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Space, Power, Policy, And The Creation Of The “Illegal” Migrant At The United States Boundary With Mexico, Catalina J. Biesman-Simons

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis discusses the relationship between space (physical and figurative) and sovereign power, with respect to the history of the United States' immigration and boundary policy. It examines spatial organization as a social product, and simultaneously a producer of mainstream associations of illegal activity at the border with Mexico. It begins with a brief introduction to a spatially informed analytical framework, a history of relevant United States' immigration policy. The paper then uses newspaper coverage from the 1970s and 1980s to examine the local and national rise of xenophobia in the United States, and the normalization of boundary control and …