Border Lives: Fronterizos, Transnational Migrants, and Commuters in Tijuana by Sergio Chávez (review)

Sergio Chávez's Border Lives arrives in the thick of heated debates over immigration to the United States. While most contemporary political discussions of immigration bifurcate immigrants into simple "legal" and "illegal" categories (Donato and Armenta 2011), Chávez's work complicates these groupings by documenting the experiences of "border commuters," Mexican residents who regularly navigate back and forth across the Mexico-US border for work. Although some border commuters enter the United States with work authorization, others may do so with a tourist visa or border-crossing card (BCC) and without formal work authorization. These migrants, who live in Mexico but work in the United States, are often overlooked in the policy debates over immigration. Chávez's book thus illuminates how federal immigration policy is often disconnected from the everyday reality of cross-border flows.

Set in Tijuana, Mexico, a border city within walking distance of neighboring San Diego County, California, Chávez's study draws on rich ethnographic and interview data among border commuters. Through interviews with 118 commuters and 40 non-commuters he met over the course of his study, he uncovers the everyday experiences of commuters and how they contrast with those of non-commuters. In particular, he explores how commuters, many of whom have left their rural communities of origin and settled in bustling Tijuana, "establish roots in the borderlands, find work in the United States and Mexico, develop family and friendship ties that aid in the settlement process, and cross the border using legal and extralegal means across distinct historical periods" (2). Chávez's analysis highlights how different cohorts of commuters exhibit agency against the backdrop of an ever-restrictive set of immigration policies enabling or constraining their cross-border movements.

To contextualize how immigration policy has impacted border commuters' experiences, Chávez classifies his respondents into four cohorts that correspond to milestones in the historical evolution of Mexico-US migration flows (c.f. Garip 2012, 2016). The first consists of those migrants who crossed into the United States from 1942 to 1964, known as the Bracero period. These individuals mobilized in response to the eponymous program that brought 4.6 million braceros, or laborers, to the United States for short-term farm work. The second cohort emerges after the guest-worker program ended abruptly in 1964. During this Open Border period that lasted until 1985, undocumented immigration from Mexico continued at the behest of US-based agriculturalists who required migrant labor to meet production demands. As the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States grew during this period, so too did the American public's desire to regulate these flows. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was passed in 1986, and it granted amnesty to 2.3 million undocumented immigrants from Mexico living in the United States while also increasing the regulation of the country's southern border. This so-called Post-IRCA period, constituting the third cohort, spanned from 1987 to 1993. Finally, and since the implementation of important free-trade agreements in the 1990s, a fourth cohort has appeared. Unlike their counterparts, however, migrants in this Post–Operation Gatekeeper period have had to confront unprecedented immigration enforcement as they attempt to cross the Mexico-US border for work, including fencing, increased patrols, and additional port inspectors.

The literature on international migration regularly underscores the structural impediments to individuals' lawful migration from Mexico to the United States. Indeed, a complex and often-contradictory system of immigration policies has made it increasingly difficult for Mexican labor migrants to enter the United States for brief periods (see Waters and Pineau 2015), even though that had been their preference before the proliferation of border security (Massey, Durand, and Pren 2016). Chávez recognizes these realities, revealing how immigration policy is repeatedly out of touch with individuals' desire for short-term labor migration. He outlines how distinct policy contexts have produced striking differences in migrants' access to myriad...