Since 1986 the United States has employed a politics of contradiction in its relations with Mexico. With US encouragement, Mexico joined GATT in that year and embarked on a neoliberal economic project that opened its economy to trade, investments, and exchange, a project that was institutionalized by NAFTA, ratified by the United States, and fully enacted in 1994. Over the same period, however, the US has poured increasing resources into maintaining the illusion of a controlled border that is impervious to the flow of Mexican workers, even as it becomes more permeable with respect to capital, information, goods, commodities, and services. Douglas Massey will document the contradictory policy of growing integration and increasing separation and then trace out the costs of this self-deception for the inhabitants of both countries and the people who move between them.

This lecture is held in anticipation of the 2008-2009 CAS Initiative–Immigration: History and Policy which will bring together scholars in the social sciences, law, computer science, engineering and humanities to explore new approaches to immigration and its controversies.

Hosted by: Department of History, Department of Human and Community Development, Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program

In conjunction with: African American Studies and Research Program, Center for African Studies, Center for Global Studies, Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society, Children and Family Research Center, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Department of Human and Community Development, Department of Geography, Department of Political Science, Department of Sociology, Global Crossroads Living and Learning Community, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Institute of Communications Research, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, Latina/Latino Studies Program, Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security, Program in South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, School of Social Work, Spurlock Museum, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory

WILL-AM580 FOCUS interview with Douglas Massey