Kidnappers in Mexico have changed their business model from retail to wholesale—instead of extorting a handful of rich families, they are targeting thousands of undocumented migrants.

Michel Houellebecq on his controversial new novel, Submission, which imagines France electing its first Muslim president.

How the Border Patrol became America’s most out-of-control law enforcement agency.

Inside the multibillion-dollar business of keeping foreigners out of America.

Javier Flores had hopes of a last-minute change in policy that would allow him to stay in Ohio with his wife and four kids, where he had a good job, a house, paid taxes. It didn’t come.

The story of one of the 74,000 children who come to this country each year alone and undocumented.

Elias Pompa is the lone deputy in one of the poorest counties in Texas. He is also at the center of the U.S. border crisis.

The people who go missing while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, and the people who attempt to identify their remains.

A profile of Nora Sandigo, guardian to hundreds of kids born in America to illegal immigrants.

Why some immigrants can never escape their parents’ battles.

Observations from a divided, strange world.

"But I remember him coming in the border patrol truck every morning. Like they were bringing some famous criminal. Him getting out. Every day it was like it was his first day there. The look on his face, I mean. Creepy. I shouldn’t say that. But I mean. The teasing or bullying, I never took part in all that, but I can say, I know it sounds defensive or you know like apologizing or something for the behavior, but I don’t think it was because of his coming from the other side. That was just the excuse. It was the look on his face. I mean if he didn’t want to join in, then go play in a corner. Okay. Go play by yourself. But to just sit there at the edge of the playground and watch us all like that . . . Never a smile. It sounds like a blame-the-victim sort of, that kind of unfair sort of thing. But you didn’t see his face."

An account of Chinese residents in a future, dystopian city once known as Baltimore; excerpted from Lee's latest novel.

"Maybe Charters can easily forget what it's like out there, but we B-Mors and others in similar settlements should be aware of the possibilities. We shouldn't take for granted the security and comfort of our neighborhoods, we shouldn't think that always leaving our windows open and our doors unlocked means that we're beyond an encroachment. We may believe our gates are insurmountable and that we're armored by routines, but can't we be touched by chance or fate, plucked up like a mouse foraging along his well-worn trail? Before you know it, you're looking down at the last faint print of your claws in the dirt."

An estranged husband recaps his odd marriage to a German woman.

"Back then, though, we weren’t sleeping together. That didn’t happen till later. In order to pretend to be my fiancée, and then my bride, Johanna had to spend time with me, getting to know me. She’s from Bavaria, Johanna is. She had herself a theory that Bavaria is the Texas of Germany. People in Bavaria are more conservative than your normal European leftist. They’re Catholic, if not exactly God-fearing. Plus, they like to wear leather jackets and such. Johanna wanted to know everything about Texas, and I was just the man to teach her. I took her to SXSW, which wasn’t the cattle call it is today. And oh my Lord if Johanna didn’t look good in a pair of bluejeans and cowboy boots."

An examination of the Minutemen movement and death on the border.

In early 2012, the bones of a woman and young boy were found near the Arizona-Mexico border. The author investigates who they were and how they died.

The dangerous work of harvesting your food.

Why three young undocumented activists intentionally got themselves detained.

On the hundreds of corpses that go unindentified every year along the U.S.-Mexico border.

How companies and large temp agencies benefit from—and tacitly collaborate with—an underworld of labor brokers, known as “raiteros,” who charge workers fees, pushing their pay below minimum wage.

As immigration turns red states blue, how can Republicans transform their platform?

A profile of “not just the toughest but the most corrupt and abusive sheriff in America.”

What became of Annie Moore, the first person to arrive on Ellis Island?

Inside a small town revived by an influx of immigrants and then destroyed by a Homeland Security raid.

How Obama’s immigration enforcement policies got away from him.

A portrait of three high school kids in Arizona forced to live on their own after SB 1070.