Book Selections

As debate about immigration policy rages from small towns to state capitals, from coffee shops to Congress, would-be immigrants are dying in the desert along the US-Mexico border. Beginning in the 1990s, the US government effectively sealed off the most common border crossing routes. This had the unintended effect of forcing desperate people to seek new paths across open desert. At least 4,000 of them died between 1995 and 2009. While some Americans thought the dead had gotten what they deserved, other Americans organized humanitarian aid groups. A Common Humanity examines some of the most active aid organizations in Tucson, Arizona, which has become a hotbed of advocacy on behalf of undocumented immigrants. This is the first book to examine immigrant aid groups from the inside. Author Lane Van Ham spent more than three years observing the groups and many hours in discussions and interviews. He is particularly interested in how immigrant advocates both uphold the legitimacy of the United States and maintain a broader view of its social responsibilities. By advocating for immigrants regardless of their documentation status, he suggests, advocates navigate the conflicting pulls of their own nation-state citizenship and broader obligations to their neighbors in a globalizing world. And although the advocacy organizations are not overtly religious, Van Ham finds that they do employ religious symbolism as part of their public rhetoric, arguing that immigrants are entitled to humane treatment based on universal human values. Beautifully written and immensely engaging, A Common Humanity adds a valuable human dimension to the immigration debate.

"Two New York Times Washington correspondents provide an inside account with never-before-told stories of the defining issue of Donald Trump's presidency: his steadfast opposition to immigration to the US. Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear have covered the Trump administration from its earliest days. In Border Wars, they take readers inside the White House to document how Trump and his allies blocked asylum-seekers and refugees, separated families, threatened deportation and sought to erode the longstanding bipartisan consensus that immigration and immigrants make positive contributions to America. Border Wars identifies the players behind Trump's anti-immigration policies, showing how they planned, stumbled, and fought their way toward major immigration changes that have further polarized the nation. This definitive, behind-the-scenes account is filled with previously unreported stories that reveal how Trump's decision-making is driven by gut instinct and marked by disorganization, paranoia, and a constantly feuding staff"--

Because of restrictive borders, human beings suffer and die. Closed borders force migrants seeking safety and dignity to journey across seas, trudge through deserts, and clamber over barbed wire. In the last five years alone, over 60,000 people have died or gone missing while attempting to cross a border. As we deny, cast out, and crack down, we have stripped borders of their potential--as lines of contact, catalyst, and blend--turning our thresholds into barricades. Brilliant and provocative, The Case for Open Borders deflates the mythology of national security through border lockdowns by revisiting their historical origins; it counters the conspiracies of immigration's economic consequences; it urgently considers the challenges of climate change beyond the boundaries of narrow national identities. This book grounds its argument in the experiences and thinking of those on the frontlines of the crisis, spanning the world to do so. In each chapter, John Washington profiles a character impacted by borders. He adds to those portraits provocative analyses of the economics and ethics of bordering, concluding that if we are to seek justice or sustainability we must fight for open borders. In recent years, important thinkers have begun to urge a different approach to migration, but no book has made the argument as accessible or as compelling. Washington's case shines with the voices of people on the move, a portrait of what a world with open borders will give to our common future.

A damning portrait of the U.S.-Mexico border, where militaristic fantasies are unleashed, violent technologies are tested, and immigrants are targeted. Over the past three decades, U.S. immigration and border security policies have turned the southern states into conflict zones, spawned a network of immigrant detention centers, and unleashed an army of ICE agents into cities across the country. As award-winning journalist John Carlos Frey reveals in this groundbreaking book, the war against immigrants has been escalating for decades, fueled by defense contractors and lobbyists seeking profits and politicians--Republicans and Democrats alike--who relied on racist fear-mongering to turn out votes. After 9/11, while Americans' attention was trained on the Middle East and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the War on Terror was ramping up on our own soil--aimed not at terrorists but at economic migrants, refugees, and families from South and Central America seeking jobs, safety, and freedom in the U.S. But we are no safer. Instead, families are being ripped apart, undocumented people are living in fear, and thousands of migrants have died in detention or crossing the border. Taking readers to the Border Patrol outposts, unmarked graves, detention centers, and halls of power, Sand and Blood is a frightening, essential story we must not ignore.

The instant New York Times bestseller, "A must-read for anyone who thinks 'build a wall' is the answer to anything." --Esquire For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Driven to understand the hard realities of the landscape he loves, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Plagued by a growing awareness of his complicity in a dehumanizing enterprise, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the full extent of the violence it wreaks, on both sides of the line.

"An anthology of writing by Mexican journalists, historians, novelists, and artists on the immigration crisis in the United States"--;Despite the extensive coverage in the U.S. media of the southern border and Donald Trump's proposed wall, most English speakers have had little access to the multitude of perspectives from Mexico on the ongoing crisis. Boullosa and Quintero redress this imbalance with this collection of essays, translated into English for the first time, drawing on writing by journalists, novelists, and documentary-makers who are Mexican or based in Mexico. They discuss important questions, including the history of U.S.-Mexican relations, and questions of sovereignty, citizenship, and borders. -- adapted from jacket

"Fencing in Democracy is an ethnography examining groups that are usually left out of national discussions about the border wall: the communities living right on the border. Drawing on extensive primary research, the authors argue that a variety of factors, including media narratives, complex political maneuvering, and purposefully marginalizing discourse, have placed border communities in a state of necrocitizenship - a set of citizenship practices produced in response to exclusionary regimes that emphasize death. Throughout the book they show necrocitizenship as operating on three levels; the increasing militarization of border regions, the building of walls along international boundaries, and the privileging of the patriotic subject, one who is willing to die for one's country"--

"The twenty-first century has been an era of hardening borders--increased borderland patrols, surveillance and militarization are widening the chasm between those who can vacation (or do business) where they please, and others whose movements are restricted by armed guards. But as journalist Todd Miller finds in Empire of Borders, the US border is also becoming increasingly fluid, expanding thousands of miles outside of US territory often to protect Washington's interests. In places like Argentina, Kosovo, Honduras, Jordan and Afghanistan, US border patrol works alongside local agents to block migrants, terrorists, drug runners and smugglers from ever approaching the US. Empire of Borders traces the rise of this border regime, along with practices of "extreme vetting" and the vast global industry for border and homeland security. But in visiting the Jordan/Syria border, as well as Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Kenya, Palestine, Mexico and the Philippines, Miller finds instead a global war against the poor"--

The border region of the Sonoran Desert, which spans southern Arizona in the United States and northern Sonora, Mexico, has attracted national and international attention. But what is less discussed in national discourses is the impact of current border policies on the Native peoples of the region. There are twenty-six tribal nations recognized by the U.S. federal government in the southern border region and approximately eight groups of Indigenous peoples in the United States with historical ties to Mexico--the Yaqui, the O'odham, the Cocopah, the Kumeyaay, the Pai, the Apaches, the Tiwa (Tigua), and the Kickapoo. Divided Peoples addresses the impact border policies have on traditional lands and the peoples who live there--whether environmental degradation, border patrol harassment, or the disruption of traditional ceremonies. Anthropologist Christina Leza shows how such policies affect the traditional cultural survival of Indigenous peoples along the border. The author examines local interpretations and uses of international rights tools by Native activists, counterdiscourse on the U.S.-Mexico border, and challenges faced by Indigenous border activists when communicating their issues to a broader public. Through ethnographic research with grassroots Indigenous activists in the region, the author reveals several layers of division--the division of Indigenous peoples by the physical U.S.-Mexico border, the divisions that exist between Indigenous perspectives and mainstream U.S. perspectives regarding the border, and the traditionalist/nontraditionalist split among Indigenous nations within the United States. Divided Peoples asks us to consider the possibilities for challenging settler colonialism both in sociopolitical movements and in scholarship about Indigenous peoples and lands.

"In personal stories from twenty years of activism and reporting, an award-winning journalist calls on readers to imagine a world without borders. Every year an untold number of people perish attempting to cross the border into the United States. Thousands of families who do make it across are apprehended and separated, often with children languishing in cages. In light of the harm it unleashes, does our increasingly militarized border policy make anyone more secure? To answer that question, Todd Miller draws upon over twenty years of work investigating international borders. In a series of anecdotes, he relates his encounters with U.S. Border Patrol agents, deportees, migrants, human-rights activists, and scholars, taking readers on a journey from the deserts of the Southwest, to the mountains of Chiapas and Guatemala, and to border zones across the globe. Through the lens of his stories and personal reflections, Miller tackles big questions in clear and inviting prose, encouraging us to honestly reckon with our own beliefs about how best to meet the critical challenges of a world in migration. This pocket-sized, easy-to-read edition is a must-have for all those who hope that a better world is possible. In a clarion call to our collective humanity, Todd Miller makes a case for tearing down barriers-both at the borders and in our own minds-as the necessary first step to achieving security by building bridges, not walls"--

"Today the United States is home to more unauthorized immigrants than at any time in the country's history. As scrutiny around immigration has intensified, border enforcement has tightened. The result is a population of new Americans who are more entrenched than ever before. Crossing harsher, less porous borders makes entry to the US a permanent, costly enterprise. And the challenges don't end once they're here. In The Border Within, journalist Kalee Thompson and economist Tara Watson examine the costs and ends of America's immigration-enforcement complex, particularly its practices of internal enforcement: the policies and agencies, including ICE, aimed at removing unauthorized immigrants living in the US. Thompson and Watson's economic appraisal of immigration's costs and benefits is interlaid with first-person reporting of families who personify America's policies in a time of scapegoating and fear. The result is at once enlightening and devastating. Thomspon and Watson examine immigration's impact on every aspect of American life, from the labor force to social welfare programs to tax revenue. The results paint an overwhelmingly positive picture of what non-native Americans bring to the country, including immigration's tendency to elevate the wages and skills of those who are native born. Their research also finds a stark gap between the realities of America's immigrant population and the policies meant to uproot them: America's internal enforcements are grounded in shock and awe more than any reality of where and how immigrants live. The objective, it seems, is to deploy "chilling effects" -- performative displays aimed at producing upstream effects on economic behaviors and decision-making among immigrants. The ramifications of these fear-based policies extends beyond immigrants themselves; they have impacts on American citizens living in immigrant families as well as on the broader society"--

"In his scathing and deeply reported examination of the U.S. Border Patrol, Todd Miller argues that the agency has gone rogue since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, trampling on the dignity and rights of the undocumented with military-style tactics ... Miller's book arrives at a moment when it appears that part of the Homeland Security apparatus is backpedaling by promising to tone down its tactics, maybe prodded by investigative journalism, maybe by the revelations of NSA leaker Edward Snowden ...Border Patrol is quite possibly the right book at the right time ... "--Tony Perry,Los Angeles Times "At the start of his unsettling and important new book,Border Patrol Nation, Miller observes that these days 'it is common to see the Border Patrol in places--such as Erie, Pennsylvania; Rochester, New York; or Forks, Washington--where only fifteen years ago it would have seemed far-fetched, if not unfathomable.'"--Barbara Spindel,Christian Science Monitor "Miller's approach inBorder Patrol Nation is to offer a glimpse into the secretive operations of the Border Patrol, reporting with a journalist's objectivity and nose for a good story. Miller's book is full of facts, and it's clear he's outraged, but he gives voices to people on every side of the issue ... Miller's book is a fascinating read ... and bring the work of Susan Orlean to mind."--Amanda Eyre Ward,Kirkus Reviews "Todd Miller's invaluable and gripping book,Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security is the story of how this country's borders are being transformed into up-armored, heavily militarized zones run by a border-industrial complex. It's an achievement and an eye opener."--Tom Engelhardt,TomDispatch "What Jeremy Scahill was to Blackwater, Todd Miller is to the U.S. Border Patrol!"--Tom Miller, author,On the Border: Portraits of America's Southwestern Frontier "Todd Miller has entered a secret world, and he has gone deep ... Powerful."--Luis Alberto Urrea, author ofThe Devil's Highway: A True Story "Journalist Miller tells an alarming story of U.S. Border Patrol and Homeland Security's ever-widening reach into the lives of American citizens and legal immigrants as well as the undocumented. In addition to readers interested in immigration issues, those concerned about the NSA's privacy violations will likely be even more shocked by the actions of Homeland Security."--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review Armed authorities watch from a military-grade surveillance tower as lines of people stream toward the security checkpoint, tickets in hand, anxious and excited to get through the gate. Few seem to notice or care that the US Border Patrol is monitoring the Super Bowl, as they have for years, one of the many ways that forces created to police the borders are now being used, in an increasingly militarized fashion, to survey and monitor the whole of American society. In fast-paced prose, Todd Miller sounds an alarm as he chronicles the changing landscape. Traveling the country--and beyond--to speak with the people most involved with and impacted by the Border Patrol, he combines these first-hand encounters with careful research to expose a vast and booming industry for high-end technology, weapons, surveillance, and prisons. While politicians and corporations reap substantial profits, the experiences of millions of men, women, and children pointto staggering humanitarian consequences.Border Patrol Nation shows us in stark relief how the entire country has become a militarized border zone, with consequences that affect us all. Todd Miller has worked on and written about US border issues for over fifteen years.

Winner, Abbott Lowell Cummings Award, Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2020 From the boundary surveys of the 1850s to the ever-expanding fences and highway networks of the twenty-first century, Border Land, Border Water examines the history of the construction projects that have shaped the region where the United States and Mexico meet. Tracing the accretion of ports of entry, boundary markers, transportation networks, fences and barriers, surveillance infrastructure, and dams and other river engineering projects, C. J. Alvarez advances a broad chronological narrative that captures the full life cycle of border building. He explains how initial groundbreaking in the nineteenth century transitioned to unbridled faith in the capacity to control the movement of people, goods, and water through the use of physical structures. By the 1960s, however, the built environment of the border began to display increasingly obvious systemic flaws. More often than not, Alvarez shows, federal agencies in both countries responded with more construction--"compensatory building" designed to mitigate unsustainable policies relating to immigration, black markets, and the natural world. Border Land, Border Water reframes our understanding of how the border has come to look and function as it does and is essential to current debates about the future of the US-Mexico divide.

"This volume offers a critical investigation of the risk and the physical toll of migration along the U.S. southern border"--

"An esteemed journalist delivers a compelling on-the-ground account of the construction of President Trump's border wall in San Diego-and the impact on the lives of local residents. In August of 2019, Donald Trump finished building his border wall-at least a portion of it. In San Diego, the Army Corps of engineers completed two years of construction on a 14-mile steel beamed barrier that extends eighteen-feet high and cost a staggering $147 million. As one border patrol agent told reporters visiting the site, "It was funded and approved and it was built under his administration. It is Trump's wall." 14 Miles is a definitive account of all the dramatic construction, showing readers what it feels like to stand on both sides of the border looking up at the imposing and controversial barrier. After the Department of Homeland Security announced an open call for wall prototypes in 2017, DW Gibson, an award-winning journalist and Southern California native, began visiting the construction site and watching as the prototype samples were erected. Gibson spent those two years closely observing the work and interviewing local residents to understand how it was impacting them. These include April McKee, a border patrol agent leading a recruiting program that trains teenagers to work as agents; Jeff Schwilk, a retired Marine who organizes pro-wall rallies as head of the group San Diegans for Secure Borders; Roque De La Fuente, an eccentric millionaire developer who uses the construction as a promotional opportunity; and Civile Ephedouard, a Haitian refugee who spent two years migrating through Central America to the United States and anxiously awaits the results of his asylum case. Fascinating, propulsive, and incredibly timely, 14 Miles is an important work that explains not only how the wall has reshaped our landscape and countless lives but also how its shadow looms over our very identity as a nation"--

From a storefront law office in the US border city of El Paso, Texas, one man set out to tear down the great wall of indifference raised between the US and Mexico. Carlos Spector has filed hundreds of political asylum cases on behalf of human rights defenders, journalists, and political dissidents. Though his legal activism has only inched the process forward -- 98 percent of refugees from Mexico are still denied asylum -- his myriad legal cases and the resultant media fallout has increasingly put US immigration policy, the corrupt state of Mexico, and the political basis of immigration, asylum, and deportation decisions on the spot. We Built the Wall is an immersive, engrossing look at the new front in the immigration wars. It follows the gripping stories of people like Saul Reyes, forced to flee his home after a drug cartel murdered several members of his family, and Delmy Calderon, a forty-two-year-old woman leading an eight-woman hunger strike in an El Paso detention center. Truax tracks the heart-wrenching trials of refugees like Yamil, the husband and father who chose a prison cell over deportation to Mexico, and Rocio Hernandez, a nineteen-year-old who spent nearly her entire life in Texas and is now forced to live in a city where narcotraffickers operate with absolute impunity.

This collection focuses broadly on the role of law in the construction of U.S. borders and takes up an important question raised by the global turn in American studies scholarship: once territory becomes less critical to scholarship in the discipline, what constitutes the frame of American studies? For this project, a "border" is not simply a territorial boundary. Borders are created through formal legal controls on entry and exit, through the construction of rights of citizenship and noncitizenship, and through the regulation of American power in other parts of the world. Where legal rights are at issue, borders and territory continue to play a powerful role, especially as certain spaces, such as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are marked by the U.S. government as outside legal restraints on government power. Yet the law also extends the United States beyond its literal borders, through, for example, efforts to export democracy to the Middle East. This is the first collection to map the intersection of law and American studies, and it captures the excitement of interdisciplinary work at this intersection.

"Rivermouth is a polemic arguing for porous borders, a decriminalization of immigration, a more open sense of what we owe one another, and a willingness to extend radical empathy"--;In this powerful and deeply felt memoir of translation, storytelling, and borders, Alejandra Oliva, a Mexican-American translator and immigrant justice activist, offers a powerful chronical of her experience interpreting at the US-Mexico border. Having worked with asylum seekers since 2016, she knows all too well the gravity of taking someone's trauma and delivering it to the warped demands of the U.S. immigration system. As Oliva's stunning prose recounts the stories of the people she's met through her work, she also traces her family's long and fluid relationship to the border--each generation born on opposite sides of the Rio Grande.

"Over two million of the nation's eleven million undocumented immigrants have lived in the United States since childhood. Due to a broken immigration system, they grow up to uncertain futures. In Lives in Limbo, Roberto G. Gonzales introduces us to two groups: the college-goers, like Ricardo, whose good grades and strong network of community support propelled him into higher education, only to land in a factory job a few years after graduation, and the early-exiters, like Gabriel, who failed to make meaningful connections in high school and started navigating dead-end jobs, immigration checkpoints, and a world narrowly circumscribed by legal limitations. This ethnography asks why highly educated undocumented youth ultimately share similar work and life outcomes with their less-educated peers, even as higher education is touted as the path to integration and success in America. Gonzales bookends his study with discussions of how the prospect of immigration reform, especially the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, could impact the lives of these young Americans"--Provided by publisher

Finalist, 2020 C. Wright Mills Award, given by the Society for the Study of Social Problems Honorable Mention, 2021 Asian America Section Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association An inspiring look inside immigrant youth's political activism in perilous times Undocumented immigrants in the United States who engage in social activism do so at great risk: the threat of deportation. In Organizing While Undocumented, Kevin Escudero shows why and how--despite this risk--many of them bravely continue to fight on the front lines for their rights. Drawing on more than five years of research, including interviews with undocumented youth organizers, Escudero focuses on the movement's epicenters--San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City--to explain the impressive political success of the undocumented immigrant community. He shows how their identities as undocumented immigrants, but also as queer individuals, people of color, and women, connect their efforts to broader social justice struggles today. A timely, worthwhile read, Organizing While Undocumented gives us a look at inspiring triumphs, as well as the inevitable perils, of political activism in precarious times.

Some 16.6 million people nationwide live in mixed-status families, containing a combination of U.S. citizens, residents, and undocumented immigrants. U.S. immigration governance has become an almost daily news headline. Yet even in the absence of federal immigration reform over the last twenty years, existing policies and practices have already been profoundly impacting these family units. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in San Diego over more than a decade, Border Brokers documents the continuing deleterious effects of U.S. immigration policies and enforcement practices on a group of now young adults and their families. In the first book-length longitudinal study of mixed-status families, Christina M. Getrich provides an on-the-ground portrayal of these young adults' lives from their own perspectives and in their own words. More importantly, Getrich identifies how these individuals have developed resiliency and agency beginning in their teens to improve circumstances for immigrant communities. Despite the significant constraints their families face, these children have emerged into adulthood as grounded and skilled brokers who effectively use their local knowledge bases, life skills honed in their families, and transborder competencies. Refuting the notion of their failure to assimilate, she highlights the mature, engaged citizenship they model as they transition to adulthood to be perhaps their most enduring contribution to creating a better U.S. society. An accessible ethnography rooted in the everyday, this book portrays the complexity of life in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. It offers important insights for anthropologists, educators, policy-makers, and activists working on immigration and social justice issues.

"This manuscript asks how young people in the Latino diaspora experience and transform citizenship, examining how their participation in transnational social fields shape civic identities and sense of belonging across national and cultural communities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the United States, El Salvador, and Madrid, the book engages young peoples' border crossings--figurative, national, and cultural--as a central object of inquiry. As the authors argue, young people in the diaspora are coming of age in an era of increasing restrictions on national boundaries in contrast to increasingly diasporic identities"--

Dreams and Nightmares takes a critical look at the challenges and dilemmas of immigration policy and practice in the absence of comprehensive immigration reform. The experiences of children and youth provide a prism through which the interwoven dynamics and consequences of immigration policy become apparent. Using a unique sociolegal perspective, authors Zatz and Rodriguez examine the mechanisms by which immigration policies and practices mitigate or exacerbate harm to vulnerable youth. They pay particular attention to prosecutorial discretion, assessing its potential and limitations for resolving issues involving parental detention and deportation, unaccompanied minors, and Dreamers who came to the United States as young children. The book demonstrates how these policies and practices offer a means of prioritizing immigration enforcement in ways that alleviate harm to children, and why they remain controversial and vulnerable to political challenges.

"Traveling across the country, journalist Karla Cornejo Villavicencio risked arrest at every turn to report the extraordinary stories of her fellow undocumented Americans. Her subjects have every reason to be wary around reporters, but Cornejo Villavicencio has unmatched access to their stories. Her work culminates in a stunning, essential read for our times. Born in Ecuador and brought to the United States when she was five years old, Cornejo Villavicencio has lived the American Dream. Raised on her father's deliveryman income, she later became one of the first undocumented students admitted into Harvard. She is now a doctoral candidate at Yale University and has written for The New York Times. She weaves her own story among those of the eleven million undocumented who have been thrust into the national conversation today as never before. Looking well beyond the flashpoints of the border or the activism of the DREAMERS, Cornejo Villavicencio explores the lives of the undocumented as rarely seen in our daily headlines. In New York, we meet the undocumented workers who were recruited in the federally funded Ground Zero cleanup after 9/11. In Miami we enter the hidden botanicas, which offer witchcraft and homeopathy to those whose status blocks them from any other healthcare options. In Flint, Michigan, we witness how many live in fear as the government issues raids at grocery stores and demands identification before offering life-saving clean water. In her book, Undocumented America, Cornejo Villavicencio powerfully reveals the hidden corners of our nation of immigrants. She brings to light remarkable stories of hope and resilience, and through them we come to understand what it truly means to be American"--

"A timely and powerful chronicle of a generation's great civil rights battle as witnessed through the experiences of five young undocumented immigrants fighting to become Americans. We often call them DREAMers: young people who were brought or sent to the United States as children. They attend our local schools; work jobs that contribute to our economy. Some apply to attend university here, only to discover their immigration status when the time comes to fill out the paperwork. Without a clear path forward, and no place to return to, these young people have fought for decades to remain in the one place they call home--a nation increasingly divided over whether they should be allowed to stay. The Making of a Dream begins at the turn of the millennium, as the first of a series of "DREAM Act" proposals is introduced, and follows the efforts of policy makers, advocates, and five very different undocumented immigrant leaders to achieve some legislative reform--or at least some temporary protection. Their coming-of-age-in-America stories of love and loss intersect with the watershed political and economic events of the last two decades, including the Obama administration's landmark Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) order in 2012, and the abrupt announcement by President Trump of his plan to end it, throwing into turmoil the lives of nearly 800,000 immigrants and their families. The Making of a Dream charts the course of a social movement, with all its failures and successes, and allows us an intimate, very human view of the complexity of immigration in America. Heartbreaking and hopeful, maddening and uplifting, this ode to the legacy of the DREAM Act is a record of our times--and the definitive story of the young people of our nation who want nothing more than to be a part of it."--Jacket.

In June 2012 President Obama signed an executive order establishing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The President acted because the U.S. Congress had repeatedly failed to pass the "Dream Act" -- legislation protecting from deportation young undocumented immigrants who had been brought to the United States as children. USCIS received more than 740,000 requests from "Dreamers" applying for protection under the President's program through September 2014. Those who were approved received short-term relief from deportation, not permanent legal status. This volume is a scholarly attempt to address the question of why some age-eligible immigrants have applied for DACA status while many more -- nearly two-thirds of those estimated to be potentially eligible -- have not. The study devotes special attention to the geography of DACA -- how place of residence influences the likelihood of participation-- and the role of social networks in transmitting knowledge about the program. Qualitative interviews illuminate life after receiving DACA status. The interviewees report that DACA status has positively transformed their lives, especially in terms of educational and economic advancement. However, as a consequence of their tentative legal status, they continue to face significant limits and obstacles to full incorporation into the United States. They are eager to translate their three-year deferral of deportation into legal permanent residency, but Congress has not provided a path for doing so, and Obama's executive action can be reversed by a future President. The authors draw upon five different types of data collected for the study, including a large-scale, on-line survey of undocumented millennials; a national-level dataset on DACA applicants; survey interviews with residents of a high-emigration community in Oaxaca, Mexico and a random sample of Mexican-born persons now living in San ^Diego County; and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with undocumented youths in San Diego County who had applied for DACA. They propose fourteen policy recommendations, for increasing future participation in the DACA program and for enhancing the economic, social, and psychological integration of those who benefit from it.

The first comprehensive history of the DREAM Act and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) In 1982, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Plyler v. Doe that undocumented children had the right to attend public schools without charge or impediment, regardless of their immigration status. The ruling raised a question: what if undocumented students, after graduating from the public school system, wanted to attend college? Perchance to DREAM is the first comprehensive history of the DREAM Act, which made its initial congressional appearance in 2001, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the discretionary program established by President Obama in 2012 out of Congressional failure to enact comprehensive immigration reform. Michael A. Olivas relates the history of the DREAM Act and DACA over the course of two decades. With the Trump Administration challenging the legality of DACA and pursuing its elimination in 2017, the fate of DACA is uncertain. Perchance to DREAM follows the political participation of DREAMers, who have been taken hostage as pawns in a cruel game as the White House continues to advocate anti-immigrant policies. Perchance to DREAM brings to light the many twists and turns that the legislation has taken, suggests why it has not gained the required traction, and offers hopeful pathways that could turn this darkness to dawn.

Meet nine courageous young adults who have lived in the United States with a secret for much of their lives: they are not U.S. citizens. They came from Colombia, Mexico, Ghana, Independent Samoa, and Korea. They came seeking education, fleeing violence, and escaping poverty. All have heartbreaking and hopeful stories about leaving their homelands and starting a new life in America. And all are weary of living in the shadows.

"WE ARE NOT DREAMERS is a collection of ten auto-ethnographic essays by undocumented, DACAmented, and formerly undocumented scholars in California who relay their experiences of illegality, as well as insights into their broader research on migration. Co-editors Leisy Abrego and Genevieve Negron-Gonzales intentionally center these voices to intervene within a field that theorizes the experiences of undocumented people without truly giving the undocumented people a space to be knowledge-producers themselves. These scholars face particular challenges--personally, politically, and in their research--and are uniquely positioned to provide nuanced insights on illegality, citizenship, education, and belonging that have the potential to grow the field of undocumented studies, shift understandings, and remake the bodies of literature which speak to their experiences. Moreover, their scholarship resists the harmful "Dreamer" narrative perpetuated by non-profits, DC lobbying groups, journalists, researchers, and the government, ultimately challenging notions of the American Dream and the "good immigrant" narrative to push for more inclusive practices within the academy and more comprehensive immigration policies on the national stage. The first half of the book explores the connection between identity, illegality, and resistance as a way to critically analyze how undocumented migrants have been 'made' through these processes. In chapter 2, Grecia Mondragon highlights the pressures and expectations that students are forced to navigate within higher education while carrying the weight of the Dreamer narrative. In chapter 5, Gabriela Garcia Cruz focuses on the political engagement of older undocumented women activists and how this activism reshapes lived experiences of citizenship and dignity. The second half of the book centers quotidian life to imagine what an intersectional analysis of undocumented status looks like by grappling with the structures of relationships, family, and identity. Audrey Silvestre, in chapter 8, centers the everyday experiences of undocumented trans women and the ways in which they have reclaimed spaces of joy amidst violent hate crimes. Chapter 9 by Lucy Leon emphasizes the insidious effects of immigration policy that determine how people must represent their love to one another and to the state. The book significantly contributes to how we understand the ways undocumented actors move through the spaces of daily life and in doing so, remake those spaces. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in Latinx and Chicanx studies, sociology, anthropology, studies of social movements, and studies of the experiences of undocumented people in the United States"--Provided by publisher.

"In the wake of post-9/11 xenophobia, Obama's record-level deportations, Trump's immigration policies, and the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, the US remains entrenched in a circular discourse regarding migrant justice. As organizer Silky Shah argues in Unbuild Walls, we must move beyond building nicer cages or advocating for comprehensive immigration reform. Our only hope for creating a liberated society for all, she insists, is abolition. Unbuild Walls dives into US immigration policy and its relationship to mass incarceration, from the last forty years up to the present, showing how the prison-industrial complex and immigration enforcement are intertwined systems of repression. Incorporating historical and legal analyses, Shah's personal experience as an organizer, as well as stories of people, campaigns, organizations, and localities that have resisted detention and deportation, Shah assesses the movement's strategies, challenges, successes, and shortcomings. Featuring a foreword by Amna A. Akbar, Unbuild Walls is an expansive and radical intervention, bridging the gaps between movements for immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition." --