Good Books About Immigration

• Religion and Social Justice for Immigrants by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo: The essays in this book analyze the different ways in which organized religion provides immigrants with an arena for mobilization, civic participation, and solidarity. Contributors explore topics including how non-Western religious groups such as the Vietnamese Caodai are striving for community recognition and addressing problems such as racism, economic issues, and the politics of diaspora; how interfaith groups organize religious people into immigrant civil rights activists at the U.S.-Mexican border; and how Catholic groups advocate governmental legislation and policies on behalf of refugees.
• Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants by David Bacon: Through interviews and on-the-spot reporting from both impoverished communities abroad and American immigrant workplaces and neighborhoods, Bacon shows how the United States' trade and economic policy abroad, in seeking to create a favorable investment climate for large corporations, creates conditions to displace communities and set migration into motion. Trade policy and immigration are intimately linked, Bacon argues, and are, in fact, elements of a single economic system. Bacon powerfully traces the development of illegal status back to slavery and shows the human cost of treating the indispensable labor of millions of migrants—and the migrants themselves—as illegal. Illegal People argues for a sea change in the way we think, debate, and legislate around issues of migration and globalization, making a compelling case for why we need to consider immigration and migration from a globalized human rights perspective.
• Enemy Aliens: Double Standards And Constitutional Freedoms In The War On Terrorism by David Cole: About 5,000 foreign nationals have been detained by the United States since September 11 and denied basic constitutional rights in the name of "wartime" expediency. Cole, who has litigated civil liberties cases on behalf of resident aliens and writes for the Nation, argues that denying foreigners rights within our legal system usually ends with citizens being stripped of those same rights. Cole documents how this process has already started and discusses provisions of the Patriot Act that he believes will allow for even further government encroachment on our freedom. He also provides detailed historical examples of the government's record of persecuting opposition voices in the name of security against a foreign menace. He argues for the moral and pragmatic importance of avoiding a double standard and according foreigners the same rights as citizens.
• Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat: Edwidge Danticat's father and uncle chose very different paths: the former struggled to make a new life for himself in America, while the latter remained in the homeland he paradoxically loved. In following their lives and their impact on future generations, Danticat's powerful family memoir explores how the private and the political, the past and the present, intersect. The most poignant section focuses on Joseph's tragic trip to the United States at age 81, but Danticat also tells a wider story about family and exile, the Haitian diaspora, the Duvalier regime, and post-9/11 immigration policy. Emotionally resonant and exceptionally clear-eyed, Brother, I'm Dying offers insight into a talented writer, her family history, and the injustices of the modern world.
• Keeping Out the Other: A Critical Introduction to Immigration Enforcement Today by David C. Brotherton, ed: David C. Brotherton and Philip Kretsedemas provide a history and analysis of recent immigration enforcement in the United States, demonstrating that our current anti-immigration tendencies are not a knee-jerk reaction to the events of September 11. Rather, they have been gathering steam for decades. With contributions from social scientists, policy analysts, legal experts, community organizers, and journalists, the volume critically examines the discourse that has framed the question of immigration enforcement for the general public. It also explores the politics and practice of deportation, new forms of immigrant profiling, relevant case law, and antiterrorist operations. Some contributors couch their critiques in an appeal to constitutional law and the defense of civil liberties. Others draw on the theories of structural inequality and institutional discrimination. These diverse perspectives stimulate new ways of thinking about the issue of immigration enforcement, proving that "security" has more to do with improving legal rights, social mobility, and the well-being of all U.S. residents than keeping out the "other."
• The Abandoned Ones: The Imprisonment and Uprising of the Mariel Boat People by Mark S. Hamm: A veteran of Arizona's prison system, Hamm trained and led a team of students who served in the late '80s as release-hearing legal representatives for Cuban detainees moved from Atlanta and Oakdale to the Terre Haute, Indiana, penitentiary. Hamm argues here that Ronald Reagan's rhetoric, Ed Meese's venality, and the politicized incompetence of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service created the powder keg that exploded in late 1987 with the announcement that Cuba would take back 2,543 Marielitos and prolonged the Oakdale and Atlanta standoffs. Official lies about repression inside Cuba were matched by lies about detainees' "criminality" ; Hamm found they were "nonviolent criminals (in Cuba), the disadvantaged, petty criminals (in the U.S.), and the doubly punished." U.S. Bureau of Prisons officials win Hamm's praise for restraint; virtually all other agencies involved either participated in or failed to short-circuit what Hamm calls the "politics of cruelty" that controlled the Cuban detainees' lives both before and after the riots. A devastating narrative of homegrown human rights violations.
• Gender and U.S. Immigration: Contemporary Trends by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, ed: Resurgent immigration is one of the most powerful forces disrupting and realigning everyday life in the United States and elsewhere, and gender is one of the fundamental social categories anchoring and shaping immigration patterns. Yet the intersection of gender and immigration has received little attention in contemporary social science literature and immigration research. This book brings together some of the best work in this area, including essays by pioneers who have logged nearly two decades in the field of gender and immigration, and new empirical work by both young scholars and well-established social scientists bringing their substantial talents to this topic for the first time.
• Deporting Our Souls: Values, Morality, and Immigration Policy by Bill Ong Hing: In the past three decades, images of undocumented immigrants pouring across the southern border have driven the immigration debate and policies have been implemented in response to those images. The Oklahoma City bombings and the tragic events of September 11, both of questionable relevance to immigration policy have provided further impetus to implement strategies that are anti-immigration in design and effect. This book discusses the major immigration policy areas - undocumented workers, the immigration selection system, deportation of aggravated felons, national security and immigration policy, and the integration of new Americans - and the author suggests his own proposals on how to address the policy challenges from a perspective that encourages us to consider the moral consequences of our decisions. The author also reviews some of the policies that have been put forth and ignored and suggests new policies that would be good for the country economically and socially.
• Securing Borders: Detention And Deportation In Canada by Anna Pratt: Detention and deportation are the two most extreme sanctions of an "immigration penality" that enforces borders, polices non-citizens, identifies those who are dangerous, diseased, deceitful, or destitute, and refuses them entry or casts them out. As such, they are constitutive practices that work to "make-up" and regulate national borders, citizens, and populations. In addition, they play a key role in the reconfiguration of citizenship and sovereignties in the global context. Despite popular and political exclamations, it is not a brand new world. The denigration of refugee claimants, heightened and intersecting anxieties about crime, security, and fraud, and efforts to fortify the border against risky outsiders have been prominent features of Canadian immigration penality since well before September 11th, 2001.
• Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History by Daniel Kanstroom: Deportation Nation is a chilling history of communal self-idealization and self-protection. The post-Revolutionary Alien and Sedition Laws, the Fugitive Slave laws, the Indian "removals," the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Palmer Raids, the internment of the Japanese Americans--all sought to remove those whose origins suggested they could never become "true" Americans. And for more than a century, millions of Mexicans have conveniently served as cheap labor, crossing a border that was not official until the early twentieth century and being sent back across it when they became a burden. By illuminating the shadowy corners of American history, Daniel Kanstroom shows that deportation has long been a legal tool to control immigrants' lives and is used with increasing crudeness in a globalized but xenophobic world.