Immigration control in crisis: Governance at the US-Mexico border

The border between the United States and Mexico is significant is not only for its status as a long-standing crisis of control but as a warning to the administrative state writ large. The border “crisis” is food for thought not only about the future viability of national sovereignty in a global era but of administrative governance and its role in upholding the rule of law, national security, and democratic as well as humanitarian values. Despite the central role played at the border by public administrators from the frontline to the executive level, relatively little systematic attention has been paid to how career personnel do their work, which is much more likely to be complex than routine. It requires not only technical and legal expertise but the weighing of situational circumstances and the exercise of judgment. A presumed source of systematic attention to the border crisis, namely the academic field of public administration/public management (PA/PM), educates practicing administrators and those aiming to enter public service. University scholars also engage in systematic research focused on administrative practice, with at least the potential, if not the expressed aim, of improving it. Yet such published research by PA/PM scholars is rare. Existing studies of the US southern border, many of high quality, are performed largely by anthropologists and specialists in Latin America. Those who claim to have deep knowledge of the nature and dynamics of the American administrative state and how to improve its performance have largely ignored perhaps its most deplorable and long-standing performance failure. Despite being described in much of the scholarly literature as weak, backward, and fractionated in contrast to other modern states, the American administrative state has expanded at all its levels, with respect to what it does and the power it has amassed, yet without the ability to make good on border control—perhaps its most crucial challenge—as the public’s deepening unhappiness over its performance would seem to indicate (Guskin, 2024; Novak, 2008). In this respect, the border crisis challenges not only the state’s sovereignty but the long-accepted notion of administrative management as professionalized control, regardless of context, over processes in order to achieve specific results. It appears that the administrative state is both too powerful and not powerful enough. Taking a cue from William J. Novak (2008), we turn from abstract theories about the administrative state to argue for a “bottom-up approach” of the sort pioneered by pragmatist thinkers like John Dewey and Mary Parker Follett. We want to aim at “how” rather than “why” questions and target parallel evolutions: on the one hand, the southern border, gradually becoming over decades the most vivid, troubled and virtually out of control governance challenge; on the other, changing understandings of what it means to govern administratively, in none of which has the academic field given border control the attention it deserves.