Book Selections

This is the first and only comprehensive, book-length political history of national ID card proposals and developments in identity policing in the United States. The book focuses on the period from 1915 to 2016, including the post-9/11 debates and policy decisions regarding the introduction of technologically-advanced identification documents. Putting the United States in comparative perspective and connecting the vital issues of immigration and homeland security, Magdalena Krajewska shows how national ID card proposals have been woven into political conflict across a variety of policy fields. Findings contradict conventional wisdom, debunking two common myths: that Americans are opposed to national ID cards and that American policymakers never propose national ID cards. Dr Krajewska draws on extensive archival research; high-level interviews with politicians, policymakers, and ID card technology experts in Washington, DC and London; and public opinion polls.

"When Jason DeParle moved in with Tita Comodas in the Manila slums thirty years ago, he didn't expect to make a lifelong friend. Nor did he expect to spend decades reporting on her family--husband, children, and siblings--as they came to embody the stunning rise of global migration. In A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves, DeParle paints an intimate portrait of an unforgettable family across three generations, as migration reorders economics, politics, and culture across the world. At the heart of the story is Rosalie, Tita's middle child, who escapes poverty by becoming a nurse, and lands jobs in Jeddah, Abu Dhabi and, finally, Texas--joining the record forty-four million immigrants in the United States. Migration touches every aspect of global life. It pumps billions in remittances into poor villages, fuels Western populism, powers Silicon Valley, sustains American health care, and brings one hundred languages to the Des Moines public schools. One in four children in the United States is an immigrant or the child of one. With no issue in American life so polarizing, DeParle expertly weaves between the personal and panoramic perspectives. Reunited with their children after years apart, Rosalie and her husband struggle to be parents, as their children try to find their place in a place they don't know. Ordinary and extraordinary at once, their journey is a twenty-first-century classic, rendered in gripping detail"--

"Just days after taking the White House, Donald Trump signed three executive orders targeting noncitizens-authorizing the Muslim Ban, the border wall, and ICE raids. The new administration's approach towards noncitizens was defined by bans, walls, and raids. This is the essential primer on how we got here, and what we must do to create a different future. Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary shows that these features have a long history and have long harmed all of us and our relationships to each other. The 45th president's xenophobic, racist, ableist, patriarchal ascendancy is no aberration, but the consequence of two centuries of U.S. political, economic, and social culture. Further, as A. Naomi Paik deftly demonstrates, the attacks against migrants are tightly bound to assaults against women, people of color, workers, ill and disabled people, queer and gender non-conforming people. These attacks are neither un-American nor unique. By showing how the problems we face today are embedded in the very foundation of the US, this book is a rallying cry for a broad-based, abolitionist sanctuary movement for all"--

"The term 'sanctuary city' gained a new level of national recognition during the 2016 United States presidential election, and immigration policies and debates have remained a top issue since the election of Donald Trump. The battle over immigration and deportation will be waged on many fronts in the coming years, but sanctuary cities - municipalities that resist the national government's efforts to enforce immigration laws - are likely to be on the front lines for the immediate future, and social workers and others in the helping professions have vital roles to play. In this book, Melvin Delgado offers a compelling case for the centrality of sanctuary cities' cause to the very mission and professional identity of social workers and others in the human services and mental health professions. The text also presents a historical perspective on the rise of the sanctuary movements of the 1970s and 2000s, thereby giving context to the current environment and immigration debate. Sanctuary Cities, Communities, and Organizations serves as a helpful resource for human service practitioners, academics, and the general public alike"--Publisher's website.

Sanctuary cities, or localities where officials are prohibited from inquiring into immigration status, have become a part of the broader debate on undocumented immigration in the United States. Despite the increasing amount of coverage sanctuary policies receive, the American public knows little about these policies. In this book, Loren Collingwood and Benjamin Gonzalez O'Brien delve into the history, media coverage, effects, and public opinion on these sanctuary policies in the hope of helping readers reach an informed decision regarding them.

"The city of El Centro is located in southern California's Imperial Valley, near the US-Mexico border. Surrounded by desert, sand dunes, and mountains, it is isolated and difficult to reach, but has long been an important place for Mexican migrants attracted to the valley's agricultural economy and proximity to the border. The Shadow of El Centro tells the story of how the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp of 1945 evolved into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Service Processing Center of the 2000s and became a national model for detaining migrants-a place where the policing of migration, the racialization of labor, and detainee resistance coalesced"--

"In 1965, the Hart-Celler Act abolished the national origins quotas of the 1920s that had severly limited immigration to American from everywhere but Western Europe. The result was mass immigration from Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. The wave of immigration and the restrictionism it produced led to a bitter political struggle over immigrants' rights that continues to this day. This book is a history of the post-1965 political battles between advocates of expansive admissions policies, rights, and benefits for immigrants and their anti-immigration, or restrictionist, opponents. Coleman argues that as immigration rendered what had once been seen as hard boundaries of the physical nation-state into something more porous, the rights of immigrations became crucial to immigration control. Restrictionists sought to limit immigrants' access to the American welfare state by arguing that they were a burden to the state and taking jobs from working- and middle-class Am ericans. However, the legacies of the civil rights movement, a growing commitment to deregulation, unusual political alliances, and institutional structures provided significant barriers to anti-immigration efforts. By the end of Reagan's presidency, restrictionists efforts to reverse the flow of immigration rights failed at the national level. In the 1990s, however, with national policy-making gridlocked, restrictionists focused their efforts on the state level. States acquired new powers in driving immigration policy and curtailed the expanded notion of alienage rights that had been forged over the previous decades. Coleman provides a new way of understanding the political history of immigration, looking not at borders and admissions policy but at the broad, internal battles over domestic policy that resulted from immigration. The author draws on a wealth of new sources from the Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administrations as well as from immigration and civil rights organizations. Th is book reveals that the current wave of anti-immigration sentiment seen in the electoral success of Donald Trump is not a recent phenomenon but has deep roots in the post-1965 immigration battles"--

"A deeply reported, newsbreaking account the humanitarian crisis of our time by the journalist who has been at the center of the story: MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff, winner of the 2019 Walter Cronkite Award, offers a chilling expose of the human cost of the Trump administration's border and immigration policies"--;In June 2018, Donald Trump's most notorious decision as president--the systematic separation of thousands of desperate migrant families at the US-Mexico border--had secretly been in effect for months before most Americans became aware of the astonishing inhumanity being perpetrated by their own government. Jacob Soboroff was among the first journalists to expose this reality after seeing firsthand the living conditions of the children in custody. His influential series of reports ignited public scrutiny that contributed to the president reversing his own policy and earned Soboroff the Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Broadcast Journalism and, with his colleagues, the 2019 Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism. Soboroff has spent the past two years reporting the many strands of this complex narrative, developing sources from within the Trump administration who share critical details for the first time. He also traces the dramatic odyssey of one separated family from Guatemala, where their lives were threatened by narcos, to seek asylum at the U.S. border, where they were separated--the son ending up in Texas, and the father thousands of miles away, in the Mojave desert of central California. And he joins the heroes who emerged to challenge the policy, and who worked on the ground to reunite parents with children.

"Through extensive ethnographic study of the aftermath of an ICE raid in one Latino community in Michigan, the author details the incredible strain that it placed on the community, the families, and the individuals left behind. Lopez's case study reveals the public health impacts of ICE raids on stable immigrant communities in the heartland of the country"--

Immigration is among the most prominent, enduring, and contentious features of our globalized world. Yet, there is little systematic, cross-national research on why countries "do what they do" when it comes to their immigration policies. Rights, Deportation, and Detention in the Age of Immigration Control addresses this gap by examining what are arguably the most contested and dynamic immigration policies--immigration control--across 25 immigrant-receiving countries, including the U.S. and most of the European Union. The book addresses head on three of the most salient aspects of immigration control: the denial of rights to non-citizens, their physical removal and exclusion from the polity through deportation, and their deprivation of liberty and freedom of movement in immigration detention. In addition to answering the question of why states do what they do, the book describes contemporary trends in what Tom K. Wong refers to as the machinery of immigration control, analyzes the determinants of these trends using a combination of quantitative analysis and fieldwork, and explores whether efforts to deter unwanted immigration are actually working.

" "State alert as pregnant asylum seekers aim for Ireland." "Country Being Held Hostage by Con Men, Spongers, and Those Taking Advantage of the Maternity Residency Policy." From 1997 to 2004, headlines such as these dominated Ireland's mainstream media as pregnant immigrants were recast as "illegals" entering the country to gain legal residency through childbirth. As immigration soared, Irish media and politicians began to equate this phenomenon with illegal immigration that threatened to destroy the country's social, cultural, and economic fabric. Pregnant on Arrival explores how pregnant immigrants were made into paradigmatic figures of illegal immigration, as well as the measures this characterization set into motion and the consequences for immigrants and citizens. While focusing on Ireland, Eithne Luibheid's analysis illuminates global struggles over the citizenship status of children born to immigrant parents in countries as diverse as the United States, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Scholarship on the social construction of the illegal immigrant calls on histories of colonialism, global capitalism, racism, and exclusionary nation building but has been largely silent on the role of nationalist sexual regimes in determining legal status. Eithne Luibheid turns to queer theory to understand how pregnancy, sexuality, and immigrants' relationships to prevailing sexual norms affect their chances of being designated as legal or illegal. Pregnant on Arrival offers unvarnished insight into how categories of immigrant legal status emerge and change, how sexual regimes figure prominently in these processes, and how efforts to prevent illegal immigration ultimately redefine nationalist sexual norms and associated racial, gender, economic, and geopolitical hierarchies. "--

For most of America's history, we simply did not lock people up for migrating here. Yet over the last thirty years, the federal and state governments have increasingly tapped their powers to incarcerate people accused of violating immigration laws. As a result, almost 400,000 people annually now spend some time locked up pending the result of a civil or criminal immigration proceeding. In Migrating to Prison, leading scholar Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernandez takes a hard look at the immigration prison system's origins, how it currently operates, and why.

Sheds light on one of the most pressing political issues of our time-the human consequences of US immigration policy. The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States. Drawing on the four major fields of anthropology, De Leon uses an innovative combination of ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and forensic science to produce a scathing critique of "Prevention through Deterrence," the federal border enforcement policy that encourages migrants to cross in areas characterized by extreme environmental conditions and high risk of death. For two decades, this policy has failed to deter border crossers while successfully turning the rugged terrain of southern Arizona into a killing field. In harrowing detail, De Leon chronicles the journeys of people who have made dozens of attempts to cross the border and uncovers the stories of the objects and bodies left behind in the desert. [from the publisher]

The impact of the U.S. immigration and legal systems on children and youth. In the United States, millions of children are undocumented migrants or have family members who came to the country without authorization. The unique challenges with which these children and youth must cope demand special attention. Illegal Encounters considers illegality, deportability, and deportation in the lives of young people--those who migrate as well as those who are affected by the migration of others. A primary focus of the volume is to understand how children and youth encounter, move through, or are outside of a range of legal processes, including border enforcement, immigration detention, federal custody, courts, and state processes of categorization. Even if young people do not directly interact with state immigration systems--because they are U.S. citizens or have avoided detention--they are nonetheless deeply affected by the reach of the government in its many forms. Contributors privilege the voices and everyday experiences of immigrant children and youth themselves. By combining different perspectives from advocates, service providers, attorneys, researchers, and young immigrants, the volume presents rich accounts that can contribute to informed debates and policy reforms. Illegal Encounters sheds light on the unique ways in which policies, laws, and legal categories shape so much of daily life for young immigrants. The book makes visible the burdens, hopes, and potential of a population of young people and their families who have been largely hidden from public view and are currently under siege, following their movement through complicated immigration systems and institutions in the United States.--Publisher website.

"Criminal prosecutions for immigration offenses have more than doubled over the last two decades, as national debates about immigration and criminal justice reforms became headline topics. What lies behind this unprecedented increase? From Deportation to Prison unpacks how the incarceration of over two million people in the United States gave impetus to a federal immigration initiative--The Criminal Alien Program (CAP)--designed to purge non-citizens from dangerously overcrowded jails and prisons. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic and archival research, the findings in this book reveal how the Criminal Alien Program quietly set off a punitive turn in immigration enforcement that has fundamentally altered detention, deportation, and criminal prosecutions for immigration offenses. Patrisia Mac��as-Rojas presents a "street-level" perspective on how this new regime has serious lived implications for the day-to-day actions of Border Patrol agents, local law enforcement, civil and human rights advocates, and for migrants and residents of predominantly Latina/o border communities. From Deportation to Prison presents a thorough and captivating exploration of how mass incarceration and law and order policies of the past forty years have transformed immigration and border enforcement in unexpected and important ways."--Back cover

Stories of non-US citizens caught in the jaws of the immigration bureaucracy and subject to indefinite detention are in the headlines daily. These men, women, and children remain almost completely without rights, unprotected by law and the Constitution, and their status as outsiders, even though many of have lived and worked in this country for years, has left them vulnerable to the most extreme forms of state power. Although the rhetoric surrounding these individuals is extreme, the US government has been locking up immigrants since the late 19th century, often for indefinite periods and with limited ability to challenge their confinement. 'Forever Prisoners' offers the first broad history of immigrant detention in the United States.

"An anthology of essays by migration scholars telling fieldwork-based stories of those affected by U.S. immigration law enforcement"--

When David Cole was first writing Enemy Aliens, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the anti-immigrant brand of American patriotism was at a fever pitch. Now, as the pendulum swings back, and court after court finds the Bush administration's tactics of secrecy and assumption of guilt unconstitutional, Cole's book stands as a prescient and critical indictment of the double standards we have applied in the war on terror. Called "brilliantly argued" by Edward Said and "the essential book in the field" by former CIA director James Woolsey, Enemy Aliens shows why it is a moral, constitutional, and practical imperative to afford every person in the United States the protections from government excesses that we expect for ourselves.

An intimate look at the people ensnared by the US detention and deportation system, the largest in the world On a bright Phoenix morning, Elena Santiago opened her door to find her house surrounded by a platoon of federal immigration agents. Her children screamed asthe officers handcuffed her and drove her away. Within hours, she was deported to the rough border town of Nogales, Sonora, with nothing but the clothes on her back. Her two-year-old daughter and fifteen-year-old son, both American citizens, were taken by the state of Arizona and consigned to foster care. Their mother's only offense- living undocumented in the United States. Immigrants like Elena, who've lived in the United States for years, are being detained and deported at unprecedented rates. Thousands languish in detention centers-often torn from their families-for months or even years. Deportees are returned to violent Central American nations or unceremoniously dropped off in dangerous Mexican border towns. Despite the dangers of the desert crossing, many immigrants will slip across the border again, stopping at nothing to get home to their children. Drawing on years of reporting in the Arizona-Mexico borderlands, journalist Margaret Regan tells their poignant stories. Inside the massive Eloy Detention Center, a for-profit private prison in Arizona, she meets detainee Yolanda Fontes, a mother separated from her three small children. In a Nogales soup kitchen, deportee Gustavo Sanchez, a young father who'd lived in Phoenix since the age of eight, agonizes about the risks of the journey back. Regan demonstrates how increasingly draconian detention and deportation policies have broadened police powers, while enriching a private prison industry whose profits are derived from human suffering. She also documents the rise of resistance, profiling activists andyoung immigrant "Dreamers" who are fighting for the rights of the undocumented. Compelling and heart-wrenching, Detained and Deportedoffers a rare glimpse into the lives of people ensnared in America's immigration dragnet.

What happens to migrants after they are deported from the United States and dropped off at the Mexican border, often hundreds if not thousands of miles from their hometowns? In this eye-opening work, Jeremy Slack foregrounds the voices and experiences of Mexican deportees, who frequently become targets of extreme forms of violence, including migrant massacres, upon their return to Mexico. Navigating the complex world of the border, Slack investigates how the high-profile drug war has led to more than two hundred thousand deaths in Mexico, and how many deportees, stranded and vulnerable in unfamiliar cities, have become fodder for drug cartel struggles. Like no other book before it, Deported to Death reshapes debates on the long-term impact of border enforcement and illustrates the complex decisions migrants must make about whether to attempt the return to an often dangerous life in Mexico or face increasingly harsh punishment in the United States.

"Having interviewed over one hundred deportees and their families, Caldwell traces deportation's long-term consequences--such as depression, drug use, and homelessness--on both sides of the border. Showing how U.S. deportation law systematically fails to protect the rights of immigrants and their families, Caldwell challenges traditional notions of what it means to be an American and recommends legislative and judicial reforms to mitigate the injustices suffered by the millions of U.S. citizens affected by deportation." -- Publisher's description

The unknown history of deportation and of the fear that shapes immigrants' lives Constant headlines about deportations, detention camps, and border walls drive urgent debates about immigration and what it means to be an American in the twenty-first century. The Deportation Machine traces the long and troubling history of the US government's systematic efforts to terrorize and expel immigrants over the past 140 years. This provocative, eye-opening book provides needed historical perspective on one of the most pressing social and political issues of our time. In a sweeping and engaging narrative, Adam Goodman examines how federal, state, and local officials have targeted various groups for expulsion, from Chinese and Europeans at the turn of the twentieth century to Central Americans and Muslims today. He reveals how authorities have singled out Mexicans, nine out of ten of all deportees, and removed most of them not by orders of immigration judges but through coercive administrative procedures and calculated fear campaigns. Goodman uncovers the machine's three primary mechanisms���formal deportations, voluntary departures, and self-deportations���and examines how public officials have used them to purge immigrants from the country and exert control over those who remain. Exposing the pervasive roots of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, The Deportation Machine introduces the politicians, bureaucrats, businesspeople, and ordinary citizens who have pushed for and profited from expulsion. This revelatory book chronicles the devastating human costs of deportation and the innovative strategies people have adopted to fight against the machine and redefine belonging in ways that transcend citizenship.

"Studies popular tropes in the United States for Mexican immigrants, tracing the history and usage of terms that were shaped by race, class, and national borders"--

I worked in a trailer that ICE had set aside for conversations between the women and the attorneys. While we talked, their children, most of whom seemed to be between three and eight years old, played with a few toys on the floor. It was hard for me to get my head around the idea of a jail full of toddlers, but there they were." For decades, advocates for refugee children and families have fought to end the U.S. government's practice of jailing children and families for months or even years until overburdened immigration courts could rule on their claims for asylum. Baby Jails is the history of that legal and political struggle. Philip G. Schrag, the director of Georgetown University's asylum law clinic, takes readers through thirty years of conflict as refugee advocates resisted the detention of migrant children. The saga begins during the Reagan administration with 15-year-old Jenny Lisette Flores, who languished in a Los Angeles motel that the government had turned into a makeshift jail by draining the swimming pool, barring the windows, and surrounding the building with barbed wire. What became the Flores lawsuit was still alive thirty years later, with the Trump administration resorting to the forced separation families when the courts would not allow the long-term jailing of the children. Schrag provides recommendations to reform a system that has caused anguish and trauma for thousands of parents and children. Provocative and timely, Baby Jails exposes the continuing struggle between the government and immigrant advocates over the duration and conditions of confinement of children who seek safety in America.

American presidents, deportations, and human rights violations : from Carter to Trump-book

"A searing indictment of the white racial politics behind American immigration restrictions from Chinese Exclusion through the Trump presidency"--;Donald Trump's mainstreaming of anti-immigrant politics in 2016 was a mere reflection of the ugly norm of the past. Jones traces the dual foundation of open immigration for whites from Northern Europe and the racial rejection of slaves from Africa, Native Americans, and eventually, immigrants from other parts of the world. He unearths the link between white supremacy and the US environmental movement, and also uncovers startling links between anti-immigrant hate groups and the Republican Party, which have left lasting marks on present-day policy. -- adapted from jacket.

Real immigrant perspectives of America’s immigration system, perfect for fans of The Book of Awesome Women, Dear America, or American Like Me. Positive and heroic stories. Far too often, immigrants are demonized and scapegoated, when they should be celebrated as heroes and revolutionaries. This audiobook strings together both triumphant and painful tales of immigrants who blazed trails and broke barriers in the fight for fundamental human rights. Unsung Heroes. These are ordinary people who have used their own stories on the fight for citizenship to illustrate their triumphs and trials as immigrants in a new land. Each uses a different strategy and tactics; what works for one does not work for another. They all have one thing in common, however - a desire for racial and social justice.

"Undocumented politics is a poignant ethnography of gender and political agency in North America's most excluded migrant communities. Author Abigail Andrews takes us from the indigenous villages of Oaxaca, Mexico into the lives of undocumented families in the barrios of Southern California and back. Drawing on two years of transnational fieldwork, archives, surveys, and the voices of migrants themselves, she compares the histories of two very distinct transnational communities. The book reveals how migrants' cross-border struggles are shaped by local practices of control, in both the places they live and the places they leave behind"--Provided by publisher.

"Moore has photographed the entire length of the U.S. southern border, and traveled extensively throughout Central America and Mexico, as well as to many immigrant communities in the United States ... [This book is a] record on the prevailing U.S. domestic topic of immigration and border security"--Amazon.com.

Presents the oral histories of undocumented immigrants struggling to carve a life for themselves in the US. --From publisher description.