THE WINDS OF CHANGE ★^1123Like the publication of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) and Michael
Harrington’s The Other America (1962), the hurricane’s aftermath alerted Amer-
icans to the extent of poverty in the world’s richest country. Generations of
state and local policies pursuing economic growth via low- wage, nonunion
employment and low investment in education, health, and social welfare had
produced a large impoverished population in the South. Nearly 30 percent of
New Orleans’s population lived in poverty.
Battle over the Border
The attacks of September 11 and subsequent war on terror threw into sharp
relief the status of American borders and borderlands, especially in the South-
west. The existence of the borderland embracing parts of the United States and
Mexico, with people enjoying well- developed connections with communities in
both countries, has always been a source of tension and insecurity in the eyes
of many Americans. Fears of terrorists crossing the border merged with older
worries about undocumented immigration and the growth of Hispanic culture
in the Southwest. When the Swedish vodka- maker Absolut posted an advertise-
ment in Mexico showing the pre- 1848 map of Mexico and the United States, the
ad angered enough Americans (who saw it on the Internet) that the company
withdrew it.
The Bush and Obama administrations greatly accelerated efforts to
police the border. By 2013, the number of U.S. Border Patrol officers stood at
20,000, making it the nation’s second largest police force after the New York
City Police Department, and 400,000 undocumented immigrants were being
deported annually, far more than in
the past. Latino communities experi-
enced the southwestern borderlands as
increasingly militarized, since the “bor-
der” stretched far inland and persons
accused of having entered the coun-
try illegally— almost all of them from
Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and
El Salvador—could be apprehended
many miles north of Mexico. None-
theless, some Americans in the region,
claiming that the federal government
was not doing enough to enforce the
border’s status as a dividing line, set up
unofficial militias to police the area.
Ironically, a major result of tighter con-
trols over border crossing was to reduce
In 2015, the artist JR took photographs of immi-
grants and affixed them to the walls of New York
City buildings and to other public places. This
image is of Kamola Akilova, from Uzbekistan.
The purpose, according to the artist, is to take
immigrants out of the shadows and make people
aware of their presence in the city.What events eroded support for President Bush’s policies during his second term?