Immigration, Migration, and Refugee History & Rights

As immigration emerges as a top election issue, our corps members documented the complex truth about immigration to the United States

The Biden administration plans to immediately invoke an authority to shut off access to asylum for migrants who cross the US-Mexico border illegally, senior officials said Tuesday, a significant attempt by President Joe Biden to address head on one of his biggest political vulnerabilities.

President Biden has issued one of the most restrictive immigration policies ever declared under a recent Democratic administration. It will temporarily shut down the U.S.-Mexico border, deny asylum to most migrants who do not cross into the U.S. via ports of entry, and limit total asylum requests at the southern border to no more than 2,500 per day. The ACLU has threatened to sue the Biden administration over what reporter John Washington, who covers immigration in Arizona, calls an “excruciating and likely deadly” decision. “An illegal asylum seeker is a contradiction in terms,” Washington continues. “People have the right, according to U.S. law, to ask for asylum irrespective of how they crossed the border or where they are or what their status is. And this rule really flies in the face of that.”

"What becomes of men the US locks up and kicks out? From 2009 to 2020, the US deported more than five million people -- over 90 percent of them men. Banished Men tells 186 of their stories. How, it asks, does forced expulsion shape men's lives and sense of themselves? In this book, a team of thirty-one Latinx students and an award-winning scholar of gender and migrant exclusion uncover a harrowing system that weaves together policing, prison, detention, removal, and border militarization -- and overwhelmingly targets men. Guards and gangs beat them down, both literally and metaphorically, as if they are no more than vermin or livestock. Their ties with family are severed. In Mexico, they end up banished: in limbo and stripped of humanity. They do not go "home." Their fight for new ways of belonging, as people of both "here" and "there," forms a devastating, humane, and clear-eyed critique of the violence of deportation"--

By Juan-Andrés Fuentes Migration and citizenship have become increasingly relevant topics of discussion both nationally and internationally. For instance, last February, the Albanian Congress appro…

"First book to argue that immigrant and refugee rights are part of the fight for racial justice; offers a humanitarian approach to reform and abolition"--

"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.