The Borders of America

The Borders of America:

Migration, Control, and Resistance

Across Latin America and the Caribbean

(Duke University Press, February 2026)

co-edited with Soledad Álvarez Velasco, Gustavo Dias, and Eduardo Domenech

“The Borders of America stares past the icy violence of border enforcement to reveal how migrants traverse and live beyond America’s manifold boundaries. With hemispheric sweep from Canada through Latin America, this collection shows how migrant mobilities shape border regimes, creating conflicted political spaces where power and authority are always at stake. The volume’s crucial insight: no border stands alone —America’s borders enact and configure a wider global architecture of movement, resistance, and control.”

-- Brett Neilson,

author of

Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor

and

The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism

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The Borders of America examines the tension between human migration and the diverse formations of border control and immigration and asylum policy that have arisen across the Americas since the start of the twenty-first century. The collection develops a single analytical framework that is hemispheric in scope, encompassing the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and the full extent of Latin America. The contributors offer the concept of a “border regime” as an epistemological and methodological approach that comprehends borders not merely as physical demarcations between state territories and jurisdictions but rather as expansive, uneven, and heterogeneous spaces of constant encounter, exchange, dispute, tension, conflict, and contestation. Presenting detailed empirical research into contemporary intra-regional and transcontinental mobilities across the hemisphere, The Borders of America scrutinizes an array of critical nodes in the larger configuration of the trans-American border regime.

Contents

Introduction

The Borders of (Our) America

Soledad Ávarez Velasco, Nicholas De Genova,

Eduardo Domenech, and Gustavo Dias

Chapter 1

Latin American Refugeeship in Canada and the Hemispheric Border Regime

Patricia Landolt and Luin Goldring

Chapter 2

Mobility Control Regime and Clandestine Practices in the US-Mexico Border

Laura Velasco Ortiz

Chapter 3

Subverting International Bordering Practices:

“Illegal Legality” in Southern Mexico

Tanya Basok and Martha Luz Rojas Wiesner

Chapter 4

Migrant Caravans and the Border Control Regime in Mexico: The Case of the Fifty-Day Caravan During the COVID Pandemic

Margarita Núñez Chaim, Amarela Varela Huerta, and

Valentina Glockner Fagetti

Chapter 5

The Indeterminacy of Transit Through Latin America as Seen from the Colombia-Panama Border

Juan Thomas Oróñez and Jonathan Echeverri Zuluaga

Chapter 6

Illegalized in the Country of “Universal Citizenship”

Soledad Ávarez Velasco

Chapter 7

Border Control, COVID-19, and the Criminalization of Irregularized Migration in Chile

Daniel Quinteros, Romina Ramos, and Roberto Dufraix-Tapia

Chapter 8

The Politics of Hostility in Argentina:

Detention, Expulsion, and Border Rejection

Eduardo Domenech

Chapter 9

Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing:

Transformation of Refuge Through the Protection-Control Relationship in the South American Space

Janneth Clavijo

Chapter 10

Logistical Lives, Humanitarian Borders:

Managing Populations in South-South Circulations

Carolina Moulin

Chapter 11

“Europe" in ”Latin America":

Illegalized Mobilities, Deportable Bodies, and Contested Sovereignties in the French-Brazilian Borderland

Fabio Santos

Chapter 12

The Trans-American Border Regime:

Toward a Genealogy

Nicholas De Genova, Soledad Ávarez Velasco,

Eduardo Domenech, and Gustavo Dias