ImmigrationProf Blog

Throwback Thursday: Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World's Largest Immigration Detention System

Detain and Punish has already been a Throwback Thursday feature. In 2021, I offered it up as a throwback read after a series of headlines regarding Haitian migrants at the Southern border here, here, here, and here.

Now, of course, the U.S. turns its attention to Haitian migrants once more. For the first time in memory, a mainstream vice presidential candidate (amplified by his presidential running mate) is spreading outright lies about Haitian migrants. See Kevin's excellent coverage here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. 

Once again, our current crisis must be viewed through the lens of our nation's historical treatment of Haitian asylum seekers. And on that front, I can think of no better Throwback Thursday recommendation than Carl Lindskoog's 2018 book Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World's Largest Immigration Detention System.

If you're unfamiliar with it, here's the pitch:

Immigrants make up the largest proportion of federal prisoners in the United States, incarcerated in a vast network of more than two hundred detention facilities. This book investigates when detention became a centerpiece of U.S. immigration policy, revealing why the practice was reinstituted in 1981 after being halted for several decades and how the system expanded to become the world’s largest immigration detention regime. From the Krome Detention Center in Miami to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to jails and prisons across the country, Haitians have been at the center of the story of immigration detention. When an influx of Haitian migrants and asylum seekers came to the U.S. in the 1970s, the government responded with exclusionary policies and detention, setting a precedent for future waves of immigrants. Carl Lindskoog details the discrimination Haitian refugees faced and how their resistance to this treatment―in the form of legal action and activism―prompted the government to reinforce its detention program and create an even larger system of facilities. Drawing on extensive archival research, including government documents, advocacy group archives, and periodicals, Lindskoog provides the first in-depth history of Haitians and immigration detention in the United States. Lindskoog asserts that systems designed for Haitian refugees laid the groundwork for the way immigrants to America are treated today. Detain and Punish provides essential historical context for the challenges faced by today’s immigrant groups, which are some of the most critical issues of our time.

My topic of the week in Crimmigration has been "immigration detention." And to explain to students how Haitian migrants inspired modern detention practices--in the shadow of the attacks on Haitian migrants in Ohio--well, it's a new kind of depressing. Sure, I can analogize to other repeated immigration stories--the 1880s fears that Chinese migrants wouldn't assimilate and would take American jobs compared to modern rhetoric regarding Latin/x migration. But the abject fear of/distaste for Haitian migrants is so clearly grounded in race and colorism. It is disheartening.

-KitJ

The KKK and U.S. Immigration Law

 

I have been looking at the role of the KKK in supporting federal immigration legislation, including the Immigration Act of 1924 and its national origins quotas system.  Two relatively recent books lay out important history of the Klan in the 1920s, an era in which the KKK was a legitimate political player and deeply integrated into the political and social fabric of many communities, north and south.

Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (2017)

The KKK of the 1920s had millions of members outside the South. It targeted Catholics and Jews as well as Blacks, and had great success at electing governors and congressmen. It passed immigrant restrictions that remained in effect until 1965.  Historian Linda Gordon explains HERE her book The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan and the American Political Tradition. 

 

A Fever in the Heartland:  The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Eagan (paperback – June 2024)

 Here is the publisher's summary of the book:

"The Roaring Twenties--the Jazz Age--has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.

Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he’d become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows – their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman – Madge Oberholtzer – who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND marries a propulsive drama to a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history."

 

KJ

From the Bookshelves . . .Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum

Michele Waslin and Carol Cleaveland have a forthcoming book, Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum.

The book presents the stories of 46 women from Central America who were forced to flee their homes because of horrific domestic or gang violence and are in the midst of the asylum process in the United States. The book tells the women’s histories prior to crossing the border, and the legal strategies they use to convince immigration judges that rape and other forms of “private violence” should merit asylum despite laws built on Cold War era assumptions that persecution occurs in the public sphere by state actors. The book also relies on interviews with immigration judges and attorneys and court observations.

The book will be published by NYU Press on October 15, 2024.

Private Violence can be pre-ordered through NYU Press here. 

IE

From the Bookshelves: Responses to Sea Migration and the Rule of Law by Katia Bianchini

Responses to Sea Migration and the Rule of Law by Katia Bianchini

The publisher's abstract:

"In the current debates on sea migration there is a dearth of works drawing on the rule of law. This important book addresses this failing.

Considering the question from that conceptual framework, it is able to broaden the sometimes fragmented and incomplete perspective of existing scholarship. The book takes as its central case study the experience of Italy, exploring the legal issues at play there and its institutional practices and policies. From here its focus broadens out to the wider EU experience, looking in particular at those problems common to southern EU states, such as failures and delays in assisting migrants in distress at sea and contested legal grounds and practices concerning interceptions at sea. It combines both legal and empirical data, charting both the black letter law and how it operates in practice.

In a field as complex as this, this clarity is key; it allows lawyers, political scientists and policymakers to truly engage with the challenges sea migration poses today.

Table of Contents

Part 1
1. Introduction and Scope of the Book
2. The Rule of Law as a Critical Lens
3. International and EU Legal Frameworks Relevant to Sea Migration
Part 2
4. Failures and Delays in Assisting Migrants in Distress at Sea
5. Contested Legal Grounds and Practices Concerning Interceptions at Sea
6. Legal Provisions, Policies, and Case Law on NGOs Engaged in Search and Rescue Activities
Part 3
7. Final Reflections
List of Interviews
List of NGOs Engaged in Search and Rescues in the Mediterranean
Glossary
Bibliography"

 

KJ

Immigration Article of the Day: Nonrefoulement: Responding to Asylum-seekers through the Prism of Subversive Stories: A Study of Three Trials of Innocence by Craig Mousin

“Nonrefoulement: Responding to Asylum-seekers through the Prism of Subversive Stories: A Study of Three Trials of Innocence,” a chapter in Furthering Interfaith Biblical Scholarship, A Festschrift in Memory of André LaCocque (Wipf & Stock, 2024), links biblical scholarship to asylum and refugee law to engage the critical issue of how nation-states respond to the contemporary demands of asylum-seekers.  The chapter focuses on Dr. LaCocque’s contention that the biblical narrative calls all who follow it to respond to a daily trial of innocence to do well or to not do well.  The first trial briefly explores the world’s failure to respond to refugees prior to and during World War II.  Subsequently, with the advent of the Refugee Convention of 1951 and the United States Refugee Act of 1980, the adopting nations established the second trial as individual asylum-seekers present their cases to determine eligibility for asylum and resettlement.   The initial promises of the Convention and the Refuge Act undergo a third trial as increased numbers of asylum-seekers flee conditions unanticipated by the drafters of the Convention including the consequences of climate change and exploitive extractive industries that frequently corrupt governments that repress their citizens. Extensive biblical scholarship regarding immigration and refugees focuses on the biblical call to welcome the stranger.  Although this chapter recognizes that imperative, it further explores the subversive stories that can encourage asylum-seekers, those who work with them, and rebut some of the arguments that white Christian nationalists employ to support policies of exclusion and deportation. 

 

KJ

From the Bookshelves: Sarah Towle, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands (June 2024)

 

Sarah Towle talks about her book Crossing the Line:  Finding America in the Borderlands (June 2024) in this podcast.  Here is the publisher's pitch for the book:

"It was family separation and `kids in cages' that drove Sarah Towle to the U.S. southern border. On discovering the many-headed hydra that is the U.S. immigration system—and the heroic determination of those caught under its knee—she could never look away again. Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands charts Sarah’s journey from outrage to activism to abolition as she exposes, layer by `broken' layer, the global deterrence to detention to deportation complex that is failing everyone—save the profiteers and demagogues who benefit from it.

Deftly weaving together oral storytelling, history, and memoir, Sarah illustrates how the U.S. has led the retreat from post-WWII commitments to protecting human rights. Yet within the web of normalized cruelty, she finds hope and inspiration in the extraordinary acts of ordinary people who prove, every day, there is a better way. By amplifying their voices and celebrating their efforts, Sarah reveals that we can welcome with dignity those most in need of safety and compassion. In unmasking the real root causes of the so-called “crisis” in human migration, she urges us to act before we travel much farther down our current course—one which history will not soon forgive, or forget."

KJ

A Book on the Horizon: Borders and Belonging (forthcoming Oxford University Press, 2025) by Hiroshi Motomura

Introduction to: Borders and Belonging  Introduction to Borders and Belonging, a book to be published in 2025, by Hiroshi Motomura

This excerpt is the Introduction to Hiroshi Motomura, Borders and Belonging (Oxford University Press forthcoming early 2025). Borders and Belonging is a comprehensive yet compact analysis of responses by governments, communities, and people to human migration. It is for a general audience that wants to view migration issues from many different perspectives. Though working primarily with policies and trends in the United States, the book interprets them for an intended worldwide audience. By combining questions that are rarely asked together, this book’s approach is unique. 

 

KJ

From the Bookshelves: Sin Padres Ni Papeles by Stephanie Canizales

Congratulations to BIMI faculty director Prof. Stephanie L. Canizales, for publishing her book titled "Sin Padres Ni Papeles." The book traces the experiences unaccompanied teens in Los Angeles who grow up as undocumented low-wage workers, navigating unthinkable material and emotional hardship, finding the agency and hope that is required to survive, and discovering what it means to be successful during the transition to adulthood in the United States. 

You can find out more and order it at https://www.sinpadresnipapeles.com/ 

MHC

Over 1 Million Were Deported to Mexico Nearly 100 Years Ago. Most of Them Were US Citizens

A Book on the Mexican Repatriation

Tyche Hendricks for KQED in the San Francisco Bay Area offers some history supporting a bill pending in the California state legislature that would commemorate the so-called "Mexican Repatriation" a mass removal of persons of Mexican ancestry -- U.S. citizens as well as immigrants --  during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  "[T]he bill’s backers say it’s all the more relevant in this election year when mass deportation is again a political topic."

The Mexican Repatriation began in 1930, as the Great Depression took hold. President Herbert Hoover had announced a plan to ensure “American jobs for real Americans.”

As Hendricks describes it, the bill, SB 537, would authorize a nonprofit organization representing Mexican Americans or immigrants to build a memorial in Los Angeles recognizing the people who were repatriated.

KJ

From The Bookshelves: Walled, edited by Andréanne Bissonnette & Élisabeth Vallet

Walled: Barriers, Migration, and Resistance in the U.S.-Mexico Borderland, edited by Andréanne Bissonnette & Élisabeth Vallet, will be published by the University of Arizona Press. Unfortunately, you read that right. will. It's not out yet. The anticipated publication date is March 2025.

You can't yet read the collection, but you can get excited for it by reading the promo:

In 1993, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton oversaw the construction of the first stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border walls. Since that pivotal moment, every subsequent U.S. president has allowed for the construction of additional miles of walls or fences. Despite his initial pledge to halt the expansion of border walls, in July 2022, President Joe Biden authorized the construction of new sections in four locations within Arizona. This decision underscores the enduring complexity and contentious nature of the U.S.-Mexico border infrastructure.

From the bustling San Diego–Tijuana region to the borderlands of Brownsville-Matamoros, the U.S.-Mexico border is marked by extensive stretches of walls. Over the past thirty years, these walls have evolved from purely physical barriers into multifaceted systems encompassing administrative, legal, legislative, and biometric components. This volume invites readers to reflect on the transformations of the border since the construction of the initial fourteen miles of wall, and the subsequent addition of 1,940 miles. It provides a comprehensive exploration of the border’s evolution, and its profound and lasting impacts.

Bringing together recognized scholars in border studies, Walled delves into the varied manifestations and lived experiences associated with U.S.-Mexico border walls. The introduction by Andréanne Bissonnette and Élisabeth Vallet offers a thorough review of the border walls’ thirty-year history, placing it within a global context. Contributions offer diverse perspectives of the border experience, from state policies and migrant experiences to the daily lives of border residents. Topics such as militarization, migration, artistic resistance, and humanitarian aid are carefully examined. This volume is an essential resource for policymakers, activists, scholars, and anyone seeking to understand the intricate realities of border communities and the far-reaching consequences of border policies.

The contributors include Susana Báez-Ayala, Andréanne Bissonnette, Mathilde Bourgeon, Silvia M. Chávez-Baray, Irasema Coronado, Thalia D’Aragon-Giguère, Erin Hoekstra, Anthony Jimenez, T. Mark Montoya, Eva M. Moya, Scott Nicol, Héctor Antonio Padilla Delgado, Lisa Sun-Hee Park, Tony Payan, Patricia Ravelo-Blancas, David A. Shirk, Allyson Teague, and Élisabeth Vallet.

-KitJ

From the Bookshelves: Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum by Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin

Private Violence:  Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum by Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin (NYU Press, forthcoming 2024)

This bool may interest ImmigrationProf blog readers.  From the publisher:

"How the US asylum process fails to protect against claims of gender-based violence

Through eyewitness accounts of closed-court proceedings and powerful testimony from women who have sought asylum in the United States because of severe assaults and death threats by intimate partners and/or gang members, Private Violence examines how immigration laws and policies shape the lives of Latin American women who seek safety in the United States. Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin describe the women’s histories prior to crossing the border, and the legal strategies they use to convince Immigration Judges that rape and other forms of “private violence” should merit asylum – despite laws built on Cold War era assumptions that persecution occurs in the public sphere by state actors.

Private Violence provides much-needed recommendations for incorporating a gender-based lens in the asylum process. The authors demonstrate how policy changes across Presidential administrations have made it difficult for survivors of “private violence” to qualify for asylum. Private Violence paints a damning portrait of America’s broken asylum system. This volume illustrates the difficulties experienced by Latin American women who rely on this broken system for protection in the United States. It also illuminates women’s resilience and the determination of immigration attorneys to reshape asylum law."

KJ

The beauty and entitlement of traveling as a tourist

I ran across this interesting podcast on NPR's Code Switch.  "Summer is a time when many Americans take off from work and set their sights on far-off destinations like tropical beaches, fairy-tale cities and sun-drenched countrysides. But in her book Airplane Mode, travel writer Shahnaz Habib warns of recklessly embracing what she calls `passport privilege' and how it can skew peoples' images of what the world is and whom it belongs to."

Airplane Mode makes the point that "[t]he color of one’s skin and passport have long dictated the conditions of travel. For Shahnaz Habib, travel and travel writing have always been complicated pleasures. Habib threads the history of travel with her personal story as a child on family vacations in India, an adult curious about the world, and an immigrant for whom roundtrips are an annual fact of life. Tracing the power dynamics that underlie tourism, this insightful debut parses who gets to travel, and who gets to write about the experience."

The podcast provided much food for thought.  I learned about "passportism," the discrimination against people from certain (usually developing) nations.

KJ

Protect Your People: New Book on Participatory Defense by Raj Jayadev

Just out this month!

A new book by Raj Jayadev on participatory defense: Protect Your People: How Ordinary Families Are Using Participatory Defense to Challenge Mass Incarceration.

This book features the work being done at Silicon Valley De-Bug and grassroots participatory defense "hubs" around the country to empower people facing incarceration and their families to participate actively in their cases. This powerful model shifts the dynamic in courtrooms to allow family members, loved ones, and those facing incarceration to tell their stories, cutting years, and even decades, off of possible sentences. The new book sets forth the model in detail and features interventions key to participatory defense such as social biographies and community experts.

Chapter 5 on "Crimmigration" will be of particular interest to readers of ImmigrationProf. The chapter features contributions by Phal Sok and others discussing how participatory defense has been used to stop ICE deportations.

The book is published by The New Press and available in paperback. More information is available here.

IE

From The Bookshelves: Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

For your next beach/plane/summer read, I submit Catalina--the debut novel of author Karla Cornejo Villavicencio. (She's previously published a nonfiction book: The Undocumented Americans.) Here's the official pitch:

When Catalina is admitted to Harvard, it feels like the fulfillment of destiny: a miracle child escapes death in Latin America, moves to Queens to be raised by her undocumented grandparents, and becomes one of the chosen. But nothing is simple for Catalina, least of all her own complicated, contradictory, ruthlessly probing mind. Now a senior, she faces graduation to a world that has no place for the undocumented; her sense of doom intensifies her curiosities and desires. She infiltrates the school’s elite subcultures—internships and literary journals, posh parties and secret societies—which she observes with the eye of an anthropologist and an interloper’s skepticism: she is both fascinated and repulsed. Craving a great romance, Catalina finds herself drawn to a fellow student, an actual budding anthropologist eager to teach her about the Latin American world she was born into but never knew, even as her life back in Queens begins to unravel. And every day, the clock ticks closer to the abyss of life after graduation. Can she save her family? Can she save herself? What does it mean to be saved?

Brash and daring, part campus novel, part hagiography, part pop song, Catalina is unlike any coming-of-age novel you’ve ever read—and Catalina, bright and tragic, circled by a nimbus of chaotic energy, driven by a wild heart, is a character you will never forget.

WaPo's review of the work characterizes it thusly: "Catalina’s journey plows a road of longing — for a place in a world that does not want her back or, at best, is confused by her mere existence." 

-KitJ

From the Bookshelves: Regina of Warsaw: Love, Loss and Liberation by Geri Spieler

Regina of Warsaw: Love, Loss and Liberation by Geri Spieler (2024)

The publisher's description of the book:

"Regina Anuszewicz looked forward to visiting her sister in Bialystok for a late afternoon stroll along the Bialy River. It was June 1906, and it should have been an exciting time to stay overnight in the women's boarding house. However, a violent pogrom blasted those plans as a rage of violence shook the town and Regina's hopes. Russian soldiers swarmed the streets and homes, stomping up to her sister's boarding house, forcing Regina to hide inside the wardrobe, barely able to breathe as she heard screams and people begging for their lives. The trauma of that day shaped Regina's life and every decision she made as she moved through the days and years, coloring her approach to every event that took her from Poland to the United States and the four children she sought to protect."

 Here is a positive review.

KJ

Empirical Studies on Migrants and Crime

Trump's speech last week, accepting the RNC's nomination, was riddled with assertions that the country's "illegal immigration crisis" has "spread... crime."

Empirical studies on migrants and crime tell a different story. The following paragraphs are adapted from section 1.2 of my new crimmigration casebook wherein I address the myth of noncitizen criminality:

***

Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president for economic and social policy studies of the libertarian thinktank the CATO Institute, published a study in 2018 based on data from the Texas Department of Public Safety. Nowrasteh found that “For all criminal convictions in Texas in 2015, illegal immigrants had a criminal conviction rate 50 percent below that of native-born Americans. Legal immigrants had a criminal conviction rate 66 percent below that of native-born Americans.” See Criminal Immigrants in Texas: Illegal Immigrant Conviction and Arrest Rates for Homicide, Sex Crimes, Larceny, and Other Crimes (2018). https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/irpb-4-updated.pdf.

Sociologists Michael T. Light and Ty Miller published a broader, longitudinal study of immigration and crime in 2018. Light and Miller combined “newly developed estimates of the unauthorized population with multiple data sources to capture the criminal, socioeconomic, and demographic context of all 50 states and Washington, DC, from 1990 to 2014.” They found that “Increases in the undocumented immigrant population within states are associated with significant decreases in the prevalence of violence.” See Michael T. Light & Ty Miller, Does Undocumented Immigration Increase Violent Crime, 56 Criminology 370 (2018), https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30464356/.

Criminologists Charis Kubrin and Graham Ousey published a book on noncitizen criminality in 2023 titled Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock. Looking at numerous studies, they found either no connection between immigration and crime or a “negative association” between immigrants and crime. In other words, they found that more immigration corresponds with less crime. As the authors told CNN, crimes committed by noncitizens that become “high profile incidents” and the focus of media and politicians are “not the norm. They’re the outlier.” 

Finally, Stanford economist Ran Abramitzky took a different approach to examining noncitizen criminality in his 2023 study with co-authors Leah Platt Boustan, Elisa Jácome, Santiago Pérez, and Juan David Torres. They looked at incarceration data from 1870 to 2020 and found that “immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for 150 years.” They also found that immigrants today are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than US-born individuals. See Law-Abiding Immigrants: The Incarceration Gap Between Immigrants and the US-born, 1870-2020 (2023), https://www.cato.org/research-briefs-economic-policy/law-abiding-immigrants-incarceration-gap-between-immigrants-us-born.

***

Just a few cites to bring to the table for when you're next debating the issue of noncitizen criminality.

-KitJ

Open-Access Crimmigration Casebook & Statutory Supplement

Introducing Crimmigration Law: An Open Casebook and its partner Crimmigration Law: Statutory Supplement 2024. These are new open-source/open-access teaching materials designed for a course on, naturally, crimmigration.

The casebook includes explanations and primary source readings regarding U.S. immigration law, the immigration consequences of criminal conduct, immigration detention, noncitizens in the criminal justice system, federal immigration crimes, states and immigration, border enforcement, and interior immigration enforcement. Most sections begin with a brief history of the topic and end with problems to test students’ knowledge.

The statutory supplement includes those portions of the United States code that concern the intersection of immigration with criminal law and procedure.

You can download .pdf and .docx versions of the documents at the links above. Paperback copies are also available on Amazon, where the casebook is currently priced at$11.53 and the statutory supplement is currently priced at $4.73.

The books have a Creative Commons license that allows adopters to add to, delete from, abridge, rearrange, and alter the works as best fits their courses. (See "Notices" inside each book.) This means that the books can be a jumping-off point for your own bespoke course materials. You can take either book in its .docx format and pull it apart, re-arrange it into the order you prefer, and add/delete materials. In the end, you’ll have materials tailored to your specific class, that you’re happy with, at a fraction of the effort because you’re not starting from scratch!

Questions? Adopting the book? Email kit.johnson at ou.edu.

-KitJ

Summertime (Fun) Reading

I picked up two novels that touch on civil rights (but not immigration issues to distract me from the press about the 2024 presidential race.  Both were great distractions and fun reads.

Camino Ghosts by John Grisham

As the publisher's abstract describes, "[t]he true story is about Dark Isle, a sliver of a barrier island not far off the North Florida coast. It was settled by freed slaves three hundred years ago, and their descendants lived there until 1955, when the last one was forced to leave. That last descendant is Lovely Jackson, elderly now, who loves her birthplace and its remarkable history. But now Tidal Breeze, a huge, ruthless corporate developer, wants to build a resort and casino on the island, which Lovely knows, deep down, is rightfully hers."

 

Calamity of Souls by David Baldacci

Here is the publisher's teaser:  "Set in the tumultuous year of 1968 in southern Virginia, a racially-charged murder case sets a duo of white and Black lawyers against a deeply unfair system as they work to defend their wrongfully-accused Black defendants in this courtroom drama from #1 New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci."

KJ

Shackled Should Be Your Next Read. Seriously.

I DEVOURED Shackled, the new book by immprof Becky Sharpless (Miami), this week. I would've finished it in one night, if I'd gotten sufficient sleep the night before. Instead, I read it in two fell swoops instead of one.

It is hard to believe that this is Becky's first major work of narrative nonfiction. It is, no exaggeration, a masterpiece.

The book takes the reader backwards and forwards in time, following the stories of two very different men whose lives happen to converge in one horrible moment--aboard ICE Air Flight N225AX, shackled, on their way to being repatriated to Somalia.

The narrative shifts never leave the reader confused or lost. Instead, each chapter reveals a new layer to each man's story. You'll be on the edge of your seat til the very end (quite literally the last five paragraphs!), equal parts enthralled and horrified by the stories Becky documents. 

This book is so good that I even diligently read the Sources and Notes, which are also written in an engaging narrative style instead of awkward Blue Book citations.

If you're lucky enough to teach a seminar on immigration or if you're in charge of picking the next read for your book club--look no further. Shackled is it.

-KitJ

From The Bookshelves: Northern Boy by Iqbal Hussain

I've got another great summer read for you: Northern Boy by Iqbal Hussain. Check it out:

Joyful, defiant and dazzling, this is the story of Rafi Aziz – a Northern boy dreaming of his name up in lights.

It's 1981 in the suburbs of Blackburn and, as Rafi’s mother reminds him daily, the family moved here from Pakistan to give him the best opportunities. But Rafi longs to follow his own path. Flamboyant, dramatic and musically gifted, he wants to be a Bollywood star.

Twenty years later, Rafi is flying home from Australia for his best friend’s wedding. He has everything he ever wanted: starring roles in musical theatre, the perfect boyfriend and freedom from expectation. But returning to Blackburn is the ultimate test: can he show his true self to his community?

Navigating family and identity from boyhood to adulthood, as well as the changing eras of ABBA, skinheads and urbanisation, Rafi must follow his heart to achieve his dreams.

The publisher also offers this description: Billy Elliot meets Bend It Like Beckham. I mean, sold, amiright?

-KitJ