Alien Residents uses the history of the obscure “green card commuter status” to rewrite the history of 1960s immigration law, Mexican American political thought, liberal governance, and globalization. It is a socio-legal history of the green card commuter status — an administrative creation devised by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) that allowed foreign nationals to enter the US as “permanent residents” for work on a daily or seasonal basis despite maintaining a permanent domicile in a contiguous foreign territory. Alien Residents shows how the state’s informal governance of the program effectively divided “Mexican commuter aliens” and “Mexican American” labor forces by producing competing, porous, and unstable rights claims while also eroding workers' access to the legal and administrative recourses they needed to defend them. With the advent of the Civil Rights Movement, liberals tried to resolve the entangled problems of Mexican American underemployment, Mexican poverty, and commuter migration by investing in borderland development and promoting tighter immigration controls. I argue that these policies inadvertently enabled agribusiness and borderland developers to evade 1960s racial and economic reforms by transforming commuters into de-facto guest workers and using the promise of cheap labor to entice neoliberal experimentation and private investment to the border, giving way to off-shore factories —maquiladoras. As a socio-legal, labor, and policy history, the project utilizes a wide range of sources, such as confidential state documents, legal cases, gossip, oral histories, economists’ reports, and other materials.