A unique comparative study of immigrant and diaspora literatures in America

A unique comparative study of immigrant and diaspora literatures in America

A longtime immigration activist explores what it means to be an undocumented American—revealing the ever-shifting nature of status in the U.S.—in this “impassioned and well-reported case for change (New York Times) In this illuminating work, immigrant rights activist Aviva Chomsky shows how “illegality” and “undocumentedness” are concepts that were created to exclude and exploit. With a focus on US policy, she probes how people, especially Mexican and Central Americans, have been assigned this status—and to what ends. Blending history with human drama, Chomsky explores what it means to be undocumented in a legal, social, economic, and historical context. The result is a powerful testament of the complex, contradictory, and ever-shifting nature of status in America.

This edited book uses migrant marginality to problematize several different aspects of global migration. It examines how many different societies have defined their national identities, cultural values and terms of political membership through (and in opposition to) constructions of migrants and migration. The book includes case studies from Western and Eastern Europe, North America and the Caribbean. It is organized into thematic sections that illustrate how different aspects of migrant marginality have unfolded across several national contexts. The first section of the book examines the limitations of multicultural policies that have been used to incorporate migrants into the host society. The second section examines anti-immigrant discourses and get-tough enforcement practices that are geared toward excluding and removing criminalized “aliens”. The third section examines some of the gendered dimensions of migrant marginality. The fourth section examines the way that racially marginalized populations have engaged the politics of immigration, constructing themselves as either migrants or natives. The book offers researchers, policy makers and students an appreciation for the various policy concerns, ethical dilemmas and political and cultural antagonisms that must be engaged in order to properly understand the problem of migrant marginality.

In recent years, Europe has had to constantly rethink and redefine its attitude toward new flows of immigrations. Issues of boundaries and identity have been integral to this reflection. Through a magnificent collection of essays, Migrant Cartographies examines both sites and conflicts and the way in which forms of belonging and identity have been reinvented. With careful analysis and exceptional insight, this volume explores the most recent literature on migration as seen from different European viewpoints. This book fills a conspicuous void in migration literature, as there are no comprehensive books on migrant literatures in Europe that address the full range of complexities of colonial legacies and linguistic productions.

A century-long history of immigrant incarceration in the United States Today, U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains an average of 37,000 migrants each night. To do so, they rely on, and pay for, the use of hundreds of local jails. But this is nothing new: the federal government has been detaining migrants in city and county jails for more than 100 years. In The Migrant's Jail, Brianna Nofil examines how a century of political, ideological, and economic exchange between the U.S. immigration bureaucracy and the criminal justice system gave rise to the world’s largest system of migrant incarceration. Migrant detention is not simply an outgrowth of mass incarceration; rather, it has propelled carceral state–building and fostered intergovernmental policing efforts since the turn of the twentieth century. From the incarceration of Chinese migrants in New York in the 1900s and 1910s to the jailing of Caribbean refugees in Gulf South lockups of the 1980s and 1990s, federal immigration authorities provided communities with a cash windfall that they used to cut taxes, reward local officials, and build bigger jails—which they then had incentive to fill. Trapped in America’s patchwork detention networks, migrants turned to courts, embassies, and the media to challenge the cruel paradox of “administrative imprisonment.” Drawing on immigration records, affidavits, protest letters, and a variety of local sources, Nofil excavates the web of political negotiations, financial deals, and legal precedents that allows the United States to incarcerate migrants with little accountability and devastating consequences.

"John H. Rappole's sophisticated survey of field data clarifies key ecological, biological, physiological, navigational, and evolutionary concerns"--Publisher.