The Shifting Border of Immigration Regulation

While American immigration law is still largely informed by the doctrine of plenary power, which holds that [a]dmission to the United States is a privilege granted by the sovereign (as the Supreme Court asserted in Knauff more than fifty years ago), what has dramatically changed in recent years is the location of our gates, which no longer stand at the country\u27s territorial edges. Instead, the border itself has become a moving barrier, a legal construct that is not tightly fixed to territorial benchmarks. This shifting border of immigration regulation, as we might call it, is selectively utilized by national immigration regulators to regain control over their crucial realm of responsibility, to determine who to permit to enter, who to remove, and who to keep at bay

The Shifting Border of Immigration Regulation

While American immigration law is still largely informed by the doctrine of plenary power, which holds that [a]dmission to the United States is a privilege granted by the sovereign (as the Supreme Court asserted in Knauff more than fifty years ago), what has dramatically changed in recent years is the location of our gates, which no longer stand at the country\u27s territorial edges. Instead, the border itself has become a moving barrier, a legal construct that is not tightly fixed to territorial benchmarks. This shifting border of immigration regulation, as we might call it, is selectively utilized by national immigration regulators to regain control over their crucial realm of responsibility, to determine who to permit to enter, who to remove, and who to keep at bay

Beyond the American century: Walter Lippmann and American grand strategy, 1943-1950

As the United States became a world Power, journalist and intellectual Walter Lippmann feared that it would become its own worst enemy. During and after the Second World War, he tried to steer the country towards coherent statecraft, to define the national interest and the limits of power, and give geopolitical expression to the role of the United States as the core of an Atlantic strategic system. But in response to world war, the Truman Doctrine, and the Korean War, he became pessimistic about the country's ability to conduct strategy effectively. In the prophetic tradition, he believed that a fatal symbiosis between America's growing strength and domestic politics led it towards crisis. Though at times ahistorical, Lippmann's concept of strategy deserves attention for its dialogue between power and identity, for its questioning of “ends” as well as means, and for its focus on the danger of self-defeating behaviour

The compositional model of Santo Domingo and Cartagena fortifications between old and new world

The work of the Antonelli family has determined the constructive characteristics of Spanish forti- fications in the new world. Their fame is due to Giovanni Battista, the military and hydraulic engineer of Italian origin, and training in the Spanish Crown service. During the second half of the sixteenth century, he designed and built the defense of the Iberian Peninsula’s borders, taking care of Cartagena’s port city, the coast of the Kingdom of Valencia, and the African ports of Oran and Mazalquivir. An extensive work, whose characters are taken from the younger brother, Battista Antonelli, planned the defensive system of fortresses and walls in the Caribbean and, more generally, in the Spanish colonies of Central America. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, the New World was a destination for explorations and observations by the great monarchies of the old continent: the English, French, Dutch, and Spanish fought over lands and businesses on a Caribbean sea that became international. In 1586 Philip II of Spain nominated Battista Antonelli as his engineer, with the specific aim of structuring the defense of the lands of the Corona overseas. Over the years, Antonelli inspects and presents design proposals for many cities in Central America, working from Colombia, Panama, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Cuba. The text addresses, in particular, the description of Cartagena de Indi- as and Santo Domingo, comparing them through the narration of two analysis, training, and docu- mentation projects conducted here by the DAda LAB Research Laboratory

Jahrbuch Migration und Gesellschaft / Yearbook Migration and Society 2020/2021

Migration is not a state of emergency, but a basic existential experience of humanity. It shapes contemporary societies by challenging established orders, creating transnational spaces beyond national hegemonies, creating new economies, influencing urban and communal ways of life, making inequality and precariousness visible locally and globally. Migration research as a social science does not narrow the focus to 'the migrants', but investigates the conditions for living together and shaping life between ethnicization and pluralization, discrimination and empowerment, division and participation. The Yearbook Migration and Society repeatedly turns the prism of narrative anew. The 2020/2021 edition focuses on the topic "Beyond Borders"

Palm Trees y Nopales: The Commodification and Hybridization of the South Texas Borderlands

This dissertation examines social inequalities rooted in capital. Through research conducted in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, this project interrogates how social characters use capital to access goods and services. By investigating seasonal migration of US and Canadian retirees into the region, the work highlights the social construction of retirement, the use of state and local governances to establish white only enclaves, and the nation-state’s role in creating marginalized populations in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Ethnography is the primary research method with demographic and popular culture analysis as secondary modes of collecting data

NAFTA-Land Security: The Mérida Initiative, Transnational Threats, and U.S. Security Projection in Mexico

This thesis explores recent U.S. bilateral aid to Mexico through the Mérida Initiative (MI), a $2.3 billion assistance commitment on the part of the United States (U.S.) officially justified as helping Mexico build its capacity to take on violent drug cartels and thereby improve security in both countries. There has been a good amount of engaging work on the MI. However this extant literature has not undertaken detailed policy analysis of the aid programme, leading to conclusions that it is a fresh approach to the Mexican counternarcotics (CN) challenge, or that CN is a ‘fig leaf’ for the U.S. to pursue other ‘real’ goals. This is a core gap in the literature this project seeks to fill. Through policy analysis, I make an empirically supported argument that Mérida is a component of a far more ambitious policy agenda to regionalise security with Mexico more generally. This involves stabilising Mexico itself, not least in response to serious drug-related violence. However the U.S. also aims to improve its own security by giving greater ‘depth’ to its borders, and seeks protect the political economy of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) from variegated security threats. In this way, recent U.S. policy in Mexico is both derivative of its wider grand strategic traditions in stabilising key political economies in line with its interests, and representative of some distinct developments stemming from the deeply integrated U.S.-Mexican economy as part of NAFTA. To assure U.S. interests accrued to it through the increasingly holistic North American economy, the U.S. has used the MI as the main vehicle in the construction of a nascent ‘NAFTA-land Security’ framework