mines have endured far longer, stimulating the industrialization of northern Mexico. However, during the 1880-1930 period coal mining in the two states not only coexisted but was closely connected. The goal of this book is to unite histories usually rent asunder by the compartmentalization of scholarship into U.S. or Mexican, indeed North American or Latin American categories. Roberto Calderón succeeds convincingly in that endeavor. The major consumer of coal was railroads coursing through Texas and northern Mexico. (Coahuila coal was also good metallurgical coal while some Texas lignite deposits were used as heating fuel.) Because U.S. investors with Mexican allies developed these railroads and smelters, business networks were heavily interwoven across the international boundary. The mining engineers and their techniques were likewise much the same. Calderón thus offers a unified binational business history in the early chapters of the work. The bountifulness of cheap Mexican labor was one assumption shared by capitalists in both nations. Coahuila was completely staffed by Mexican workers, not surprisingly, but Texas presented a more complex stratification of social race, location, and labor markets. Border coal fields (in the Eagle Pass and Laredo areas) were overwhelmingly staffed by Mexicans and U.S. citizens of Mexican extraction, while the large northern coalfields around Thurber, Texas, combined Mexicans with a large pool of European immigrant and eastern U.S. coal laborers. The easterly lignite mines, being less lucrative and smaller in scale, employed Mexican migrant workers along with local white and black farm populations. Through careful marshalling of evidence from both nations, Calderón writes a unified labor and social history that spans the two sides of the border. This reinforces work by other scholars, including the present author, that suggests that prior to 1929 , we might best think of one single Mexican border working class facing the same arrangement of opportunities and racial-national discrimination in each society. After 1940 such a pattern does not disappear, but subsequent U.S. immigration and citizenship policies prevent it from being quite so cohesive and pervasive. Calderón critiques the racial prejudices of observers of the 1880-1930 era. In doing so, he dispels that epoch's assumption that Mexicans were disorganized, passive, and grateful for their miserably paid work. He goes beyond the best-known unions and strikes (in this case, the UMWA in the Thurber area) to tease out the hints of collective organization among laborers in the U.S.-side border coalfields, making good use of Spanish-language newspapers. A particularly intriguing topic along the lines of self-determination is the constant churning of migrant miners through the Texas lignite belt, though by its nature this individualistic or small group response leaves only tiny traces. Little is said about labor in Mexico, however. The primary documentary work in Mexican Coal Mining Labor concerns the U.S.-side Rio Grande district coalfields. Unifying the Texas-Coahuila subject matter is an important accomplishment, but the reliance on secondary sources for northern Texas and especially for Coahuila was frustrating. One trusts that Calderón, who manifests evident capability, will continue to deepen and refine his historical labors. The writing is clear but rarely vivid. The book is both inherently limited in scope and packed with meticulous detail, and so is best suited for research and graduate-level work. In sum, the integrated Mexican-U.S. approach is admirable and will serve as an exemplar for future students of both nations' histories. Josiah Mcc. HeymanMichigan Technological University

Among Latinas, lacking health insurance and having lower levels of acculturation are associated with disparities in mammography screening. We seek to investigate whether differences in lifetime mammography exist between Latina border residents by health insurance status and health care site (i.e., U.S. only or a combination of U.S. and Mexican health care). Using data from the 2009 to 2010 Ecological Household Study on Latino Border Residents, mammography screening was examined among (n = 304) Latinas >40 years old. While more acculturated women were significantly (p < .05) more likely to report ever having a mammogram than less acculturated women, ever having a mammogram was not predicted by health care site or insurance status. Latinas who utilize multiple systems of care have lower levels of acculturation and health insurance, thus representing an especially vulnerable population for experiencing disparities in mammography screening.

ABSTRACT Link: http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/docs/Heyman_-_Drugs_Guns_and_Money_091211.pdf The external borders of the United States matter to security, but how and in what ways is neither automatic nor obvious. The current assumption is that borders defend the national interior against all harms, which are understood as consistently coming from outside—and that security is always obtained in the same way, whatever the issue. Some security policies correctly use borders as tools to increase safety, but border policy does not protect us from all harms. The 9/11 terrorists came through airports with visas, thus crossing a border inspection system without being stopped. They did not cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Future terrorists would not necessarily cross a land border. U.S. citizens and residents, and nationals of Western Europe, also represent an important element of the terrorist threat, and they have unimpeded or easy passage through U.S. borders. Fortified borders cannot protect us from all security threats or sources of harm. Moreover, not all border crossers pose security concerns, even ones who violate national laws. The hundreds of thousands of unauthorized migrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border each year have not posed a threat of political terrorism, and external terrorists have not traveled through this border. Enforcement of laws against unauthorized immigration is, in the vast majority of cases, a resource- and attention-wasting distraction from sensible national security measures. That does not mean the U.S.-Mexico border is free from risk of harm, such as increasingly violent drug trafficking organizations operating nearby in Mexico. But that issue needs to be addressed in different ways than current enforcement policy does.

[A]s an anthropologist committed to field re- search, I am compelled to make one final clos- ing observation. Approximately ten years ago, anthropologists began to yield insights and in- formation regarding the homesteading prac- tices of migrant farm workers, and to describe the ...

RésuméLa discrétion exercée par les agents de première ligne des services frontaliers représente un élément fondamental dans l'étude de la façon que les états-nations traitent les populations mobiles aux frontières internationales et près de celles-ci. Cette discrétion implique non seulement des décisions sur les moments d'agir, instants réactionnaires marqués par des circonstances, des personnes ou des motifs légaux particuliers, mais aussi des décisions sur les moments de nepasagir. Une étude des inactions complète l'ensemble des informations nécessaires afin de délimiter l'inégalité du triage social par l'État. Cette inégalité est soulignée dans l'analyse des documents frontaliers à l'aide d'une perspective novatrice: l'auteur examine les raisons pourquoi, dans un tel contexte, certains frontaliers inspirent confiance tandis que d'autres sont considérés comme des risques potentiels. L'allocation de la confiance et du risque est des plus...

[A]s an anthropologist committed to field re- search, I am compelled to make one final clos- ing observation. Approximately ten years ago, anthropologists began to yield insights and in- formation regarding the homesteading prac- tices of migrant farm workers, and to describe the ...

ABSTRACT A pdf is available by request from jmheyman@utep.edu . A synthetic overview of the border region. Political economy is the study of power in human affairs, including politics, economics, and ideology. Three border processes are examined in terms of these three elements. They are border crossing processes, border-reinforcing ones, and, a third category crucial to borders, uneven and combined relations. The latter involve both connections and also the maintenance or reinforcement of differentiation. The border is a subordinate region in the political economy of North America, though also a crucial point of production and exchange due to combined and uneven relations. This is explored through application of the concept of dependency to politics, economics, and ideas. Examples are taken from the domains of migration, smuggling, and industrialization, and the topic of regulated, unequal mobility is explored. Finally, the challenge and possibilities for social justice struggles of this highly unequal scenario of political economy are explored.

ABSTRACT A pdf is available by request to jmheyman@utep.edu . On the basis of participant-observation in an immigrant human rights coalition, this contribution offers reflections on the opportunities and challenges of being an academic in a politically active coalition. It first examines the ways in which university scholars can encounter rich fields for social scientific learning by engagement with coalitions in the communities that surround them, offering an alternative to the ivory tower model of anthropology done in distant fields. It then explores the challenges of coalition involvement through the theme of role expectations and conflicts. Among the topics examined through participant-observation are role expectations conflicts, time or schedule conflicts, resource tensions, legal and bureaucratic limits, social status inequalities, reduction of name visibility and ego gratification, and complex negotiations and compromises. It finishes with observations on commitment and objectivity, and proposes that coalitions shape particular forms of knowledge creating and communicating processes. These are real issues, but not insurmountable ones, and an honest accounting of them will result in more effective and rewarding coalitions between activists and academics.

ABSTRACT Link: http://www.cairn.info/landing_pdf.php?ID_ARTICLE=POX_087_0021 Résumé – Dans un passage devenu célèbre, Foucault analyse le traitement différentiel des « illégalismes» et leur rôle dans le processus social. Le but de cet article est d’appliquer ce concept fondamental aux différences de traitement entre des individus qui font l’objet d’enquêtes et d’arrestations, quand d’autres ne sont pas du tout inquiétés. On s’efforcera ici de décrire la logique profondément inégale selon laquelle certains acteurs sont perçus comme des « risques » et sont étroitement surveillés (et le cas échéant arrêtés), tandis que d’autres sont jugés « dignes de confiance » et ne se font donc presque jamais contrôler. Ce jugement différentiel de risque ou de confiance au regard de la loi a des répercussions considérables sur la vie quotidienne, les subjectivités, les représentations sociales et les relations entre individus au sein de la société. On prendra comme base empirique l’étude de divers postes de contrôle et inspections ponctuelles dans les zones frontalières américaines à forte présence policière, le long et à proximité de la frontière mexicaine.

The purpose of this study was to determine the association between income, insurance status, acculturation, and preventive screening for diabetes, high blood pressure, and cholesterol in Mexican American adults living in El Paso, Texas. This is a secondary data analysis using data from El Paso, Texas, that was collected between November 2007 and May 2009. Bivariate and stepwise regression analysis was used to determine the relationships between income, insurance, and acculturation factors on preventive screenings. Findings indicate that insurance status was associated with blood pressure check, blood sugar check, cholesterol screening, and any preventive screening. The association for income $40,000 + was explained by insurance. The only significant acculturation variable was language use for cholesterol. Disparities in preventive health screening in Mexican Americans were associated with primary insurance coverage in El Paso, Texas. With the border region being among the most medically underserved and underinsured areas in the United States, the results from this study suggest policy efforts are essential to ensure equal access to resources to maintain good health. Intervention efforts may include increasing awareness of enrollment information for insurance programs through the Affordable Care Act.

ABSTRACT A pdf is available by request from jmheyman@utep.edu . A brief reflection on the development of the study of states and illegal practices since the book of that name (Heyman, ed. 1999). Key points include the need to differentiate more clearly among kinds and implications of illegal and state practices, to consider both normative and non-normative issues in the field, and the ways that high-scale criminal organizations and state enforcement agencies are mutually reinforcing.

ABSTRACT A pdf is available by request to jmheyman@utep.edu . Discusses the impact of the U.S.-Mexican Border Region culture on anthropological thinking about culture. Emergence of the concept of culture; Challenge presented by the life of border inhabitants to the accepted notion of culture. Culture as a dynamic emergence of practices and meanings in social relations.

ABSTRACT A pdf of this item is available by request from jmheyman@utep.edu . This synthetic chapter addresses the causes of the massive escalation of border immigration enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico boundary since 1994 (and in some ways, since the early 20th century). It argues that hierarchical citizenship in which Mexican origin people are slotted as commodity-migrant laborers (though resisted as such) now is interacting with a national and global political economy in which there are increasing sources of conflict and anxiety (economic and social inequality worsening, capitalist driven insecurity and globalization, continual failures of the United States as a militaristic global hegemon) to result in scapegoating of feared subordinate servant populations: immigrants. It looks at the specific symbolic role of borders (as a boundary between purity and danger) in this cultural-political economy. It argues that the current immigration and border policy conjucture is emerging from a three sided struggle between capitalist managerial elites (favoring managed subordinate labor flows), xenophobic populist right wing sectors (as analyzed above), and human/labor rights coalitions battling under difficult circumstances.