Immigration Matters
Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive Future
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A provocative, strategic plan for a humane immigration system from the nation’s leading immigration scholars and activists
During the past decade, right-wing nativists have stoked popular hostility to the nation’s foreign-born population, forcing the immigrant rights movement into a defensive posture. In the Trump years, preoccupied with crisis upon crisis, advocates had few opportunities to consider questions of long-term policy or future strategy. Now is the time for a reset.
Immigration Matters offers a new, actionable vision for immigration policy. It brings together key movement leaders and academics to share cutting-edge approaches to the urgent issues facing the immigrant community, along with fresh solutions to vexing questions of so-called “future flows” that have bedeviled policy makers for decades. The book also explores the contributions of immigrants to the nation’s identity, its economy, and progressive movements for social change. Immigration Matters delves into a variety of topics including new ways to frame immigration issues, fresh thinking on key aspects of policy, challenges of integration, workers’ rights, family reunification, legalization, paths to citizenship, and humane enforcement.
The perfect handbook for immigration activists, scholars, policy makers, and anyone who cares about one of the most contentious issues of our age, Immigration Matters makes accessible an immigration policy that both remediates the harm done to immigrant workers and communities under Trump and advances a bold new vision for the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lucid and well-organized anthology, three scholars from the CUNY School of Labor and Union Studies bring together activists and academics to examine the forces that have shaped U.S. immigration policy and offer ideas for achieving "meaningful, lasting reforms." Historian Mae M. Ngai analyzes how structural shifts in the economy and demagogic politicians have fueled nativist periods in American history when anti-immigration measures were passed. Cristina Jiménez Moreta, the founder of United We Dream, details the tactics and strategies that led to a 2012 executive order protecting the Dreamers from deportation, while labor activist D. Taylor discusses how immigrant leadership has reinvigorated labor groups in Nevada, helping to turn the state from red to blue. In the book's final sections, contributors argue for significantly increasing the number of refugees and asylum seekers allowed into the U.S., share techniques for changing the minds of xenophobic voters, and discuss what a humanitarian immigration enforcement program would look like. Each essay is packed with useful information and based on decades of experience. Progressive lawmakers and immigration activists will find this to be a valuable resource.
