Abstract :
Border scholars have on the whole rejected the claim that the U.S.–Mexico border has been dissolved by late modern crossborder migrations of capital, people, and practices. However, in noting the escalation of militarized policing practices in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands in the midst of liberalizing trade agreements such as NAFTA, the tendency in this literature has been to reconcile hegemonic U.S. geopolitical and geoeconomic practices in the region as paired. In conversation with these approaches to U.S. statecraft in the region, I propose that border policing in the wake of September 11, 2001, surfaces the long-standing relative incoherence of U.S. geopolitical and geoeconomic practice. By investigating how nonlocally conceived policies come apart on the ground in terms of the local circumstances each produce, I describe the border as a security/economy nexus in U.S. statecraft.
