Abstract
This paper leverages the repressive turn in U.S. migration policy to understand how a cross‐border perspective can illuminate the experiences of two different, but contemporaneous second‐generation populations: Those whose lives have unfurled in the United States, all the while growing up in internationalized families with ongoing homeland ties; and those whose childhoods began in the United States, but were disrupted as part of the ‘Great Expulsion’, and thus migrated to Mexico, albeit often with U.S. citizenship and almost always with cross‐border ties to family members still living in the United States. As the paper demonstrates, looking across borders highlights the importance of the territorial frontier and the continuing power of the national to undermine the forces that produce cross‐border connections.