In March 2018, American conservative politicians used racialized rhetoric to describe a caravan of Central Americans traveling toward the U.S.–Mexico border as a threat to national safety. Their tone was eerily similar to nativist attempts to prevent “Chinamen” crossing from Chihuahua into El Paso “in herds and droves” during the 1890s (103). Given the recent politicized rhetoric describing the border as unsafe and lawless alongside the vitriol surrounding immigration reform, Lim’s Porous Borders provides a timely history of the racist ideologies behind these standpoints. Bridging immigration and borderlands history, Lim asks how the multiracial landscape of the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez region affected the national identities and immigration policies of both countries. Using a transnational lens, Lim argues that the United States and Mexico were in a “shared venture” of “controlling race, immigration and the border” from 1880 to 1930 (14).
In five chapters, Porous Borders traces how racially “open borders”...