School of Political Science, Public Affairs, Legal and Security Studies Faculty Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-31-2025
Abstract
With the Trump administration, we witnessed a hardening of border security policy and practices. Trump used his leadership and celebrity to explicitly attack and criminalize “undocumented” migrants with a discourse of threat, danger, invasion, crisis. Policywise, he took steps to further securitize the borderlands. In this paper, we examine how public opinion has differed with regards to the support or opposition to these hard security policies, especially in borderland areas when compared to the overall national population. The aim of this paper is to examine this difference by directing our attention to the Rio Grande Valley (RGV), a borderlands region which does not appear to receive adequate attention when compared to the San Diego or El Paso border regions. Drawing upon a critical political sociology perspective, we analyze how the framing of “undocumented” or “unauthorized” migration as a threat affects public perception and opinion. However, using survey data collected in 2018, we provide suggestive evidence that despite these negative political frames which have been disseminated through the media, the population in the RGV (despite living day-to-day in a “border crisis”) appear to hold more liberal attitudes with regards to immigration and border policies when compared to the national population. This highlights how the narrative of “transboundary crises” is used to justify draconian policies and practices against migrants, despite the lack of a “crisis” on-the-ground.
Recommended Citation
Angulo-Pasel, Carla, Mi-son Kim, and Adrien A. Halliez. "Border Perceptions: Security and Immigration in the South Texas Borderlands." Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences (2025): 07399863251357718. https://doi.org/10.1177/07399863251357718
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences
DOI
10.1177/07399863251357718
Comments
© The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).