Why and how has the United States developed and sustained a border-spanning system to regulate the movement of migrants, one that recruits Mexico as a partner state and deploys U.S. actors and technologies throughout Mexican territory (not only along the shared border) to intervene in the movement of people before individuals reach U.S. territory? In contrast to explanations of U.S. immigration policymaking that center on institutional constraints, electoral incentives, or interest group pressures on legislators or presidents, this book shifts the scope of analysis from the electoral politics of immigration policy to the bureaucratic and beyond-the-border politics of immigration policy.

Externalization is at once a vision of border management, a set of administrative processes carried out by bureaucracies working transnationally, and a bundle of cross-border regulatory programs intended to intervene in the movement of people. Externalization is not a single policy, nor are interstate cooperation agreements on migration control codified in treaties. Rather, states often create informal, flexible agreements that are sometimes deliberately kept out of the public realm. Given the challenging data environment, this book draws on analyses of interviews with U.S. and Mexican government officials and interest groups, archival materials, and observations of interactions among them.

Exporting Borders examines the strategic engagement between the United States and Mexico and the strategies the United States employs to secure Mexico’s active yet subordinate cooperation in regulation. However, U.S.-Mexico cooperation on migration and border management cannot be understood without analyzing the United States’ outsized influence in the Western Hemisphere. This book documents the United States’ imperial intrusions into Mexico.

Exporting Borders also pries open the executive bureaucracy by documenting the actors, incentives, capacities, and opportunities that drive externalization. Ultimately, Exporting Borders reveals that the U.S. immigration bureaucracy is not only an implementation body operating within the domestic United States but also a political institution composed of politically capable actors who advocate for, set agendas, and make policy that drive the externalization of U.S. borders.