Post 9/11, debates about borders, immigration, and belonging have reached a new intensity in the US South. The temporal overlap of growing immigration to the South since the late 1990s and growing nativist sentiment across the US since 9/11 has led southern communities to fuse new regional racial demographics to new national border anxieties. This convergence enables southern political elites to address the changing contours of local communities through recourse to national imperatives of border security, all the while avoiding an explicit language of race in a thoroughly racialized debate. In an analysis of recent political maneuvers in the South, this article examines what happens when debates about nation, community, and borders are relocated to southern spaces heretofore absent in discussions of immigration. It argues that legislative actions against immigrant populations in southern states are virulent and multiscalar border policings in which concerns about the social and cultural boundaries of southern communities, new racial projects across the South, and post-9/11 immigrant anxieties across the US become inseparable. To conclude, it discusses the theoretical insight that this critical assessment of the South's new border projects offers vis-à-vis understandings of, and struggles against, exclusion, racism, and social injustice.

This article calls for the study of new immigrant destinations in a global context. Although the term “new immigrant destinations” has been primarily associated with the U.S., migration scholars of other regions and countries are examining new or emerging immigrant destinations and the implications of immigrant settlement in places that heretofore have had no notable foreign‐born populations. This article argues that expanding the frame of reference for the study of new immigrant destinations provides greater insight into the ways that new geographies of immigrant settlement around the world are re‐shaping dominant understandings of contemporary migration processes.

Questions and practices of race in the US South have historically been unthinkable outside the register of a black-white binary. In recent years, this connection between the South as a region and race as a dualism has been challenged by Latino migration to southern cities and towns. This article reviews the emerging literature on this southern arm of Latino migration, arguing for more attention to its interactions with racial formations and practices in southern communities and the geographic and place contingency of its features across the region. To achieve more critical understandings of these processes, it suggests, future studies must contextualize this migration in relation to studies of both immigrant gateway cities across the USA and the historical geographies of race and ethnicity in southern cities.

This article offers a critical genealogy of the dominant imaginaries through which social reproduction, particularly in relation to capitalist production, has been examined in key feminist literatures since the 1960s. Feminist scholars have long observed that the distinction between production and social reproduction in capitalist societies manifests as an opposition between ‘work’ and ‘home,’ but they have implicitly envisioned and interpreted that opposition in diverse ways that crucially connect with geography. We offer this analysis in order to clarify how different imaginaries embedded in and shaping approaches to social reproduction both illuminate and occlude the social reproduction-production nexus. Although this critical genealogy leaves us better prepared to address conceptual shortcomings within different understandings of this nexus, we still lack an approach that grasps the complex workings of this interface in a moment of rising precarité across the globe.

This article examines immigrants’ and long‐term residents’ intertwining practices of flexible labour and social reproduction in the American South. It analyses neoliberal globalisation's flexible‐labour demands through the body and social reproduction's spatial forms and politics through place, arguing for the centrality of these processes to both recent political shifts in the South and broader theorisations of globalisation and social reproduction. As immigrants and long‐term southern residents grapple with factors from casualised employment to militarised borders, they work to situate themselves in place as community members. The frictions between these processes create political initiatives into which our analysis offers new insight.