Line. Fence. Wall.

6:08Rachel St. John:Partly for that reason, it was sparsely settled in the 19th century. It's a place that many indigenous people passed through.

6:18Miguel Levario:Dozens of tribes called this area home for centuries, including the Yaqui, the Tana Autumn, and the Kumeyaay.

6:26Rachel St. John:But they wouldn't have thought of the border as a specific and distinct place.

6:32Miguel Levario:In 1850, the U.S.-Mexico border didn't exist yet, but it was about to.

6:42Rachel St. John:Hundreds of miles away, a man named John Russell Bartlett was busy packing up his things to head south. He had just been hired as the new U.S. Boundary Commissioner, the head of a team of men in charge of marking the U.S.-Mexico border for the first time. It's not quite what he imagined for himself. Bartlett was a bookseller from Rhode Island. A bookseller with big dreams. He'd gone to Washington, D.C., hoping to become something glamorous, like a U.S. diplomat to Denmark. Instead, he landed this job. To cross a wilderness from the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean, a distance of more than 800 miles, would at any time be a labor of difficulty.

7:29Rachel St. John:He had no experience in surveying. This is Rachel St. John. I'm associate professor of history at UC Davis. She also wrote a book called Line in the Sand, a history of the western U.S.-Mexico border. The work is one for the near completion, of which we could not be too thankful. When Bartlett joined the survey, it had already been going on for over a year. And let's just say, the U.S. Boundary Commission was not known for its outstanding workplace culture.

8:01Miguel Levario:Bartlett was the fifth U.S. commissioner to be hired. One of his predecessors had left the job after being shot by his lead surveyor during a drunken argument.

8:13Rachel St. John:Quick pause for context here. The whole reason this survey was happening was to wrap up a war the U.S. and Mexico had fought. A war that was primarily about expanding U.S. territory. And the U.S.

8:27Miguel Levario:had won. In February 1848, the two countries signed the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. Mexico ceded a huge amount of land, what makes up Nevada, Utah, and California, plus parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming.

8:45Rachel St. John:They had agreed on the border in the treaty. Now, they needed to mark that border out on the land. If you read the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it looks like a clear blueprint, right? They say, what you need to do is you need to look at this map and these few places and just draw straight lines between them and then follow rivers. It'll be no problem.

9:06Miguel Levario:Famous last words.

9:12Miguel Levario:When the survey began, both nations sent their own team of men to meet at the border. And while American commissioners came and went, Mexico's commissioner, a man named Pedro García Conde, trudged on.

9:24Rachel St. John:His demonstrated talents, his scientific knowledge, specific to the material at hand, but also his true patriotism and important service he has lent to the nation.

9:41Miguel Levario:García Conde was grizzled. He was an experienced surveyor. And right from the start, he watched the American team fall into disarray.

9:55Rachel St. John:Without any real means and surrounded by the greatest misery and exposed to everything imaginable, we are advancing the work as much as possible, given the disorganization of the American Commission.

10:07Miguel Levario:Which wasn't to say the Mexicans had it easy. Both sides were contending with forces outside their control. One of the problems they run into is that the California gold rush starts. The American Commission couldn't find enough boats to take them to San Diego, where the survey was supposed to start. And so they end up getting stalled in Panama for a long time. When they finally got going, it was slow and hard.

10:33Rachel St. John:There was no GPS, no satellite imaging. Surveying was done using tools that have names I can barely pronounce, like sextants, theodolites, and circumferenters.

10:45Miguel Levario:And to make matters worse, the Mexican government didn't have much money after the war to finance their boundary commission. García Conde had to draw on his personal line of credit to fund the expedition. So by the time Bartlett showed up, García Conde had been through it.

11:08Rachel St. John:When he meets Bartlett for the first time in Paso del Norte, present-day El Paso, Texas, he's not impressed.

11:23Rachel St. John:Mr. Barlett, who presides over it, is a fine fellow, but without any idea of the word we have to do. We wrote 120 engineers, and except for two or three very average ones among them, the rest don't know a single word, nor do they obey the commissioner. But there's nothing he can do about it. This is the man he has to work with. And right away, the two of them run into a problem. They have where Paso del Norte actually is, where they're standing, and then they have where it was drawn on the map.

11:59Miguel Levario:They look at the treaty map and they realize it's wrong. Paso del Norte is a good 30 miles south of what the map says. And Paso del Norte is supposed to be their starting reference point for marking the border.

12:13Rachel St. John:But it is actually very tricky because depending on where they drew it, hundreds of miles were at stake. If they drew it from one place, they would shift to Mexico. If they drew it to another place, they'd shift to the United States.

12:26Miguel Levario:It wasn't just land at stake. People lived in this area, too. Depending on where the line landed, those people would either be Mexicans or Americans.

12:36Rachel St. John:These two boundary commissioners came up with a compromise where they decided to sort of split the difference.

12:42Miguel Levario:We won't bore you with the details, but Mexico got a little more land to the north, and the U.S. got a little more land to the west. They then went on their way.

13:02Rachel St. John:Bartlett kept a detailed journal of the expedition. April 19th, 1851.

13:12Rachel St. John:A wild and barren region lay before us.

13:20Rachel St. John:We toiled across these sterile plains The sun glowing fiercely and the wind hot from the parched earth Cracking the lips and burning the eyes

13:35Rachel St. John:He's constantly complaining The country passed over in the last three days is uninteresting And the extreme One becomes disgusted with the ever-reoccurring sameness of plain and mountain, plant and living thing. They were traveling with mules and huge wagons, sometimes where there weren't roads or even trails. We found ourselves, all at once, surrounded by steep hills, steeper mountains, ravines, gullies, and frightful canyons. They were plagued by breakdowns. The wagon turned bottom upwards, rolling down the ravine.

14:14Miguel Levario:By unreliable team members.

14:17Rachel St. John:My cook took the opportunity to get drunk during the night. And by a lack of food. We had not tasted a potato for a year, nor any other vegetables, except a little wild asparagus. Most people on the commission are unexcited about this place. And Bartlett in particular, at one point, writes, Is this the land which we have purchased and are to survey and keep at such a cost? As far as the eye can reach stretches one unbroken waste, barren, wild, and worthless. For both commissions, this survey was supposed to be about staking a claim on this land on behalf of their nations. It was about marking out what belonged to Mexico and what belonged to the U.S.

15:02Rachel St. John:And what the Boundary Commissioners find, in fact, is that, no, this space is mostly inhabited by and in fact controlled by indigenous peoples still. Many of the tribes that lived there, like the Pima and Maricopa, aided the Boundary Survey. They served as guides, provided food and information. But the survey also ran into bands of Apache and Comanche people who saw the survey as an intrusion. Time after time, Native people prove to the boundary commissioners that they do not actually control this landscape.

15:37Miguel Levario:Throughout the survey, the commissions are constantly splitting up to survey different pieces of the border and then meeting up again. On one of his detours, Bartlett receives bad news.

15:53Rachel St. John:December 24th, 1851. Dr. Vassbinder arrived today, bringing the painful news that General García Conde, the Mexican commissioner, had died.

16:09Miguel Levario:García Conde had fallen ill days after Bartlett had last seen him. Bartlett is shaken.

16:17Rachel St. John:He had ever shown himself ready to aid the American commission in any way that lay in his power.

16:27Miguel Levario:Bartlett is ready for this grueling journey to come to an end. And the end was near. Or so he thought.

16:36Rachel St. John:Everything required to ensure the speedy completion of the work was at hand. But all of my plans were frustrated by dispatches from Washington. Congress decides that they don't want to approve the boundary line.

16:50Miguel Levario:And they'd suspended the commission. Bartlett was in big trouble. Remember when he and García Conde compromised over where to start the survey? Turns out, Congress was not happy with Bartlett for the deal he'd struck.

17:05Rachel St. John:They thought he gave too much land to Mexico. The ultimate outcome of this is the two countries decide to renegotiate the boundary line. Congress forked over$10 million to buy a chunk of southern Arizona and New Mexico from Mexico. And so, the borderline moved again. By the time Bartlett got the news, it had been nearly two years since he and García Conde had made their initial compromise. Now it would have to be redone. The U.S. and Mexico sent out a new survey team. And they replaced Bartlett with another commissioner.

17:49Miguel Levario:The survey was finally finished in October 1855. It ended up taking six years.

17:58Rachel St. John:The finished product was a nearly 2 ,000-mile long line that followed the Rio Grande River, then stretched into the desert until it reached the Colorado River, and continued across land until it reached the Pacific Ocean. In many places, the only sign that it existed was the occasional boundary monument, these short obelisks made of stone.

18:22Miguel Levario:But it was still a border, a line that both nations could begin to define themselves against as they grew and changed.

18:32Rachel St. John:And soon, the land that Bartlett called wild, barren, and worthless would start to fill up. That's coming up.

18:54Miguel Levario:Hi, it's John V. from Dallas, Texas, and I love ThruLine because I love stories. And without further ado, you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

19:10Rachel St. John:Part 2. Good fences make good neighbors.

19:22Rachel St. John:We're at a saloon in southern Arizona, known as The Exchange. There's men, sitting around, drinking and gabbing, just like any old-timey western saloon.

19:36Miguel Levario:The saloon is in a town called Ambos Nogales. Well, actually, it's two towns. Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Mexico. That's why it's called Ambos Nogales. It means both Nogales.

19:49Rachel St. John:And the owner of this saloon, John Brickwood, has purposefully built it right on the border.

19:59Rachel St. John:So he could sell American liquor without any duty on it from inside the bar. And then he had a little box on the outside that was actually in Mexican territory. And so he could sell Mexican cigars from the box without having to pay the duties on them there as well.

20:16Miguel Levario:It's been a few decades since the U.S.-Mexico border was drawn. And in places like Ambos Nogales, it's still pretty theoretical. In the town's early days, you could basically only tell the difference between the Mexican and U.S. sides because the Mexican buildings were made of adobe, while the Americans preferred to build with wood.

20:35Rachel St. John:For most of the 1800s, there wasn't much going on here. The town was mostly railroad workers and the gambling saloons and brothels that served them. They were building a train stop in Ambos Nogales. And the cities really take off when a railroad connects across the U.S.-Mexico border.

20:56Rachel St. John:The railroad was finished in 1882, and it ran right through Amos Nogales. It brought merchants and traders to the town. The ability to move between the U.S. and Mexico was actually a huge economic draw. And I think it's important to recognize that these government agencies and the border towns around them are initially made to support trans-border movement. And things were pretty friendly between Mexico and the U.S. along the border in these early years. They would have parades and celebrations that would bring both sides of the community together. One of the things about Ambas Nogales is lots of buildings and streets are called international.

21:37Rachel St. John:There's a celebration of people being together, Mexicans and Americans, in a shared vision of development. They took pride in their interdependence. A Nogales, Arizona newspaper wrote, We speak of the two towns as one, for they are really such, being divided by imaginary line only. As those towns get more heavily developed, as lots of buildings cluster close to the border, it becomes hard at times, particularly for government agents, but also for regular people, to distinguish between when they're in Mexico and when they're in the United States.

22:17Miguel Levario:One of the only signs that there was a border was a marker outside of Brickwood Saloon.

22:23Rachel St. John:The boundary marker that the surveyors had put in was just a big pile of rocks.

22:29Miguel Levario:And as things got busier in Ambos Nogales, that pile of rocks wasn't quite cutting it.

22:36Rachel St. John:Customs officers start saying, you know, it's impossible for us to police this space. If people can just walk through John Brickwood's saloon and we can't see if they're entering the U.S. or Mexico.

22:48Miguel Levario:So a new survey team came to town to mark the border more clearly. They put a new boundary monument and they build it on the porch. A giant white obelisk, the new boundary marker, smack dab on the porch of the saloon.

23:04Rachel St. John:In a picture taken from that time, it's taller than the men around it. And it was just the first step towards something much larger.

23:13Miguel Levario:In 1897, then-U.S. President William McKinley issued a proclamation to clear a strip of land 60 feet wide and two miles long, right through ambos Nogales.

23:25Rachel St. John:They say, you know, in order to make clear where Mexican space stops and where American space begins, we need to move some of these buildings out of the way. We can't just have buildings right up and onto the border. John Brickwood's saloon and a slew of homes, businesses, and barns were given 90 days to vacate.

23:45Miguel Levario:They knocked it all down, and the saloon was no more. In its place was a clear strip of land.

23:58Miguel Levario:Still, in ambos Nogales and all along the border, there weren't many fences. The ones that were there were actually built to control the movement of cows, not people. But that was about to change.

24:14Miguel Levario:The Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910.

24:18Rachel St. John:Border towns became particularly important because they had ports of entry where people pay their customs duties. So if someone can take over a border town, they can take that money. Different Mexican revolutionary factions would raid American towns along the border. And as Mexico became increasingly unstable, more Mexicans started emigrating to the U.S. Violence along the border increased. And then, in the middle of the Mexican Revolution, World War I began. That brought a whole new set of anxieties.

24:53Miguel Levario:The U.S. feared that German spies could infiltrate through the border. All of a sudden, people who had long been neighbors were suspicious of each other.

25:02Rachel St. John:The U.S. started to send all kinds of people to the border to address these different threats. The U.S. government deploys the military to the border to protect people on the U.S. side. You also have, you know, intelligence officers operating on the border looking out for spies. More customs agents coming out trying to watch for smuggling of guns and money. And then you have immigration officials who are trying to manage the flow of refugees.

25:34Miguel Levario:Those big changes on the border were coming to ambos Nogales, too. The mayor of Nogales, Mexico, ordered construction of a wire fence on the Mexican side to make it easier to manage the flow of crossings. But ambos Nogales had already become a powder keg. And on August 27, 1918, the fuse was lit. You might hear different versions of this story depending on who you ask. But any way you tell it, the story ends in violence.

26:06Miguel Levario:It was just after 4 o 'clock in the afternoon. A Mexican carpenter named Zeferino Gil la Madrid was leaving the U.S. after finishing work. He was carrying a bulky package under his arm as he approached Mexico.

26:22Rachel St. John:He was ordered to halt by American officials.

26:25Miguel Levario:They wanted to inspect the package. Mexican officials told him he should keep coming. The U.S. customs official raised his rifle to force Gila Madrid to come back for an inspection. What happened next is still disputed today.

26:42Rachel St. John:Someone from either side of the border, it's unclear who, fired the first shot.

26:54Rachel St. John:And violence broke out actually between the two sides of the border. It was chaos.

27:06Rachel St. John:Mexican civilians grabbed guns and joined the fight.

27:27Miguel Levario:It's immortalized in this Mexican song. El Corrido de Nogales tells the Mexican version of the battle.

27:44Miguel Levario:The song goes, when a Mexican crossed the borderline, a gringo fired a shot at him. That was the beginning of the story. The Corrido is all about the bravery of the Nogalenses. It says,

27:57Rachel St. John:There were 1 ,500 gringos.

28:09Miguel Levario:All were federal troops. And the people of Nogales did not let them advance.

28:19Rachel St. John:But things were escalating. At some point, a Mexican consul tried to negotiate with an American soldier. If they both raised a white flag, it could all be over. The American replied, Go to hell. American troops don't carry white flags and don't use them. If the Mexicans don't hoist a white flag within 10 minutes, U.S. soldiers will march in and burn Nogales Sonora. The Mexican side raised a white flag.

28:58Rachel St. John:The battle lasted more than two hours. As many as four Americans and 129 Mexicans were dead, including the mayor of Mexico's Nogales. And hundreds of people were wounded.

29:15Miguel Levario:After the Battle of Amos Nogales, people on both sides expressed regret.

29:19Rachel St. John:The shooting was an unfortunate affair, started by irresponsible persons under undue stress of excitement. But the damage was done. And that leads a lot of government officials along the border to say, we need a fence. We need to be really clear about marking this space.

29:38Miguel Levario:And so, one of the first U.S.-built fences meant to divide people was built through Amos Nogales.

29:47Rachel St. John:Whenever I think about this, I think of the Robert Frost poem, where he talks about how good fences make good neighbors, right? That these fences are built in a very different mindset than the border wall of today. This is not seen as an imposition by the U.S. government on Mexico, but rather a joint effort to better demarcate where Mexican and American space end.

30:23Miguel Levario:The fence wasn't about keeping Mexican people out of the U.S.

30:27Rachel St. John:Mexican people in general are not seen as an immigration problem. No one cared about immigration at all on the U.S.-Mexico border until the very late part of the 19th century.

30:40Miguel Levario:And if people were concerned about who was coming through the southern border, that concern was mostly about Chinese immigrants. Which isn't to say immigration wasn't a big issue in the U.S. It was.

30:53Rachel St. John:In 1924, Congress passed one of the most restrictive immigration laws in its history, setting strict quotas for who can enter the U.S. Congress also established the Border Patrol to control immigration, though it mainly ended up enforcing prohibition.

31:11Miguel Levario:By the mid-1920s, the infrastructure of the border, the fences, the manpower, and the law enforcement, the tools that we use today, were all in place.

31:22Rachel St. John:I walked the border, and I saw example after example of a border that was totally out of control. We have to gain control.

31:33Miguel Levario:That's coming up.

31:41Miguel Levario:This is Rachel from San Diego, California. You're listening to Throughline.nz.

31:52Part 3.

31:53Rachel St. John:The Border is Everywhere I was born and raised on a farm here in El Paso. We grew cotton, alfalfa, stuff like that.

32:06Miguel Levario:This is Silvestre Reyes. He was born in 1944.

32:10Rachel St. John:As a young boy, I was a lookout against the Border Patrol. It was simple, just play on the truck. And when you see the jeeps coming, because we could see the jeeps coming from far away. Because when you first see them, start blowing the horn. And if the Border Patrolman asks you what you're doing, tell them you're playing. I was thoroughly briefed.

32:36Miguel Levario:When Silvestre was a kid, a federal initiative called the Bracero Program gave work visas to Mexicans who came to the U.S. for short-term contracts, mostly in agriculture and on railroads. But some workers still crossed without papers.

32:50Rachel St. John:On the farm, the undocumented ones, they're the ones that would run and hide. The other braceros, they had their ID card, so they were OK. Although I will tell you, sometimes they would run just to be decoys. It was fun times.

33:04Miguel Levario:It was fun. You remember that as a fun memory.

33:06Rachel St. John:Yeah. Oh, yeah. They were trying to catch people that were undocumented. But the only thing they would do is catch them, process them. And then we would see the same guys back a couple of days later. Then, as now, the agricultural economy relied on immigrant labor. The attitude towards Mexican immigration in the 20th century United States is that workers from Mexico are necessary, but that they are not people who necessarily are going to become part of the United States. Because there's a long history of anti-Mexican sentiment within the United States, and it comes up in these different flashpoint moments.

33:47Rachel St. John:Moments like Mexican repatriation during the Great Depression, or Operation Wetback in the 1950s, when the federal government led massive deportation campaigns targeting Mexicans and, at times, U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. But Rachel says even those efforts weren't meant to halt immigration. They're never trying to close the border. They're trying to control the border in such a way that it will allow the seamless entry as much as possible of things that they deem good, valuable, and desirable in the country, and to block as seamlessly as possible those things that they deem bad, that need to be kept out of the country.

34:28Rachel St. John:By the late 1980s and 90s, immigration had become a big political issue.

34:33Miguel Levario:And by that time, Silvestre, who grew up moving back and forth across the border... I used to go with my grandpa to buy groceries in Juarez.

34:41Rachel St. John:had joined the Border Patrol. Oh, I was excited and my family was excited. I remember my grandpa was so proud. I guess it was part of the American story.

34:56Miguel Levario:Silvestre served on the patrol for more than 25 years. He became the first Latino Border Patrol sector chief, serving first in McAllen and then in his hometown of El Paso, Texas.

35:10I attended an all-boys Catholic high school right there in downtown El Paso.

35:15Rachel St. John:So we were maybe a mile, if not less, from the borderline itself. This is Miguel Levario. He wrote Militarizing the Border, When Mexicans Became the Enemy. And he grew up on the outskirts of El Paso, just like Silvestre Reyes had some 40 years before. So we had to drive into downtown El Paso every morning September 20, 1993 started off like any other Monday. Miguel was on his way to school with friends when... My friend who was driving was like, what is going on? And we all look up and we see, you know, the Border Patrol trucks. They were lined up every 100 yards. Like, you know, they were about to face off with somebody.

36:00Rachel St. John:And I remember vividly thinking like, oh my gosh, what is happening? So I briefed every single agent, and I said, when people wake up, they're going to see a wall of Border Patrol vehicles and agents all across this 20-mile area that we want to control. What Miguel saw on his way to school that day was Silvestre Reyes' idea, a big show of Border Patrol strength called Operation Hold the Line. We're going to block people from coming into the country. Sylvesterne saw the border as a problem. At the time, he told reporters in Texas that he was trying to fix the, quote, institutionalized, undocumented entry through the Rio Grande that people had gotten used to for decades.

36:48Rachel St. John:I walked the border and I saw example after example after example of a border that was totally out of control. People congregating, ready to rush into El Paso. So his idea was simple. The border patrol would become a wall. We have to gain control. I put the agents right on the border, where I didn't care if they apprehended anybody, as long as they deterred them from crossing. Silvestre deployed 400 agents and their trucks and lined them up on the border over a stretch of 20 miles. They planned to stay out there, day and night. And that's what Miguel saw. I'll be honest with you, as a 16, 17-year-old kid or even younger, we didn't really get, like, what was the whole point.

37:40Rachel St. John:Now the maids can't get back. The gardeners and the riffraff can't cross. And that was the point, was to be intimidating, was to be a deterrent.

37:54Miguel Levario:The way Sylvester saw it, too many people were crossing back and forth. without papers and with no regard to the official ports of entry. So he ordered the Border Patrol agents under his command to not back down. People are in uncharted territory. The line held for a week. There's never been an operation that's been kept in place for a week. People couldn't get to work. There were protests on both sides of the border. Still, the line held. And it would hold indefinitely. Right away, Silvestre Reyes claimed the operation was a victory. All of a sudden, the Border Patrol became heroes. Oh my God, the crime rate in El Paso for stolen cars dropped 98%.

38:46Rachel St. John:That's an exaggeration. And Miguel says it's hard to assess the correlation between crime rates and the border blockade. Of course, as always, historically we've done this, we associate those increases with immigrants.

39:01Miguel Levario:But Sylvester's narrative of success prevailed. It seemed like he'd done what decades of immigration reform had failed to do. Limit the number of immigrants coming in. Money, on the other hand, started pouring in.

39:16Rachel St. John:And the strategy went national. In San Diego, with Operation Gatekeeper, and Arizona, with Operation Safeguard. Over the course of five years, the number of border patrol agents on the southern border more than doubled.

39:32Miguel Levario:In the seven months since hundreds of federal immigration agents were deployed along the banks of the Rio Grande here, the traffic of illegal workers from Mexico has all but stopped. But the flow of politicians to the border here has surged. In the 1990s, the issue of illegal immigration and the need to solve it became a hot political issue. The politicians are prompted by polls showing that the issue is gaining in importance among voters who polls say are increasingly worried about the economic impact of immigrants and their effect on American culture.

40:07Rachel St. John:The country was coming out of a recession. Unemployment remained high. People were on edge, and they wanted change.

40:16Miguel Levario:This was also the era of tough-on-crime policies, the so-called welfare queen. And as the number of legal and unauthorized immigrants coming into the country rose in the 90s, illegal immigrants became another political target.

40:32Rachel St. John:They keep coming. Two million illegal immigrants in California. California's Republican governor, Pete Wilson, who was running for reelection in 1994, made immigration the center of his campaign. And the word he used was illegal immigrant. And he had these commercials at the time where he showed immigrants running through traffic near the border. Governor Pete Wilson sent the National Guard to help the Border Patrol. But that's not all.

41:01Miguel Levario:For Californians who work hard, pay taxes, and obey the laws, I'm suing to force the federal government to control the border.

41:09Rachel St. John:It's associating migrants with the threat of invasion. And part of what played into Wilson's politics around that is that you do see increases in immigration over time across the border, particularly as the Mexican economy is destabilized in the 1970s and 1980s. That category of the illegal alien gets increasingly attached to Mexican people in a way that then the government can evoke at different times, either for political reasons or to manage labor. Pete Wilson won his re-election campaign. And other politicians followed suit. Immigration is basically a political ace card.

41:58Miguel Levario:And it wasn't just Republicans. Democrats also took up the issue.

42:04Rachel St. John:From California Senator Dianne Feinstein. The day when America could be the welfare system for Mexico is gone. We simply can't afford it. All the way to President Bill Clinton. Two years ago, when I took office, I was determined to do a better job of dealing with the problem of illegal immigration. The Clinton administration steps in and really embraces a hard border policing model where they really focus on border control. One of the cornerstones of our fight against illegal immigration has been a get tough policy at our borders. They put up a bunch of new barriers. So, you know, infrared cameras and all sorts of high tech stuff.

42:49It's sort of, it's the 90s, I think, where we really see that, the birth of that highly militarized border.

43:01Miguel Levario:And the irony here is that Clinton was securing the border at the very same time that he was opening it up. Good morning.

43:10Rachel St. John:This week, at a time when many Americans are hurting from the strains of the tough global economy, Our country chose courageously to compete and not to retreat. With its vote Wednesday night for the North American Free Trade Agreement, the House of Representatives sent a message to the world. Yes, the Cold War is over, but America's leadership for prosperity, security, and freedom continues.

43:34Miguel Levario:NAFTA, or the North American Free Trade Agreement, went into effect in 1994, a year after Operation Hold the Line. And what it did was essentially open up the borders for the flow of goods between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. There was a fair amount of anxiety around this. Is it right to move your jobs to Mexico, where people live in poverty?

43:57Rachel St. John:So right as manufactured goods were starting to flow in like never before across the border, the Clinton administration built some of the first metal border walls. They have these huge metal walls that go up outside Tijuana. and showing that in a very public way was a way to balance out the increased movement that was going to be going across the borders with NAFTA. One part of the San Diego wall was built on Imperial Beach and now extends some 300 feet into the ocean. The idea that we close off El Paso in San Diego, it would force migrants to consider entering through the Sonoran Desert, one of the harshest environmental landscapes in all of North America.

44:44Rachel St. John:And they thought they're not going to do it. It's too harsh. It's too difficult. And they won't do it. What we learned is that desperate people will do desperate things. And we learned that people did do it.

44:59Miguel Levario:What do you say to people that say all it does is it pushes migrants to areas outside of ports of entry to deadlier parts of the desert, that it doesn't really stop undocumented migration into this country, right? Like, it's not effective in that way. What do you say to that?

45:18Rachel St. John:Well, it depends what you think we were trying to prove.

45:24Miguel Levario:Well, what were you trying to prove? You were there. You were the head of it. Well, that the border can be managed.

45:33Rachel St. John:The border can be managed. People can be re-educated to understand that we no longer can tolerate that.

45:48Miguel Levario:Silvestre eventually became a Democratic congressman. And in the 30-plus years since Operation Hold the Line, politicians of both parties have continued to support aggressive border policies.

46:01Rachel St. John:Today, there are over 700 miles of border wall. Why is this space that is so peripheral, by definition is the periphery of the nation, why is it so important in American politics? It's a place where you can really see how government works, what government priorities are, how they try to enforce them in different ways, and how local people respond to and navigate that. The Trump administration is actually moving the dynamics of immigration into the country. They're extending this border politics away from the border. I think it remains to be seen whether what has been so politically effective when isolated to a border space, which is a space that most people don't inhabit and will never visit, if that can work on a national scale.

47:02Miguel Levario:This episode is part of our series on how immigration enforcement became political and profitable. Next week. The idea that you can just basically have a detention footprint in every community in America is really, really intriguing.

47:17Rachel St. John:The business of immigrant detention.

47:25Rachel St. John:And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramtin Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and. Sarah Wyman. Amber C. Casey Miner.

47:41Miguel Levario:Julie Kaye.

47:42Rachel St. John:Lawrence Wu.

47:43Miguel Levario:Anya Steinberg. Christina Kim.

47:45Rachel St. John:Devin Kadiyama.

47:46Miguel Levario:Irene Noguchi.

47:47Rachel St. John:Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. It was mixed and mastered by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Naveed Marvi, Cho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani. Thank you to James Delahousie, Allison Silvera, Stephen McNally, Julian Nieveski-Fiat Godoy, and Bruno Ramirez for their voiceover work. El Corrido de Nogales by Robert Lee Benton Jr. and Oscar Gonzalez, is from the recording entitled Heroes and Horses, Corridos from the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands, 2002. It was used by permission, courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

48:34Rachel St. John:Thanks also to Johannes Durgey, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write us at throughlineatnpr.org. and make sure you follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode.

48:54Miguel Levario:Thanks for listening.