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 will demonstrate, 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.3
After the transnational turn:Looking across borders to see the hard face of the nation-state The transnational turn in migration studies is now almost thirty years old. It began with the appearance of a publication that rarely captures much attention: the collected papers of a conference held under the auspices of an organization mainly concerned with the health and physical sciences. That publication promised to provide a « transnational perspective on migration ». In fact, the book's introduction never explained what a transnational perspective on migration might entail, nor how such a perspective might differ from those that then prevailed. Instead the then unknown, later famous organizers of the conference -Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton -highlighted a phenomenon so new and distinctive that it required the novel concept that they introduced, transnationalism. The phenomenon involved a "new kind of migrating population, composed of those whose networks, activities, and patterns of life encompass both their host and home societies (Schiller et al, 1992: 1)." The ethnographic evidence provided in the article pointed to ways in which the migrants were at once oriented towards and yet strangely disconnected from their home societies : in one case, a migrant donated several thousand dollars for a sports complex in his hometown, without however thinking about where the money for staffing or maintenance would come ; in another case, an association donated an ambulance to its hometown -a place so impoverished that it possessed neither a gas station nor a hospital. While those examples did demonstrate the continuing connection between migrants and their places of origin, they also highlighted the anthropologists' preoccupation with the migrants, as opposed to the