Mass deportation is at the forefront of political discourse in the United States. The Shadow of the Wall shows in tangible ways the migration experiences of hundreds of people, including their encounters with U.S. Border Patrol, cartels, detention facilities, and the deportation process. Deportees reveal in their heartwrenching stories the power of family separation and reunification and the cost of criminalization, and they call into question assumptions about human rights and federal policies.

The authors analyze data from the Migrant Border Crossing Study (MBCS), a mixed-methods, binational research project that offers socially relevant, rigorous social science about migration, immigration enforcement, and violence on the border. Using information gathered from more than 1,600 post-deportation surveys, this volume examines the different faces of violence and migration along the Arizona-Sonora border and shows that deportees are highly connected to the United States and will stop at nothing to return to their families. The Shadow of the Wall underscores the unintended social consequences of increased border enforcement, immigrant criminalization, and deportation along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Contributors
 
Howard Campbell
Josiah Heyman
Alison Elizabeth Lee
Daniel E. Martínez
Ricardo Martínez-Schuldt
Emily Peiffer
Jeremy Slack
Prescott L. Vandervoet
Matthew Ward
Scott Whiteford
Murphy Woodhouse

Jeremy Slack is an assistant professor of geography in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at the University of Texas at El Paso. Daniel E. Martínez is an assistant professor in the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona. Scott Whiteford is the director of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Mexico Initiative and a professor emeritus at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona.
 

“The book adds invaluable information on what migrants’ experience while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.”—AmeriQuests

“The Shadow of the Wall is an excellent compilation…The contributors here have not called for some utopian solution. On the contrary, their research demonstrates that in order to implement reasonable immigration control, that is, a system based upon reason, a quantitative understanding must undergird any policy. Their work also elicits the voices of migrants, so often left out of the record. The book’s ethnographic work makes migrants into participants rather than objects, another perspective that policymakers must adopt in order to bring an end to the chaos and inhumanity along that line in the shadow of the wall.”—H-Net Reviews

“The authors use a unique data set and multimethod approach to document the criminalization of migration and demonstrate the futility of deportation as a tool for deterrence. This book should energize activists, inspire academic researchers, and challenge policy-makers to rethink this failed approach.”—Wayne A. Cornelius, Director Emeritus, Mexican Migration Field Research and Training Program, University of California, San Diego
 
“This book shows how U.S. immigration policy has changed over the years and generated unintended, undesirable outcomes: tearing families apart, fueling violence, and failing to keep deported unauthorized immigrants from attempting to immigrate anew.”—Susan Eva Eckstein, Boston University