A compelling, if at times uneven, argument for reforming deportation policy.
Tramonte and Setty combine personal stories with analysis of public policy to provide an overview of the problems with deportations from the United States.
Through interviews, the authors (Tramonte is a communications consultant and director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance; Setty is a senior policy analyst on the immigration and immigrant families team at the Center for Law and Social Policy) have collected the experiences of more than 250 people who have been deported from the United States—deportations that have created “lasting and unnecessary damage on ordinary people.” Their study focuses primarily on the effects on families, leading to analyses of the larger impacts on communities and society as a whole. Many of the personal stories referenced stem from “massive, SWAT-team style raids” throughout northern Ohio conducted by Trump’s ICE following his election and contain devastating testimony from the individuals who lived these experiences. Tramonte and Setty dig into research on the layers of harm resulting from events such as loss of income, children falling into poverty, mental health issues, physical health issues, and more. This research informs their concrete analysis as they go through the Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations to detail how systemic racism has affected immigration law and how more and more people have become eligible for deportation. The authors conclude with recommendations for improving the system. Tramonte and Setty’s breakdown of immigration policy across administrations is particularly enlightening and insightful, and the stories they have collected are potent and powerful, such as that of Seyni Diagne, who received no treatment for his cancer or hepatitis C, neither in ICE detention nor after being sent to jail in Mauritania, his country of origin. In organizing and building their overall argument, however, the authors’ use of a personal perspective versus a more critical, scientific eye feels unbalanced; certain stories are referenced anecdotally without the same background or gravitas as others. Even as it builds to a compelling thesis on immigration, the book feels unsure of the best rhetorical strategy for getting there.
A compelling, if at times uneven, argument for reforming deportation policy.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2023
ISBN: 9798988862420
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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