Immigration and Migration
Showing all 19 results
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Migrating to Prison
America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants$17.99 – $24.99NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A powerful, in-depth look at the imprisonment of immigrants, addressing the intersection of immigration and the criminal justice system, with a new epilogue by the author
“Argues compellingly that immigrant advocates shouldn’t content themselves with debates about how many thousands of immigrants to lock up, or other minor tweaks.” —Gus Bova, Texas Observer
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.
Migrating to Prison takes a hard look at the immigration prison system’s origins, how it currently operates, and why. A leading voice for immigration reform, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández explores the emergence of immigration imprisonment in the mid-1980s and looks at both the outsized presence of private prisons and how those on the political right continue, disingenuously, to link immigration imprisonment with national security risks and threats to the rule of law.
Now with an epilogue that brings it into the Biden administration, Migrating to Prison is an urgent call for the abolition of immigration prisons and a radical reimagining of who belongs in the United States.
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Milked
How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers$26.99A compelling portrayal by the veteran journalist of the lives of farming communities on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border and the surprising connections between them
“Conniff brings her skills and insights to a particularly urgent project: moving beyond the polarizing politics of our current era, and taking a deeper look at how people who have been pitted against each other can forge bonds of understanding.” —E.J. Dionne Jr., co-author of 100% DemocracyWinner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize
In the Midwest, Mexican workers have become critically important to the survival of rural areas and small towns—and to the individual farmers who rely on their work—with undocumented immigrants, mostly from Mexico, accounting for an estimated 80 percent of employees on the dairy farms of western Wisconsin.
In Milked, former editor-in-chief of The Progressive Ruth Conniff introduces us to the migrants who worked on these dairy farms, their employers, among them white voters who helped elect Donald Trump to office in 2016, and the surprising friendships that have formed between these two groups of people. These stories offer a rich and fascinating account of how two crises—the record-breaking rate of farm bankruptcies in the Upper Midwest, and the contentious politics around immigration—are changing the landscape of rural America.
A unique and fascinating exploration of rural farming communities, Milked sheds light on seismic shifts in policy on both sides of the border over recent decades, connecting issues of labor, immigration, race, food, economics, and U.S.-Mexico relations and revealing how two seemingly disparate groups of people have come to rely on each other, how they are subject to the same global economic forces, and how, ultimately, the bridges of understanding that they have built can lead us toward a more constructive politics and a better world.
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Immigration Matters
Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive Future$18.99 – $27.99A provocative, strategic plan for a humane immigration system from the nation’s leading immigration scholars and activists
During the past decade, right-wing nativists have stoked popular hostility to the nation’s foreign-born population, forcing the immigrant rights movement into a defensive posture. In the Trump years, preoccupied with crisis upon crisis, advocates had few opportunities to consider questions of long-term policy or future strategy. Now is the time for a reset.
Immigration Matters offers a new, actionable vision for immigration policy. It brings together key movement leaders and academics to share cutting-edge approaches to the urgent issues facing the immigrant community, along with fresh solutions to vexing questions of so-called “future flows” that have bedeviled policy makers for decades. The book also explores the contributions of immigrants to the nation’s identity, its economy, and progressive movements for social change. Immigration Matters delves into a variety of topics including new ways to frame immigration issues, fresh thinking on key aspects of policy, challenges of integration, workers’ rights, family reunification, legalization, paths to citizenship, and humane enforcement.
The perfect handbook for immigration activists, scholars, policy makers, and anyone who cares about one of the most contentious issues of our age, Immigration Matters makes accessible an immigration policy that both remediates the harm done to immigrant workers and communities under Trump and advances a bold new vision for the future.
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Let’s Talk About Your Wall
Mexican Writers Respond to the Immigration Crisis$25.99Major writers from Mexico weigh in on U.S. immigration policy, from harrowing migrant journeys to immigrant detention to the life beyond the wall
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. Celebrated novelist Carmen Boullosa (author of Texas and Before) and Alberto 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. Contributors include the award-winning author Valeria Luiselli, whose Tell Me How It Ends is the go-to book on the child migrant crisis, and the novelist Yuri Herrera, author of the highly acclaimed Signs Preceding the End of the World.
Let’s Talk About Your Wall uses Trump’s wall as a starting point to discuss important questions, including the history of U.S.-Mexican relations, and questions of sovereignty, citizenship, and borders. An essential resource for anyone seeking to form a well-grounded opinion on one of the central issues of our day, Let’s Talk About Your Wall provides a fierce and compelling counterpoint to the racist bigotry and irrational fear that consumes the debate over immigration, and a powerful symbol of opposition to exclusion and hate.
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We Too Sing America
South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future$17.95 – $25.95“Powerful…Iyer catalogues the toll that various forms of discrimination have taken and highlights the inspiring ways activists are fighting back. [She] is an ideal chronicler of this experience.”
—The Washington PostNOW IN PAPERBACK The nationally renowned racial justice advocate’s illumination of the ongoing persecution of a range of American minorities
In the lead-up to the recent presidential election, Donald Trump called for a complete ban on Muslims entering the United States, surveillance against mosques, and a database for all Muslims living in the country, tapping into anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim hysteria to a degree little seen since the targeting of South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh people in the wake of 9/11.
In the American Book Award–winning We Too Sing America, nationally renowned activist Deepa Iyer shows that this is the latest in a series of recent racial flash points, from the 2012 massacre at the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, to the violent opposition to the Islamic Center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and to the Park 51 Community Center in Lower Manhattan.
Iyer asks whether hate crimes should be considered domestic terrorism and explores the role of the state in perpetuating racism through detentions, national registration programs, police profiling, and constant surveillance. Reframing the discussion of race in America, she “reaches into the complexities of the many cultures that make up South Asia” (Publishers Weekly) and provides ideas from the front lines of post-9/11 America.
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Cast Away
True Stories of Survival from Europes Refugee Crisis$25.95Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence 2017
“Galvanizing and deeply compassionate.”
—O MagazineFrom Time magazine’s European Union correspondent, a powerful exploration of the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, told through the stories of migrants who have made the perilous journey into Europe
In 2015, more than one million migrants and refugees, most fleeing war-torn countries in Africa and the Middle East, attempted to make the perilous journey into Europe. Around three thousand lost their lives as they crossed the Mediterranean and Aegean in rickety boats provided by unscrupulous traffickers, including over seven hundred men, women, and children in a single day in April 2015.
In one of the first works of narrative nonfiction on the ongoing refugee crisis and the civil war in Syria, Cast Away describes the agonizing stories and the impossible decisions that migrants have to make as they head toward what they believe is a better life: a pregnant Eritrean woman, four days overdue, chooses to board an obviously unsafe smuggler’s ship to Greece; a father, swimming from a sinking ship, has to decide whether to hold on to one child or let him go to save another.
Veteran journalist Charlotte McDonald-Gibson offers a vivid, on-the-ground glimpse of the pressures and hopes that drive individuals to risk their lives. Recalling the work of Katherine Boo and Caroline Moorehead, Cast Away brings to life the human consequences of one of the most urgent humanitarian issues of our time. -
Integration Nation
Immigrants, Refugees, and America at Its Best$24.95 – $24.99“Eaton has done invaluable work in documenting the revitalization of communities across the U.S. by immigrants and refugees” (David Bacon, author of Illegal People).
In recent years, politicians in a handful of local communities and states have passed laws and regulations designed to make it easier to deport unauthorized immigrants or to make their lives so unpleasant that they’d just leave. The media’s unrelenting focus on these ultimately self-defeating measures created the false impression that these politicians speak for most of America. They don’t.
Integration Nation takes readers on a spirited and compelling cross-country journey, introducing us to the people challenging America’s xenophobic impulses by welcoming immigrants and collaborating with the foreign-born as they become integral members of their new communities. In Utah, we meet educators who connect newly arrived Spanish-speaking students and US-born English-speaking students, who share classrooms and learn in two languages. In North Carolina, we visit the nation’s fastest-growing community-development credit union, serving immigrants and US-born depositors and helping to lower borrowing thresholds and crime rates alike.
Giving a voice to people who choose integration over exclusion, who opt for open-heartedness instead of fear, Integration Nation is a desperately needed road map for a nation still finding its way beyond anti-immigrant hysteria to higher ground.
“This useful book provides models for civic organizations that want to tackle immigration challenges, and it paints a vivid picture of some real successes.” —Publishers Weekly
“Presents in discrete essays an array of compelling and persuasive regional efforts across the country . . . From Indiana to Georgia to Maine, these intelligent model programs should inspire others.” —Kirkus Reviews -
Living “Illegal”
The Human Face of Unauthorized Immigration$19.95 – $19.99A myth-busting account of the tragedies, trials, and successes of undocumented immigration in the United States.
For decades now, America’s polarizing debate over immigration revolved around a set of one-dimensional characters and unchallenged stereotypes. The resulting policies—from the creation of ICE in 2003 to Arizona’s draconian law SB 1070—are dangerous and profoundly counterproductive.
Based on years of research into the lives of ordinary migrants, Living “Illegal” offers richly textured stories of real people—working, building families, and enriching their communities even as the political climate grows more hostile. In the words of Publishers Weekly, it is a “compassionate and well-reasoned exploration of why migrants come to the U.S. and how they integrate into American society.”
Moving beyond conventional arguments, Living “Illegal” challenges our assumptions about who these people are and how they have adapted to the confusing patchwork of local immigration ordinances. This revealing narrative takes us into Southern churches (often the only organizations open to migrants), into the fields of Florida, onto the streets of major American cities during the immigrant rights marches of 2006, and across national boundaries—from Brazil to Mexico and Guatemala. -
Fortress Europe
Dispatches from a Gated Continent$17.95 – $27.99Singled out by Foreign Affairs for its reporting on “the brutal frontiers of new Europe,” Fortress Europe is the story of how the world’s most affluent region—and history’s greatest experiment with globalization—has become an immigration war zone, where tens of thousands have died in a humanitarian crisis that has galvanized the world’s attention.
Journalist Matthew Carr brings to life remarkable human dramas, based on ex- tensive interviews and firsthand reporting from the hot zones of Europe’s immigration battles, in a narrative that moves from the desperate immigrant camps at the mouth of the Channel Tunnel in Calais, France, to the chaotic Mediterranean sea, where African migrants have drowned by the thousands. Speaking with key European policy makers, police, soldiers on the front lines, immigrant rights activists, and an astonishing range of migrants themselves, Carr offers a lucid account both of the broad issues at stake in the crisis and its exorbitant human costs.
The paperback edition includes a new afterword by the author, which offers an up-to-the-minute assessment of the 2015 crisis and a searing critique of Europe’s response to the new waves of refugees. -
The World of Mexican Migrants
The Rock and the Hard Place$19.99 – $25.95Widely praised as a splendid addition to the literature on the great wave of post-1970 immigration from Mexico—as a result of which an estimated 6 million undocumented Mexican migrants now live in the United States—The World of Mexican Migrants, by acclaimed author Judith Adler Hellman, takes us into the lives of those who, no longer able to eke out even a modest living in their homeland, have traveled north to find jobs.
Hellman takes us deep into the sending communities in Mexico, where we witness the conditions that lead Mexicans to risk their lives crossing the border and meet those who live on Mexico’s largest source of foreign income, remittances from family members al Norte. We hear astonishing border crossing tales—including one man’s journey riding suspended from the undercarriage of a train. In New York and Los Angeles, construction workers, restaurant staff, street vendors, and deliverymen share their survival strategies—the ways in which they work, send money home, find housing, learn English, send their children to school, and avoid detection.
Drawing upon five years of in-depth interviews, Hellman offers a humanizing perspective and “essential window” (Booklist) into the lives and struggles of Mexican migrants living in the United States.
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Ex Mex
From Migrants to Immigrants$17.95 – $25.95From the massive nationwide rally in support of immigrant rights in May 2006 to protests against the increasingly frequent immigration raids across the country, the public debate on immigration reform has largely centered on Mexican immigrants. Yet, in the United States, we rarely hear the Mexican perspective on the issue.
In “portraits that defy American stereotypes of who is a Mexican immigrant” (Booklist), former Mexican foreign minister and eminent scholar Jorge G. Castañeda describes just who makes up the newest generation of immigrants from Mexico, why they have chosen to live in the United States, where they work, and what they ultimately hope to achieve. Drawing on his wide-ranging experience, Casteñeda examines the century-long historical background behind the labor exchange between Mexico and the United States, while offering an insider’s account of the official conversations and secret negotiations between the two countries in recent years.
Both authoritative and timely, Ex Mex is essential reading for all who want to make sense of the complex issue of immigration.
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God Needs No Passport
Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape$18.95 – $26.95Not since the era of Ellis Island have so many immigrants arrived on America’s shores. As in the past, native-born Americans continue to expect immigrants to assimilate; however, in an era of cheap international travel and the Internet, immigrants themselves are now able to keep one foot in their countries of origin, thereby confusing old assumptions about pluralism and American identity. And increasingly it is global religious institutions that enable immigrants to participate in two cultures at once—whether via religious services beamed in by satellite or through an expanding network of global religious organizations.
These multicultural religious immigrants, sociologist Peggy Levitt argues in this pathbreaking account, are changing the face of religious diversity in the United States, helping to make American religion just as global as U.S. corporations. In a book with stunning implications for today’s immigration debates—where commentators routinely refer to a “clash of civilizations”—Levitt shows that the new realities of religion and migration are subtly challenging the very definition of what it means to be an American. Filled with impressive original research and charts and statistics that “give an excellent overall view of the results of her thorough on-site research” (Library Journal), God Needs No Passport reveals that American values are no longer just made in the U.S.A. but around the globe.
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A Floating City of Peasants
The Great Migration in Contemporary China$35.00The largest human migration in history is taking place in China today—incredibly, off the radar of the world’s major media. Since the 1990s, at least 120 million Chinese peasants have left the countryside for big cities to work in factories, on construction sites, in catering and prostitution—typically without even the most basic rights or protections.
In A Floating City of Peasants, Floris-Jan van Luyn—who spent six years reporting from China for a daily newspaper—relates the remarkable tales of migrant workers who have helped fuel the explosive growth of the People’s Republic. In a series of a dozen remarkably intimate portraits illuminated by wide-ranging reporting, we meet Xiao Li, a prostitute, who sends her little girl to the best school in Chongqing; Chunming who stole money from his parents to pay for the long trip to Beijing and found work on a garbage dump; Lüsong, who campaigned for a village school and against corrupt government employees and, as a result, was tortured almost to death; and others with equally gripping stories.
Revealing the dark side of the Chinese economic miracle in words and striking pictures, this book documents an historic turning point in the life of the modern world.
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Crossing Into America
The New Literature Of Immigration$24.95This outstanding collection captures the diverse voices of the new literature of American immigration. Bringing together beautiful writing from celebrated authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Chang-Rae Lee, Crossing into America fills the literary void in public discussion about immigration.
Since the immigration reforms of 1965 removed many of the racial barriers in American immigration laws, a new wave of immigrants has visibly transformed a society that has long prided itself on being a nation of immigrants. Crossing into America includes stories and memoirs of writers born in Mexico, Kashmir, the Philippines, South Africa, and Romania, as well as poignant reflections on the immigrant experience by the children of immigrants. This book follows these newest arrivals—from their home countries through their engagement with America—and also includes an accessible history of immigration policy, cartoons, and newspaper stories, and a section of conversations with activists, journalists, and scholars working in the front lines of our immigration battles. -
The New Americans
$18.95 – $27.95 -
Guests and Aliens
$17.95Guests and Aliens presents a comprehensive analysis of worldwide immigration by one of the world’s leading experts on globalization. Putting the current “crisis” of immigration into a historical context for the first time, Sassen suggests that the American experience represents only one phase in a history of global border crossing. She describes the mass migrations of Italians and Eastern European Jews during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the international dislocations—particularly after the end of World War II—that have engendered the “refugee” concept. Using these examples, Sassen explores the causes of immigration that have resulted in nations’ welcoming incomers as “guests” or disparaging them as “aliens,” and outlines an “enlightened approach” (Publishers Weekly) to improving US and European immigration policies.
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Letters of Transit
Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss$17.95“Moving, deeply introspective and honest” (Publishers Weekly) reflections on exile and memory from five award-winning authors. All of the authors in Letters of Transit have written award-winning works on exile, home, and memory, using the written word as a tool for revisiting their old homes or fashioning new ones. Now in paperback are five newly commissioned essays offering moving distillations of their most important thinking on these themes. Andre Aciman traces his migrations and compares his own transience with the uprootedness of many moderns. Eva Hoffman examines the crucial role of language and what happens when your first one is lost. Edward Said defends his conflicting political and cultural allegiances. Novelist Bharati Mukherjee explores her own struggle with assimilation. Finally, Charles Simic remembers his thwarted attempts at “fitting in” in America.
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Ellis Island and the Peopling of America
The Official Guide$19.95Over 3 million people visit Ellis Island, the “Golden Door to America,” every year. Ellis Island has become an invaluable resource center on immigration and genealogy as well as a national tourist attraction, widely praised for its excellent displays and informative exhibits. Now, the best of the Ellis Island Museum is available to readers everywhere from the Ellis Island-Statue of Liberty Foundation. Fascinating primary-source documents offer an exciting overview of Ellis Island, placing it in historical context with a concise history of immigration and global migration. This comprehensive guide is a must for anyone interested in immigration in general and Ellis Island in particular.
Ellis Island: A Reader and Resource Guide includes:
- Entry interviews with immigrants
- Descriptions of mental and physical health evaluations
- Oral histories and memoirs of immigrants and immigration officers
- Correspondence from the 1921 Commissioner of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor
- Census information on immigrants
- Photographs and prints from the 1800s to the present
- Maps, charts, graphs, and political cartoons
- Activities and topics for writing and discussion
- A bibliography of related materials: books, videos, and CD-ROMs
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Ellis Island
$16.95The French novelist Georges Perec has continually captured the American imagination, most recently with the publication of A Void, a novel written without the letter “e.” Ellis Island holds us in thrall once again. With poetic grace, insistent questioning, and a stunning carousel of images, Perec and filmmaker Robert Bober open our eyes to the intriguing blend of permanence and transience that is Ellis Island.
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