ABSTRACT
Such is the case with the presence of unauthorized immigrants in the United States and an insufficiently state-regulated U.S.–Mexico boundary in the 1990s. The previous almost 150 years had provided the long-term social infrastructure that enabled Americans to perceive particular peoples and places as “outside” and the medium-term factors discussed in the previous chapter had intensified the ability of the public to see them as threatening. Still, what came about in terms of immigration and boundary-related matters in the early 1990s could have been very different.
