Books
The Shadow of el Centro by
ISBN: 9781469662473Publication Date: 2021Bounded by desert and mountains, El Centro, California, is isolated and difficult to reach. However, its location close to the border between San Diego and Yuma, Arizona, has made it an important place for Mexican migrants attracted to the valley's agricultural economy. In 1945, it also became home to the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp. The Shadow of El Centro tells the story of how that camp evolved into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service Processing Center of the 2000s and became a national model for detaining migrants--a place where the policing of migration, the racialization of labor, and detainee resistance coalesced.Border and Rule by
ISBN: 9781642592696Publication Date: 2021In Border and Rule, one of North America's foremost thinkers and immigrant rights organizers delivers an unflinching examination of migration as a pillar of global governance and gendered racial class formation. Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change generating mass dispossession worldwide. Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees.The End of the Myth by
ISBN: 9781250179814Publication Date: 2019In The End of the Myth, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin explores the meaning of the frontier throughout the full sweep of U.S. history - from the American Revolution to the War of 1898, the New Deal to the election of 2016. For centuries, he shows, America's constant expansion - fighting wars and opening markets - served as a "gate of escape," helping to deflect domestic political and economic conflicts outward. But this deflection meant that the country's problems, from racism to inequality, were never confronted directly. And now, the combined catastrophe of the 2008 financial meltdown and our unwinnable wars in the Middle East have slammed this gate shut, bringing political passions that had long been directed elsewhere back home. It is this new reality, Grandin says, that explains the rise of reactionary populism and racist nationalism, the extreme anger and polarization that catapulted Trump to the presidency.Migra! by
Call Number: Online AccessISBN: 9780520266414Publication Date: 2010This is the untold history of the United States Border Patrol from its beginnings in 1924 as a small peripheral outfit to its emergence as a large professional police force that continuously draws intense scrutiny and denunciations from political activism groups.
Peer-reviewed articles
- A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Federal Prosecution of Immigration Crimes"Immigration crimes are the most prosecuted federal crimes in America. This Article examines the benefits of the federal prosecution of immigration crimes (training, deterrence, and signaling/expression) and balances those benefits against the costs of such prosecutions (court-house costs, alternative prosecution, and incarceration). I conclude that deportation immediately following a conviction for an immigration crime appears to capture the key benefit of this system (signaling/expression) while alleviating its greatest expense (incarceration)."
- Nationalism, Immigration Control, and the Ethnoracial Remapping of America in the 1920s"During and immediately after World War I, a confluence of political and economic trends impelled the legislation of immigration restriction. Wartime nationalism had produced a feverish sentiment against presumably disloyal "hyphenated Americans." While war nationalism was aimed principally at German Americans, it provided a popular basis of support for nativists that had been campaigning for restriction since the 1890s."
- Tales of a flow stayed by nothing: menstruation immigration detention"When Fauziya Kassindja landed at New York’s JFK airport in 1994, she was seventeen, seeking asylum, and fleeing the brutal practice of female genital mutilation.1She was also menstruating.2Hours after her arrival, Fauziya was strip searched, forced to stand before a female officer “completely naked, soiled pad exposed, shamed beyond words.”3She was then transferred to an off-site detention facility where she was strip-searched again. When Fauziya asked where she should place her soiled pad, the female guard responded: “I don’t know. Why don’t you eat it?”4When Fauziya asked for a new pad, she was told she could ask for one the next morning.5She was given absolutely nothing to stay her flow—not even toilet paper or paper towels. This was the beginning of Fauziya’s experience with immigration detention. She would remain there for sixteen months."