ImmigrationProf Blog

Reviews of Citizenship History Books

Anna Law reviews for Law and Politics Book Review two books that analyze the evolution of the law of U.S. citizenship:

YOU ARE NOT AMERICAN: CITIZENSHIP STRIPPING FROM DRED SCOTT TO THE DREAMERS by Amanda Frost and

AMERICAN BY BIRTH: WONG KIM ARK AND THE BATTLE FOR CITIZENSHIP by Carol Nackenoff and Julie Nokov

Law's bottom line:

"On balance, whether one is a specialist in the field of U.S. citizenship and immigration policy and law, or a newcomer hoping to learn more, there is something valuable and new for you. Both books deliver a textured understanding of the unsteady development of American citizenship, and will be fantastic additions to one’s syllabi or works cited pages."

KJ

 

From The Bookshelves: Does Skill Make Us Human?

Natasha N. Iskander, Professor of Urban Planning and Public Service at NYU's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, is the author of Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond (2021). Here's the overview:

Skill—specifically the distinction between the “skilled” and “unskilled”—is generally defined as a measure of ability and training, but Does Skill Make Us Human? shows instead that skill distinctions are used to limit freedom, narrow political rights, and even deny access to imagination and desire. Natasha Iskander takes readers into Qatar’s booming construction industry in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup, and through her unprecedented look at the experiences of migrant workers, she reveals that skill functions as a marker of social difference powerful enough to structure all aspects of social and economic life.

Through unique access to construction sites in Doha, in-depth research, and interviews, Iskander explores how migrants are recruited, trained, and used. Despite their acquisition of advanced technical skills, workers are commonly described as unskilled and disparaged as “unproductive,” “poor quality,” or simply “bodies.” She demonstrates that skill categories adjudicate personhood, creating hierarchies that shape working conditions, labor recruitment, migration policy, the design of urban spaces, and the reach of global industries. Iskander also discusses how skill distinctions define industry responses to global warming, with employers recruiting migrants from climate-damaged places at lower wages and exposing these workers to Qatar’s extreme heat. She considers how the dehumanizing politics of skill might be undone through tactical solidarity and creative practices.

With implications for immigrant rights and migrant working conditions throughout the world, Does Skill Make Us Human? examines the factors that justify and amplify inequality.

-KitJ

From the Bookshelves: The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Kevin Kenny

The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Kevin Kenny (Oxford University Press, April 2023)

Here is the publisher's abstract of what appears to be a very interesting book:

"A powerful analysis of how regulation of the movement of enslaved and free black people produced a national immigration policy in the period between the American Revolution and the end of Reconstruction.

Today the United States considers immigration a federal matter. Yet, despite America's reputation as a "nation of immigrants," the Constitution is silent on the admission, exclusion, and expulsion of foreigners. Before the Civil War, the federal government played virtually no role in regulating immigration, and states set their own terms for regulating the movement of immigrants, free blacks, and enslaved people. Insisting that it was their right and their obligation to protect the public health and safety, states passed their own laws prohibiting the arrival of foreign convicts, requiring shipmasters to post bonds or pay taxes for passengers who might become public charges, ordering the deportation of immigrant paupers, quarantining passengers who carried contagious diseases, excluding or expelling free blacks, and imprisoning black sailors. To the extent that these laws affected foreigners, they comprised the immigration policy of the United States.

Offering an original interpretation of nineteenth-century America, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic argues that the existence, abolition, and legacies of slavery were central to the emergence of a national immigration policy. In the century after the American Revolution, states controlled mobility within and across their borders and set their own rules for community membership. Throughout the antebellum era, defenders of slavery feared that, if Congress gained control over immigration, it could also regulate the movement of free black people and the interstate slave trade. The Civil War and the abolition of slavery removed the political and constitutional obstacles to a national immigration policy, which was first directed at Chinese immigrants. Admission remained the norm for Europeans, but Chinese laborers were excluded through techniques of registration, punishment, and deportation first used against free black people in the antebellum South. To justify these
measures, the Supreme Court ruled that immigration authority was inherent in national sovereignty and required no constitutional justification. The federal government continues to control admissions and exclusions today, while some states monitor and punish immigrants, and others offer sanctuary and refuse to act as agents of federal law enforcement.

By revealing the tangled origins of border control, incarceration, and deportation, distinguished historian Kevin Kenny sheds light on the history of race and belonging in America, as well as the ongoing tensions between state and federal authority over immigration."

KJ

From the Bookshelves: Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World by Anna Lekas Miller (forthcoming June 6, 2023)

 

 

Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World (Algonquin Books; forthcoming June 6, 2023) by Anna Lekas Miller illustrates the journeys of couples around the world who must navigate the ever-changing immigration laws and ambiguous systems to be together—as she did to be with her husband.

Love Across Borders is the story of how Lekas Miller and her partner, Salem, fought to stay together, but it’s also the stories of many others, woven together through each other’s shared frustration over borders, and their desire to love despite them. It takes readers through contentious frontiers around the world, from Turkey to Iraq, Syria to Greece, Mexico to the United States, to reveal the laws intent on dividing us. Lekas Miller carefully details the endless hurdles that she and Salem, who is Syrian, had to face while in Istanbul, when they were both reporting on the Syrian civil war. When Turkey started cracking down on refugees, Salem wasn’t allowed to stay, nor could he safely return to Syria. While his mobility was severely limited, Lekas Miller’s American passport left her with various possibilities, though she knew her home was now wherever Salem could reside safely.

As they navigated his asylum claims, the United States’ Muslim ban, and labyrinthine regulations in several different countries, Lekas Miller learned about—and naturally bonded with—other people whose spouses had been deported, who found love in refugee camps, whose differing immigration statuses caused complicated power dynamics and financial hardship in their relationships or threatened the wellbeing of their children. From Wala’a who took a notoriously dangerous boat trip from the Turkish coast to Greece to meet and later marry the love of her life, Ahmed, to Cecilia, who has borne the burden of singlehandedly supporting her family and loved her husband from afar ever since he was deported to Mexico nine years ago, Lekas Miller beautifully provides us with snapshots into the myriad ways that borders shape our lives and impact our ability to be with the people we love.

“I set out to write this book to chronicle the stories of people who love one another despite borders. It is the story of Syrian lovers who fell for each other despite being separated by the Mediterranean Sea, and of a Honduran queer couple who fled street gangs and death threats to be together, only to be separated by ICE agents once they crossed into the US.” Lekas Millers says. “This book is a journey into the hearts of people fighting an unjust system to be together. Writing it helped me make sense of the way that borders shaped my own relationship and build a community of people fighting for the right to love and be loved.” Love Across Borders offers a fascinating look at the history of passports (a shockingly recent institution) and the discriminatory laws shaping how people move through the world every day, all while delving into these rich love stories across the world.

KJ

Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Impact on Citizenship and Immigration Law: Through Her Opinions

Be on the lookout for this analysis of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's immigration and citizenship opinions.  M. Isabel Medina, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Impact on Citizenship and Immigration Law:  Through Her Opinions, in The Jurisprudential Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, edited by Ryan Vacca and Ann Bartow (NYU Press 2023).

KJ

From the Bookshelves: Dreamland: America's Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction by Carly Goodman (forthcoming May 2023)

Dreamland:  America's Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction by Carly Goodman

400 pp., Published: May 2023

Author Website

Follow the Author on Twitter

The University of North Carolina Press description of the book:

"In a world of border walls and obstacles to migration, a lottery where winners can gain permanent residency in the United States sounds too good to be true. Just as unlikely is the idea that the United States would make such visas available to foster diversity within a country where systemic racism endures. But in 1990, the United States Diversity Visa Lottery was created to do just that.

Dreamland tells the surprising story of this unlikely government program and its role in American life as well as the global story of migration. Historian Carly Goodman takes readers from Washington, D.C., where proponents deployed a colorblind narrative about our `nation of immigrants' to secure visas for white immigrants, to the African countries where it flourished and fostered dreams of going to America. From the post office to the internet, aspiring emigrants, visa agents, and others embraced the lottery and tried their luck in a time of austerity and limits. Rising African immigration to the United States has enriched American life, created opportunities for mobility, and nourished imagined possibilities. But the promise of the American dream has been threatened by the United States' embrace of anti-immigrant policies and persistent anti-Black racism."

KJ

From the Bookshelves: Ukrainians in Michigan by Paul M. Hedeen & Maryna Hedeen

Ukrainians in Michigan by Paul M. Hedeen & Maryna Hedeen paper | $21.95 160 pgs. | 5.50 x 8.50    Publisher's abstract: "This history of Ukrainian immigrants in Michigan and their American descendants examines both the choices people made and the social forces that impelled their decisions to migrate and to make new homes in the state. Michigan’s Ukrainians came in four waves, each unique in time and character, beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing in the twenty-first. Detroit attracted many of them with the opportunities it offered in its booming automobile industry. Yet others put down roots in cities and towns across the state. Wherever they settled, they established churches and community centers and continued to practice the customs of their homeland. Many Ukrainian Americans have made significant contributions to Michigan and the United States, including those who are showcased in this book. This comprehensive text also highlights cultural practices and traditional foods cherished by community members."   Ordering Information   KJ

From the Bookshelves: Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir by Jean Guerrero

 

 

 

 

 

Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir by Jean Guerrero

Here is the publisher's blurb on the book, which came out in paperback this month:

"From renowned journalist Jean Guerrero, here is the haunting story of a daughter’s mission to save her father from his demons and to save herself from destruction. Marco Antonio was raised in Mexico, then migrated to California, where he met Jean’s mother, Jeannette, a Puerto Rican woman just out of med school. Marco is a self-taught genius at building things—including mythologies about himself and the hidden forces that drive us. When he goes on the run, Jean follows and embarks on an investigative journey between cultures and languages, the earthly and the mystical, truth and fiction. 

A distinctive memoir about the search for an elusive parent, Crux is both a riveting adventure story and a profoundly original exploration of the mysteries of our world, our most intimate relationships, and ourselves."

 

Guerrero takes to task the Biden administration for recycling failed immigration policies in this Los Angeles Times op/ed.

 

KJ

From the Bookshelves: QUEERING THE BORDER: ESSAYS by Emma Pérez (Arte Publico Press, 2022)

QUEERING THE BORDER: ESSAYS by Emma Pérez (Arte Publico Press, 2022)

The publisher describes the book as follows:

"`You will never know how it feels to have brown skin and a Mexican name. You will never know what it is like to watch your mother struggle with white words.' In this collection of prose pieces, author and scholar Emma Pérez explores the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality.

A Chicanx queer lesbian `who honors my mother and her plight within patriarchal institutions' that limit women’s choices and opportunities, Pérez writes about issues—including sexual politics and power relations between Anglo and Hispanic men—that have impacted her Tejano family for generations. A historian by training, her work aims to decolonize the Southwest by uncovering voices from the past that validate multiple experiences.

Essays reveal the influence of Gloria Anzaldúa’s scholarship; recount the controversy surrounding artist Alma López’s digital print, “Our Lady,” in which the Virgin of Guadalupe appears in a provocative bikini; and evaluate interviews with 25 LGBTQ people in the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez area to expose life on the border as a queer of color. This collection also includes short fiction and an epistolary love poem to the first feminist of the Americas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, or in this case, Sor Juanx. Bringing together the work of a noted Chicanx writer and academic, this volume reinforces the body of work by LGBTQ people of color dealing with racism and sexism, conquest and colonization, power and privilege, all with a particular emphasis on the Southwest borderlands."

KJ

From the Bookshelves: Border Hacker: A Tale of Treachery, Trafficking, and Two Friends on the Run by Levi Vonk (2022)

Border Hacker: A Tale of Treachery, Trafficking, and Two Friends on the Run by Levi Vonk (2022)

 

 

The publisher's description of the book:

 

"An unlikely friendship, a four-thousand-mile voyage, and an impenetrable frontier—this dramatic odyssey reveals the chaos and cruelty US immigration policies have unleashed beyond our borders.

Axel Kirschner was a lifelong New Yorker, all Queens hustle and bravado. But he was also undocumented. After a minor traffic violation while driving his son to kindergarten, Axel was deported to Guatemala, a country he swore he had not lived in since he was a baby. While fighting his way back through Mexico on a migrant caravan, Axel met Levi Vonk, a young anthropologist and journalist from the US. That chance encounter would change both of their lives forever.

Levi soon discovered that Axel was no ordinary migrant. He was harboring a secret: Axel was a hacker. This secret would launch the two friends on a dangerous adventure far beyond what either of them could have imagined. While Axel’s abilities gave him an edge in a system that denied his existence, they would also ensnare him in a tangled underground network of human traffickers, corrupt priests, and anti-government guerillas eager to exploit his talents for their own ends. And along the way, Axel’s secret only raised more questions for Levi about his past. How had Axel learned to hack? What did he want? And was Axel really who he said he was?

Border Hacker is at once an adventure saga—the story of a man who would do anything to return to his family, and the friend who would do anything to help him—and a profound parable about the violence of American immigration policy told through a single, extraordinary life."

KJ

From the Bookshelves: The Refugee System: A Sociological Approach by Rawan Arar and David Scott FitzGerald

Hot off the presses! A new book by Rawan Arar and David Scott FitzGerald, The Refugee System: A Sociological Approach.

The introduction is open access. Here is a summary of the book:

Some people facing violence and persecution flee. Others stay. How do households in danger decide who should go, where to relocate, and whether to keep moving? What are the conditions in countries of origin, transit, and reception that shape people's options?

This incisive book tells the story of how one Syrian family, spread across several countries, tried to survive the civil war and live in dignity. This story forms a backdrop to explore and explain the refugee system. Departing from studies that create siloes of knowledge about just one setting or ""solution"" to displacement, the book's sociological approach describes a global system that shapes refugee movements. Changes in one part of the system reverberate elsewhere. Feedback mechanisms change processes across time and place. Earlier migrations shape later movements. Immobility on one path redirects migration along others. Past policies, laws, population movements, and regional responses all contribute to shape states’ responses in the present. As Arar and FitzGerald illustrate, all these processes are forged by deep inequalities of economic, political, military, and ideological power.

Presenting a sharp analysis of refugee structures worldwide, this book offers invaluable insights for students and scholars of international migration and refugee studies across the social sciences, as well as policy makers and those involved in refugee and asylum work.

IE

From The Bookshelves: Daughters of the New Year by E.M. Tran

There's a cold front rolling through Oklahoma which means I'm looking forward to a night of cozying up under a blanket and reading. Would I also be doing this in August? Sure. But when there's snow on the ground, it's more socially acceptable.

What to read? What to read?

Daughters of the New Year by E.M. Tran looks promising. Check out this promo:

What does the future hold for those born in the years of the Dragon, Tiger, and Goat?

In present day New Orleans, Xuan Trung, former beauty queen turned refugee after the Fall of Saigon, is obsessed with divining her daughters' fates through their Vietnamese zodiac signs. But Trac, Nhi and Trieu diverge completely from their immigrant parents' expectations. Successful lawyer Trac hides her sexuality from her family; Nhi competes as the only woman of color on a Bachelor-esque reality TV show; and Trieu, a budding writer, is determined to learn more about her familial and cultural past.

As the three sisters begin to encounter strange glimpses of long-buried secrets from the ancestors they never knew, the story of the Trung women unfurls to reveal the dramatic events that brought them to America. Moving backwards in time, E.M. Tran takes us into the high school classrooms of New Orleans, to Saigon beauty pageants, to twentieth century rubber plantations, traversing a century as the Trungs are both estranged and united by the ghosts of their tumultuous history.

A “haunted story of resilience and survival” (Meng Jin, Little Gods), Daughters of the New Year is an addictive, high-wire act of storytelling that illuminates an entire lineage of extraordinary women fighting to reclaim the power they’ve been stripped of for centuries.

-KitJ

Noon PST Today on Zoom: Professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez on Her Book Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands

Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands

Join us TODAY as UCLA Professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning Kelly Lytle Hernández discusses the migrant rebels who sparked the 1910 Mexican Revolution from the United States.

Kelly Lytle Hernández is a professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at UCLA where she holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History and directs the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (Norton, 2022). She also leads Million Dollar Hoods, a big data research initiative documenting the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. For her historical and contemporary work, Professor Lytle Hernández was named a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prize Board.

REGISTER HERE for livestream,  The event is open to the community.

Co-sponsored by UC Davis Aoki Center for Critical Race and Nation Studies, Global Migration Center, and Chicana/o Studies Department.

KJ

UPDATE 1:30 PST Feb. 1:  Professor Lytle Hernandez offered a wonderful summary of her book.  In discussing the violence against -- including lynching of -- persons of Mexican ancestry in the Texas/Mexico border region, she recommended looking at the website Refusing to Forget.  It provides a wealth of information about the horrific violence and offers background about, among other things, the role of the Texas Rangers in all of it.  Eduardo Diaz of the Smithsonian also suggested this resource on a museum exhibit on lychings ("The Starngest Fruit").  

KJ

From the Bookshelves: The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in American by Saket Soni

The New York Times called it a must-read. The Great Escape by Saket Soni is a non-fiction thriller about immigrant workers from India organizing to blow apart a post-Hurricane Katrina labor trafficking ring. It was featured on NPR's Fresh Air and Chris Hayes' podcast. 

The publisher's blurb on the book:

"The astonishing story of immigrants lured to the United States from India and trapped in forced labor—told by the visionary labor leader who engineered their escape and set them on a path to citizenship.

In late 2006, Saket Soni, a twenty-eight-year-old Indian-born community organizer, received an anonymous phone call from an Indian migrant worker in Mississippi. He was one of five hundred men trapped in squalid Gulf Coast `man camps,' surrounded by barbed wire, watched by guards, crammed into cold trailers with putrid toilets, forced to eat moldy bread and frozen rice. Recruiters had promised them good jobs and green cards. The men had scraped up $20,000 each for this “opportunity” to rebuild hurricane-wrecked oil rigs, leaving their families in impossible debt. During a series of clandestine meetings, Soni and the workers devised a bold plan. In The Great Escape, Soni traces the workers’ extraordinary escape, their march on foot to Washington, DC, and their twenty-three-day hunger strike to bring attention to their cause. Along the way, ICE agents try to deport the men, company officials work to discredit them, and politicians avert their eyes. But none of this shakes the workers’ determination to win their dignity and keep their promises to their families.

Weaving a deeply personal journey with a riveting tale of twenty-first-century forced labor, Soni takes us into the lives of the immigrant workers the United States increasingly relies on to rebuild after climate disasters. The Great Escape is the gripping story of one of the largest human trafficking cases in modern American history—and the workers’ heroic journey for justice."

KJ

Los Angeles Has Selected Six Finalists to Design a Memorial to the 1871 Chinese Massacre.

Sadly, we have seen too much hate violence in recent days, with Monterey Park a tragic example.  

Unknown to many, if not most, Angelenos, the Chinese Massacre of 1871 occurred in what is now downtown Los Angeles.  The event in brief:  "In October 1871, a simmering, small-scale turf war involving three Chinese gangs exploded into a riot that engulfed the small but growing town of Los Angeles. A large mob of white Angelenos, spurred by racial resentment, rampaged through the city and lynched some 18 people before order was restored. In The Chinatown War, Scott Zesch offers a compelling account of this little-known event, which ranks among the worst hate crimes in American history."

The City of Los Angeles is commissioning a monument to the victims of the massacre and has selected six finalists to design the 1871 Chinese Massacre Memorial.

KJ

Immigration Article of the Day: Book Review: Robert F. Barsky, Clamouring for Legal Protection: What the Great Books Teach Us About People Fleeing from Persecution by Cori Alonso-Yoder

Book Review: Robert F. Barsky, Clamouring for Legal Protection: What the Great Books Teach Us About People Fleeing from Persecution by Cori Alonso-Yoder, Forthcoming in the AALS Journal of Legal Education

Abstract

In his latest book, Robert F. Barsky makes a plea for empathy toward those seeking humanitarian protection by deepening our understanding of the humanities. In Clamouring for Legal Protection: What the Great Books Teach Us About People Fleeing from Persecution, Barsky suggests that the plight of refugees and other border crossers can be better understood by reference to classic literature. While his study is based in the law and literature movement, the book is accessible to those without that specialized background. Indeed, Barsky has crafted a book that according to the back cover synopsis will appeal to “law students, lawyers, social scientists, literary scholars and general readers who are interested in learning about international refugee law and immigration.” Barsky makes the point that the literary theory and storytelling serves as an antidote to the at times impersonal and mechanical application of laws, regulations, and dry court decisions that predominate in immigration law. He argues that students and practitioners can use literary texts to move beyond the legal texts to rehumanize the experiences of migrants. The core of Barsky’s thesis about the humanizing and persuasive effect of storytelling in the law is well founded and has been championed by a number of scholars including Gerald P. López, Margaret Montoya, Richard Delgado, Robin West, and Patricia Williams. This concept has figured prominently in my approach to teaching practical lawyering skills, and I am so pleased that Barsky’s book offers another resource that tethers this theory to the specific practice of immigration law.

KJ

From the Bookshelves: Kurzban's Immigration Law Sourcebook, 18th edition

The 18th edition of the Kurzban's Immigration Law Sourcebook is available. 

Ira Kurzban discuss the new sections and all the contents in this video:

 

Here is the introduction to the American Immigration Lawyers Association blurb for the book:

"Since the release of the first edition in 1990, Kurzban’s Immigration Law Sourcebook has been the go-to legal reference on U.S. immigration law. It cuts out lengthy explanations to provide busy legal professionals with what they need and want—comprehensive, authoritative, and concise analysis of a complicated area of law."

KJ

Immigration Books of the Year: Bad Mexicans, Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success

Two amazing immigration books stood out in 2022.  They have earned Immigration Book of the Year honors.

Bad Mexicans:  Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands by Kelly Lytle Hernández

On Fresh Air on NPR, Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández talks about her book, which tells the previously untold story of the rebels who fled Mexico to the United States and helped incite the 1910 Mexican Revolution.  Hernández spoke with guest interviewer Tonya Mosley about Bad Mexicans:  Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands. "People who were being disparaged at that time as 'bad Mexicans' in the United States were those who organized, those who protested against the conditions of what was then known as Juan Crow, a similar form of social marginalization as Jim Crow," Hernández says.

The publisher's blurb about Bad Mexicans describes the book as follows:

"Bad Mexicans tells the dramatic story of the magonistas, the migrant rebels who sparked the 1910 Mexican Revolution from the United States. Led by a brilliant but ill-tempered radical named Ricardo Flores Magón, the magonistas were a motley band of journalists, miners, migrant workers, and more, who organized thousands of Mexican workers—and American dissidents—to their cause. Determined to oust Mexico’s dictator, Porfirio Díaz, who encouraged the plunder of his country by U.S. imperialists such as Guggenheim and Rockefeller, the rebels had to outrun and outsmart the swarm of U. S. authorities vested in protecting the Diaz regime. The U.S. Departments of War, State, Treasury, and Justice as well as police, sheriffs, and spies, hunted the magonistas across the country. Capturing Ricardo Flores Magón was one of the FBI’s first cases.

But the magonistas persevered. They lived in hiding, wrote in secret code, and launched armed raids into Mexico until they ignited the world’s first social revolution of the twentieth century.

Taking readers to the frontlines of the magonista uprising and the counterinsurgency campaign that failed to stop them, Kelly Lytle Hernández puts the magonista revolt at the heart of U.S. history. Long ignored by textbooks, the magonistas threatened to undo the rise of Anglo-American power, on both sides of the border, and inspired a revolution that gave birth to the Mexican-American population, making the magonistas’ story integral to modern American life."

Bad Mexicans is a brilliant look at an important, and largely forgotten, part of U.S./Mexico history.

 

The second book explains Why Immigrant Children Excel More than US-Born Kids.  This important fact gets little play in the national discussion in the U.S. about immigration.

The Voice of America spoke to economic historians Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky, who have thoroughly studied the data comparing today's migrants to those who came to the United States a century ago.  Their findings are laid out in an important book, Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success.

“One big surprise was how well the children of immigrants are doing, and how (children of) immigrants from nearly every sending country are more upwardly mobile than the children of the U.S.-born. And how that stays constant over 100 years, regardless of the sending country,” says Abramitzky.

The reason many children of immigrants do better than their American-born counterparts can come down to location, said Boustan. “They're locating in very dynamic cities with a lot of good job opportunities, and that's helping set up their kids for success,” Boustan says. “We find that the children of the internal migrants — the U.S.-born families that move somewhere else — actually look a lot like the children of immigrants. And so, what's really happening is that immigrants are willing to move to good places, and a lot of U.S.-born families stay in the location where they were born."

Another less-apparent advantage for children of immigrants in low-paying jobs, is that their parents might have college degrees and professional skills honed in their home countries that they cannot apply in the United States, but they instill a drive for education and professional success in their children.

As a whole, the data suggests that the children of today’s immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Mexico or Guatemala who grew up in relatively poor families are doing just as well as the children of Norwegian, German and Italian immigrants of the past.  Like them, they are more likely than the children of equally poor U.S.-born parents to make it into the middle class or beyond.

KJ

From the Bookshelves: Journeys from There to Here: Stories of Immigrant Trials, Triumphs, and Contributions by Susan J. Cohen with Steven T. Taylor

Journeys from There to Here: Stories of Immigrant Trials, Triumphs, and Contributions by Susan J. Cohen with Steven T. Taylor (Nov. 2021)

Here is the publisher's blurb for the book:

"A famous writer exiled from Albania and Greece.

A Somali nomad-turned-multinational banker.

An Asian-born virtuoso violinist with perfect pitch, and many more . . .

In this eye-opening collection of immigrant trials, triumphs, and contributions, leading immigration lawyer Susan Cohen invites you to walk with her clients as they share their incredible journeys coming to America while overcoming unimaginable dangers and often heartbreaking obstacles abroad. Cohen masterfully uplifts marginalized voices, laying bare the remarkable realities of staggering hardships and inspiring resilience.

Sprinkled with amusing anecdotes, tense junctures, and heartwarming segments, you will sit front and center at the courtroom learning about US immigration policies and systems—which often become an immigrant’s greatest hurdle—while also discovering the ways unscrupulous American citizens take advantage of those not born in the States. As you ride the ups and downs and follow the zig-zagging twists and turns of their travails, you will discover the many ways immigrants from all over the world give back to their local communities and enrich the fabric of the nation. Finding yourself enmeshed in their stories, you will gain insight, grow in empathy, and come to understand what it truly takes to become an American citizen."

Cohen is an attorney at the Mintz law firm and was founding chair of the firm's immigration practice group.

KJ

From The Bookshelves: Undocumented Saints by William A. Calvo-Quirós

Undocumented Saints: The Politics of Migrating Devotions is a new book from William A. Calvo-Quirós (Michigan -- LSA Department of American Culture). Here's the pitch:

Undocumented Saints follows the migration of popular saints from Mexico into the US and the evolution of their meaning. The book explores how Latinx battles for survival are performed in the worlds of faith, religiosity, and the imaginary, and how the socio-political realities of exploitation and racial segregation frame their popular religious expressions. It also tracks the emergence of inter-religious states, transnational ethnic and cultural enclaves unified by faith.

The book looks at five vernacular saints that have emerged in Mexico and whose devotions have migrated into the US in the last one hundred years: Jesús Malverde, a popular bandido turned saint caudillo; Santa Olguita, an emerging feminist saint linked to border women's experiences of sexual violence; Juan Soldado, a murder-rapist soldier who is now a patron for undocumented immigrants and the main suspect in the death of an eight-year-old victim known now as Santa Olguita; Toribio Romo, a Catholic priest whose ghost/spirit has been helping people cross the border into the US since the 1990s; and La Santa Muerte, a controversial personification of death who is particularly popular among LGBTQ migrants. Each chapter contextualizes a particular popular saint within broader discourses about the construction of masculinity and the state, the long history of violence against Latina and migrant women, female erasure from history, discrimination against non-normative sexualities, and as US and Mexican investment in the control of religiosity within the discourses of immigration.

¡Fascinante!

-KitJ