Recent Books
232 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
create legal work programs in the
United States, and properly sta U.S.
immigration courts.Thomas C. Mann: President Johnson, the
Cold War, and the Restructuring of Latin
American Foreign Policy
BY THOMAS TUNSTALL ALLCOCK.
University Press o Kentucky, 2018, 294 pp.Allcock works hard to rehabilitate the
reputation o Thomas Mann, U.S.
President Lyndon Johnson’s senior adviser
on Latin America. Loyalists o Johnson’s
predecessor, John F. Kennedy, along with
other liberal critics, blamed Mann for
abandoning the idealism o the Alliance
for Progress, Kennedy’s ambitious eco-
nomic and security assistance programs
for Latin America, in favor o supporting
military dictatorships and conservative
business interests. Allcock persuasively
argues that, in fact, Kennedy’s contradic-
tory Cold War security strategies always
preferred pro-U.S. authoritarians over
potentially pro-Soviet leftists. Moreover,
the administration was already shifting
away from its lofty early rhetoric and
unrealistic goals by the time o Kennedy’s
assassination. Nor was Mann an economic
reactionary, as his detractors have
claimed; rather, he adhered to New Deal
beliefs in government spending on
infrastructure projects and public inter-
vention to mitigate market failures. Mann
supported international agreements to
stabilize the price o coee, for example,
and was unafraid to criticize corporate
executives he considered socially irrespon-
sible. A Çuent Spanish speaker with years
o diplomatic experience, Mann also
deserves credit for reducing tensions with
Mexico and Panama by negotiating
bilateral treaties.Sand and Blood: America’s Stealth War on
the Mexico Border
BY JOHN CARLOS FREY. Bold Type
Books, 2019, 256 pp.
In this searing eyewitness report on the
situation at the U.S.-Mexican border,
Frey argues that long-standing U.S.
policies to deter illegal immigration by
building fences, detaining and mistreating
and then deporting immigrants, and
now splitting up families cannot stem
the Çow o desperate people. Harsh
U.S. policies have, however, killed an
unknown number o immigrants, as
people resort to more dangerous routes
and some die in overcrowded detention
facilities. The only winners are the
federal bureaucracies whose budgets and
personnel swell, opportunistic politi-
cians who trac in fear-mongering, and
the defense contractors that supply the
facilities and weaponry. Although the
Trump administration may have
a dopted “zero tolerance” policies, since
the 1980s, the U.S. Congress and
various administrations, including those
o Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack
Obama, have laid the groundwork for
the mistreatment o immigrants through
legislation, executive orders, and anti-
immigrant rhetoric. Housed within the
military-minded Department o
Homeland Security, the 20,000-strong
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
agency, in Frey’s view, has morphed
into an unaccountable, ill-trained
“clandestine police force” running the
world’s largest immigrant detention
system. Frey argues that instead o
locking immigrants up, the United States
should promote economic development in
the countries from which they come,