A well-researched study that will appeal mostly to fellow academics.
A law professor examines how U.S. citizenship laws have neglected the “complexities and contradictions” of individual migrants.
America has long prided itself on being a safe haven for what Emma Lazarus immortalized as “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” However, according to García Hernández, author of Migrating to Prison, this safe-haven status is more myth than reality because of what he calls a “romanticized view of migrants…[as uniformly] morally upstanding, self-reliant, up-by-the-bootstraps” individuals. He suggests that where this point is most visible is in the relationship between federal immigration law and criminal law. Anyone can seek asylum in the U.S. regardless of how that person gets to America, but federal law does not protect such individuals from prosecution. This situation has created increasingly problematic tensions between what the U.S. purports to be and what it actually is, especially after 9/11. Riding on fears of increased terrorist activity, George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security to deter the inflow of hostile immigrants along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, both of which focus on the border between the U.S. and Mexico. These events signaled a sea change in immigration policies while also laying the foundation for the “overblown rhetoric” politicians like Donald Trump would later use to provoke outrage over threats posed by immigrants, especially those hailing from south of the border. Using individual stories—like that of an aunt who, risking deportation, routinely gave shelter and assistance to non-citizens—the author demonstrates the brokenness of an immigration system he believes is in need of greater compassion toward imperfect people trying to lead better lives. Though tending at times toward historical digressiveness, this book offers timely insights into the vexing problem of citizenship in America.
A well-researched study that will appeal mostly to fellow academics.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2024
ISBN: 9781620977798
Page Count: 240
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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