A powerful exposé of the human costs of America’s immigration policies.
Towle, an educator and activist, confronts America’s immigration system in this debut nonfiction book.
“Whatever the answer” to America’s immigration crisis, writes the author, “a dream deferred—dried up like a raisin in the sun—is indeed justice denied.” To refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants from around the world, America has long stood as a haven of peace, prosperity, and freedom. Over the last two decades, however, the U.S. has been at the forefront of a new global paradigm that prioritizes national security above human rights, per Towle’s eye-opening narrative. Focusing on what she calls the “Border Industrial Complex,” the author outlines the ways in which the U.S. and Europe have forged a system of “global apartheid” through draconian visa requirements, passport controls, border walls, and other anti-immigration policies. The book offers readers an astute analysis that provides a well-researched overview of the current immigration system as well as historical context for the ways in which racism and xenophobia have shaped American policy in the past. Bipartisan in her critiques, Towle traces the modern roots of America’s anti-immigration ethos from Reagan through Clinton to the post-9/11 Bush administration, though she also holds the Obama and Biden administrations to account for their subsequent complicity. The book stands out by centering the lived experiences of the victims of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), particularly the subagency known as Enforcement and Removals Operations (“aka ICE Air, ‘the deportation machine’”). Working with the Texas A&M University School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic and the Cameroon Advocacy Network and privileged with white skin that allowed her to “cross borders with relative ease,” Towle shares her firsthand experiences at the U.S.-Mexican border, where she met freedom-seekers whose home countries spanned from Central America to Cameroon. The author’s observation that merely seeing and documenting the experiences of victims is a “subversive act” powerfully underscores the stories of mothers ripped away from their children, men detained indefinitely without due process during the Covid-19 pandemic that “turned prisons into death traps,” and asylum-seekers returned to the violent battlefields of war-torn countries.
A powerful exposé of the human costs of America’s immigration policies.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9781647425791
Page Count: 424
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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