The three border wars
A tale with two sides
The meaning of the border
The frontier era
The customs era
The law enforcement era
The national security border
The closing of the border
Our lives in the hands of others
A democratic deficit
Conflating the issues
Planning to secure the border: same old, same old
Are the three border wars justified?
The scope of the book
The drug war on the border
A bird's eye view
Economics and geography
It's economics
The explanatory power of a standard map
The beginning of the war
Between business and war
Bureaucrats versus drug cartels: unequal enemies
Modus smugglandi
The port of entry versus the non-port of entry axis
The people versus the vehicles axis
The NAFTA connection
The C-TPAT
The narco-tunnels
Corrupting the warriors
The protective shield of the border police
Victimizing the criminals with bribes
Violence and the drug trafficking business
Competition: violence between cartels
Competition: intra-cartel violence
Taking sides: the Mexican government
Plata o plomo: silver or lead
Disciplining the workforce
Random violence: the exception to the rule
The Sicarios
Handling the disloyal
Money and drugs: north and south
The media and the drug war
The wealth of drugs: on narco mansions and narco juniors
The big cartels versus the small time players
The border geographic of the drug war
Conclusion
Immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border
The scene at the border
The beginning
The breaking point: 1986
A failed logic for a failed war
The balloon effect
The dead
Build it and they will come
The backside of economic development
It's economics, stupid!
The legal side
Mothers and their babies
How they come
The old crossers: how times change
Humpty dumpty and the border
The more things change, the more they stay the same
Operation hold the line
Good fences make good neighbors
Empowering the coyotes
The crossing card trick
NAFTA and undocumented immigration
OTM: other than Mexicans
Other modus operandi
The militarization of the border
Law enforcement and escalation
Deterrence and escalation
The illegal document industry
The attrition argument
The U.S. military and the border
All the border's a stage
The American public
The minutemen
Border political grandstanding
A new approach is needed
Homeland Security and the border
The war on terror comes to the border
The border and the immediate aftermath of September 11
Diagnosing the failure of September 11
Immigration failure
Economic integration, trade and border security
Arizona and New Mexico
Damn those bureaucrats!
Intelligence failure and the border
Conflating the issues
Reorganizing for border security
A nagging question
New immigration procedures
Consequences of the new immigration procedures
New trade procedures
The consequences of the new trade system
The value added by the new trade procedures
The inordinate burden on border residents
The costs of Homeland Security at the border to the taxpayer
Back to normalcy?
The treatment of border crossers
The panopticon border
Technology and the panopticon border
Militarization of the border
The border as a symbol of a reluctant partnership
Agent González and the problem with the problem
The definition of border security
The construction of security
Unhelpful rhetoric
Talking past each other at the border
A new approach is needed
The North American Free Trade Agreement and the border
The North American solution
Defining a North American community
The North American security bubble
Bureaucratic politics and the border
The border reinstated
The border is the future of America
No end in sight.