Border Games and Border Thinking: A Review of Border Games; Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide.

• Author: Palafox, Jose

Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000; 158 pp., paper $15.95.

ON MAY 13, 2000, OVER 250 PEOPLE CAME TOGETHER IN SIERRA VISTA, Arizona, to discuss stopping the "illegal immigration invasion" from Mexico and to support local rancher Roger Barnett. Roger and his brother Don have apprehended over 3,000 undocumented immigrants near his ranch in Douglas, Arizona. Using broadly applied "citizen's arrest" powers, other ranchers and property owners in the sparsely populated areas have also detained and turned over hundreds of would-be migrants to the Border Patrol and the INS (Janofsky, 2000). U.S. official policy has historically condoned vigilantism on the U.S.-Mexico border; recently, the INS supported the Sierra Vista ranchers' demand for more Border Patrol agents. By immediately redeploying some 400 agents from the interior to border areas like Douglas, Arizona, the INS demonstrated political synchronicity with vigilante actions (Johnson, 2000). The public discourse, however, largely ignored the reasons underlying the surge in unauthorized crossings in rural areas like Doug las. The redeployment of agents and resources to similar border areas underscores the powerful border narrative that state agencies are merely reacting to a problem of unauthorized crossings. Unacknowledged, however, is that the Border Patrol's longstanding strategy has sought to force unauthorized crossings from urbanized areas into more remote areas. In Border Games, the culmination of many years of research, Peter Andreas marshals a mountain of evidence and meticulous, authoritative analysis to argue that the border enforcement narrative obscures how border policy has fundamentally structured, conditioned, and, at times, unintentionally enabled unauthorized crossings.

Andreas' excellent and timely study offers insightful analysis of recent U.S.-Mexico border policing efforts. It places borders within a broader analysis of globalization and compares the U.S.-Mexico border to the boundaries of the European Union. (1) Especially intriguing is that increased U.S.-Mexico border enforcement has taken place as these economies are being integrated (e.g., NAFTA), leading to a "borderless economy and a barricaded border" (p. x). As part of the simultaneous "opening" of the border to trade and commerce, while "closing" it to undocumented immigration and drug trafficking, border policing has attempted to create the image of a controlled border in an era of massive and potentially cataclysmic change.

The reduction of border incursions through infusions of border agents is less important than image management that creates the perception that the U.S. can control the U.S.-Mexico border. Andreas argues that officials attribute failures to technical and resource glitches, "rather than any fundamental flaw in the control strategy itself" (p. 102). Thus, the central argument in Border Games is that "the escalation of border policing has ultimately been less about deterring the flow of drugs and migrants than about recrafting the image of the border" (p. x) through a variety of symbolic measures. In his use of the "game metaphor," Andreas highlights the "performative and audience-directed nature" (Ibid.) of the process. However, border-policing initiatives have not been limited to the U.S. side of the border. For its part in creating and maintaining a "new and more intimate cross-border economic relationship" between the U.S. and Mexico, Mexico has embarked on image projection policies and practices, mainly in t he "war on drugs" (p. 51).

Eleven days after assuming...