The expansive understanding of borders and boundaries in recent scholarship has enriched border studies, but it has also obscured what a border is. This set of interventions is motivated by a need for a more sophisticated conceptualization of borders in light of the recent trajectories of border scholarship. In contrast to the much-feted "borderless world" of the early 1990s, the trend during the past decade has been to consider the exercise of state sovereignty at great distances from the border line itself as "bordering". Indeed, Balibar's (1998) notion that "borders are everywhere"-that the sovereign state's loci of bordering practices can no longer be isolated to the lines of a political map of states-has gained tremendous currency but it is also quite a departure from traditional border studies. Thus the broad question posed to our contributors was: Where is the border in border studies?

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As contemporary international migrants forge new webs of connection and social fields between distant places, transnational scholarship seeks to understand and theorize these emerging spaces. Our account of the Salvadoran transnational social field centered in northern New Jersey contributes to the development of transnational theory by considering how a particular legal provision-temporary protective status (TPS)-permeates daily life. We argue that material and nonmaterial aspects of daily life become associated with an experience of space-time relations to which we refer as permanent temporariness. Permanent temporariness limits the geographic, economic, social, and political ambitions of Salvadorans, but is increasingly resisted through acts of strategic visibility. Our article reflects on the implications of permanent temporariness for the production of scale in the particular transnational field we study, and on links to broader discussions about transnationalism, the international political economy of migration, and capitalist restructuring. To represent the experiences of Salvadorans, we use a transnational mixed-methods approach to pool quantitative and qualitative data that were collected serially at multiple sites.