Border Crossings: NAFTA, Regulatory Restructuring, and the Politics of Place

Professor Buchanan begins her paper by questioning whether recent economic and political shifts towards notions of "globalization" (e.g., the NAFTA) have failed to consider the politics or economics of change in particular places. Her prime example of a "place" where integration is illogically forced against a background of differentiation is the U.S.-Mexico border region. Through the scope of a "regulatory complex" (a complex of legal, institutional, regulatory, and social orderings), she departs from the common view of the NAFTA as a productive tool of North American integration, and instead views the NAFTA as exacerbating "differences between localities, industries, and labor markets." She argues that the debate over the NAFTA underemphasized its different local, sectoral, and regional impacts. In places such as the US.-Mexico border region, the various forces of labor, capital, and regulation interact in complex ways; the complexities (and realities) of these interactions were perhaps overlooked during the NAFTA debates. The author briefly examines this growing region, focusing primarily on the social and economic aspects of the maquiladora industry, including labor migration into the United States and the potential for increased migration because of the NAFTA. She concludes by arguing for a shift in perspective from the outdated, territorial concept of "borders" to the richer, more complex concept of "borderlands."