The Border We Cannot Think Beyond: Institutional Logic and the US-Mexico Border

• In Event: The American Empire’s Favorite Line: Ports of Entry and Everyday Violence at the US-Mexico Border

Abstract

This paper interrogates the conceptual framework through which we have come to know the US-Mexico border—a framework that has come to define not only how we enforce the border, but how we think about, measure, and imagine it. Despite being one of the world's most peaceful borders, with 27 ports of entry processing approximately 200 million authorized crossings annually, the US-Mexico border has become increasingly militarized through an institutional logic that demands perpetual expansion of enforcement capabilities. From immigration control in the 19th century to drug interdiction and national security in the 20th and 21st centuries, the border's security apparatus has not merely responded to new threats—it has fundamentally shaped how we conceive of the border itself, making it impossible to think outside the paradigm of enforcement and control. The border bureaucracy has so thoroughly shaped the conceptual terrain that even our attempts to critique or resist border policies often remain trapped within its logic of threat and control.
Through historical analysis, I trace how this framework emerged from the bureaucratic evolution of border enforcement agencies, particularly their institutional need to justify their existence through the production of quantifiable threats. While scholars have examined the border through various theoretical lenses—as a cultural borderlands (Anzaldúa), a site of state performance (Andreas), and a space of necropolitical violence (Mbembe)—this paper argues that we must critically examine the paradigms that shape how we conceptualize the border itself.
Drawing on institutional records and border statistics, I demonstrate how this framework has created not just policies but ways of seeing—making certain questions askable and others unthinkable, certain solutions imaginable and others impossible. The paper concludes that meaningful border policy discussion requires developing new analytical frameworks that can comprehend sanctioned and unsanctioned border spaces as interconnected domains governed by the same oppressive logic.

Author

• Aleshia Barajas, Indiana University, Bloomington