Preface

You have to burn some shoe rubber to get the story. That was the axiom drilled into me as a cub reporter for The Associated Press, some time ago now. Only so much can be learned through the telephone, my senior colleagues advised. To tell the story right, you need to be able to take in the look, the feel, and even the smell of a place. You need to observe your subjects in their own surroundings, try to develop a genuine sense of where and how they live their lives. Something similar is true, I am increasingly coming to believe, of the political theorist’s work. A theory argument, especially if it has clear policy implications, can benefit enormously from engagement with salient actors in their own contexts, offering their own justifications for action, and their own insights on possibilities for change.

When I began this book, I was already several years distant from filing my last story on the AP wire. I had completed the transition from reporter to academic, fulfilling a long-held ambition to be able to delve more deeply into arguments and issues, and to develop my own positions on them. I knew precious little at first about the immigration context that figures so centrally in this work. I quickly became frustrated with trying to think through the issues arising, especially around unauthorized immigration, using what I could glean from theoretical treatments, news, and non-fiction accounts. So, I began to accompany colleagues’ classes on experiential learning trips to the border between the US state of Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora. I was exposed with their students to ground-level views of border economics, deprivation, and the reasons behind mass unauthorized entry. I began to meet some of the activists who had for decades been bringing issues of social justice from the borderlands to national and global audiences.