WHILE DONALD TRUMP WAS EXTREMELY LITERAL in his ideas about the U.S. border, his administration was far less so, setting up numerous legal and administrative barriers to documented and undocumented immigrants alike. President Biden has halted work on Trump’s wall, but has left much of the prior administration’s border regime in place. Join writer JOHN WASHINGTON and Professors SUZY LEE (SUNY Binghampton) and JUSTIN AKERS CHACÓN (San Diego City College) as they bring together academic, journalistic, and activist perspectives to discuss migration at the US-Mexico border and beyond. How is US border policy evolving in the Biden era and how does it affect ordinary people? Is there such thing as a just or humane border regime, both at the southern border and more broadly? What is the case for open or no borders, and what might such a world look like? Weaving together the concrete realities of the current moment with wider considerations about the nature of borders and restrictions on movement, this panel will look both at the world we have now and the one we should be trying to build. Moderated by Mitchell Center Graduate Fellow MIKE GODAMSKI.

JOHN WASHINGTON is a journalist and author of The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexican Border and Beyond (2020). SUZY LEE is Assistant Professor of Human Development and Director of the Human Rights Program, SUNY Binghampton; she is on the editorial board of Catalyst. JUSTIN AKERS CHACÓN is Professor of Chicana/o History at San Diego City College and author of The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border (2021) and No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border (2006, with Mike Davis).