A provocative, necessary book about an ongoing hot-button topic.
A geography professor examines how the U.S. Border Patrol developed into an organization with powers that supersede the Fourth Amendment right to freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.
Officially established as a federal agency in 1924, the Border Patrol has its roots in the Texas Rangers. “Ostensibly, [the Rangers’] purpose was to protect citizens from attack by Mexican or Native American raids,” writes Jones, “but in practice they often harassed and displaced Native Americans and Mexicans who lived in the region”—not to mention peaceful non-White residents and runaway slaves traveling on the Underground Railroad to Mexico. Jefferson Davis Milton, a former Ranger who was named after the president of the Confederacy, later became the first man hired as a federal officer to patrol the U.S. border, in 1904. But the background history of the Border Patrol accounts for only part of how it evolved from a tiny, underfunded agency with “loosely defined regulations” regarding how far from the border it could operate into a “sophisticated paramilitary force” that surreptitiously made its lethal presence felt during the mass demonstrations that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Jones argues that the agency's unprecedented expansion in the late 20th century was driven by two Supreme Court decisions in the mid-1970s. The first, United States v. Brignoni-Ponce (1975), made racial profiling a legal factor for federal agents roving the border to consider when stopping drivers. The second, United States vs. Martinez-Fuerte, approved the use of interior checkpoints “on highways and interstates within one hundred miles of borders and coastlines.” This well-researched account is disturbing in its demonstration of the unwitting complicity between the American justice system and an organization born of racist violence. Jones also clearly shows the specter of increased—and sanctioned—police power to transform all places within the U.S. into anti-democratic borderlands.
A provocative, necessary book about an ongoing hot-button topic.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64009-520-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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