In late September 2017, eight construction companies erected models of a new border wall outside San Diego. Each of these companies hopes to build the “big, beautiful” wall promised by Donald Trump during his presidential campaign. If past is prologue, however, the wall will never be built, because so many border residents and lawmakers oppose it on financial, environmental, and humanitarian grounds.

Local resistance to federal intervention along the US–Mexico border has deep historical precedent, and is a focus of S. Deborah Kang's detailed history of the INS between 1917 and 1954. Kang argues incisively that immigration law never simply emanated from the federal government, only to be carried out in the borderlands. Rather, INS officials on the southwest border contested, remade, and created immigration laws, in response to the conflicting demands of residents and business interests in the region. These laws, Kang argues, “construed and constructed the border as an economic zone, a transnational social space, and a vast legal jurisdiction” (169).

Throughout six chapters, Kang uses regional and national archival records to provide an institutional history of INS activities in the southwest. Her narrative begins in 1917, when federal government passed the first set of broadly restrictive immigration laws, instituting a head tax and a literacy test for immigrants. Border residents, who “had grown accustomed to crossing and re-crossing the international boundary without hindrance,” protested the new policies (22). In response, the INS crafted accommodations (such as literacy test waivers) that maintained a more open frontier.

By the 1920s, immigration from Mexico was on the rise. Over the course of the decade, a series of restrictionist immigration laws passed in Congress. Undocumented immigration – as well as illicit alcohol consumption and smuggling – made the southern border an increasing target for reform. These developments led to the 1924 creation of the US Border Patrol, a mobile policing force which could extend past the borderline and search roads, private dwellings, and farms in order to hunt down undocumented immigrants. Yet the Border Patrol faced local resistance, particularly from farmers and growers who wished to retain access to cheap Mexican labor, and resented agents’ incursions into their private property. This tension came to a head in the early 1930s, after the massive repatriation campaigns of 1929 sparked protests on both sides of the border. Throughout the 1930s, the INS underwent a period of reform, reviewing the policies and practices of the Border Patrol, and attempting to curtail its worst excesses.

Kang's discussion of the INS's role during the Bracero Program (1942–64) is particularly fascinating. Although the Bracero Program was designed by the US and Mexican federal governments, INS officials in the Southwest had to confront its “messy realities” on the ground (88). Those realities included an unprecedented new stream of undocumented workers. INS officials on the border found themselves tasked with “identifying the existence of labor shortages, processing recruits in Mexico and at the border, setting wages, inspecting job sites and dwellings, apprehending deserters and undocumented immigrants, and conducting deportations” (103).

By the mid-1940s, INS officials recognized that orderly law enforcement along the border had broken down, and called for a new round of reforms. Spearheading these changes was El Paso district director Grover C. Wilmoth, who “sounded the alarm on undocumented immigration” to the federal government, and sought its assistance (138). The Truman administration responded with an infusion of funding, as well as new legal mechanisms to “stop, search, seize, and arrest within a specific geographic area beyond the border” (124).

These efforts would eventually pave the way for Operation Wetback, the federal deportation drive designed by INS commissioner general Joseph Swing in 1954–55. A military man, Swing “played a critical role in creating an image of the INS as an aggressive, highly militarized law enforcement organization” (152). Operation Wetback eventually expelled one million Mexican nationals, but the program's success was debatable. There was resistance to the roundups from residents of the borderlands, and in response the INS instituted local programs that allowed growers to regularize undocumented workers. Furthermore, many of the deportees eventually came back to the US. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Operation Wetback, Kang observes, is the “now routine exercise of large-scale expulsions at the international boundaries and throughout the country” (167).

Kang's book provides an adept and fascinating overview of the dynamic between the INS, border residents, and federal officials. Although the account is occasionally dry (perhaps unavoidable when discussing the inner workings of a growing bureaucracy), Kang ably demonstrates how the INS developed and maintained administrative discretion over the borderlands – and how local actors persistently checked its powers. This dynamic remains relevant to this day, when immigration law and policy remain, as Kang so aptly puts it, “unable to shed the dilemmas of the past” (179).