Results by title

In 1996, Congress passed expansive laws to control illegal immigration, imposing mandatory detention and deportation for even minor violations. Critics argued that such legislation violated civil liberties and human rights; correspondingly, in 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that many facets of the 1996 statutes were unconstitutional. Michael Welch shows how what he calls "moral panic" led to the passage of the 1996 laws and the adverse effects they have had on the Immigration and Naturalization Service, producing a booming detainee population and an array of human rights violations. Detained: Immigration Laws and the Expanding I.N.S. Jail Complex offers sensible recommendations for reform along with an enlightened understanding of immigration. In an epilogue, Welch examines closely the government's campaign to fight terrorism at home, especially the use of racial profiling, mass detention, and secret evidence.Recently, the INS, particularly its enforcement and detention operations have expanded dramatically. This book will offer many readers their first look inside that system. It will be an invaluable guide to thinking through whether the system is fit to take on the additional responsibilities being asked of it in the post-September 11th world.

Illustrates how the Dreamer community was created rhetorically—in the discourse, messages, actions, and visual representations of undocumented youth

Dreamer Nation tells the story of how Dreamers in the Obama era creatively confronted a complex sociopolitical landscape to advocate for immigrant rights and empower undocumented youth to proudly represent their lives and identities, all while under the ever-present threat of detention and deportation. Contributing to rhetorical studies of social movements, immigration, and minoritized rhetorics, Ribero argues that even though Dreamer rhetorics were reflective of the discursive limits of the neoliberal milieu, they also worked to disrupt neoliberal constraints through activism that troubled the primacy of the nation-state and citizenship, refused to adhere to respectability politics, forwarded embodied identity and transnational belonging, and looked for liberation in community—not solely in legislative action.

Each chapter presents a different rhetorical situation within the US “crisis” of immigration and the rhetoric that Dreamers used to respond to it. Organized chronologically, the chapters document Dreamer activism during the Obama presidency, from the 2010 hunger strikes advocating for the DREAM Act to undocuqueer “artivism” responding to Trump’s presidential campaign. The author draws not only on the methods and theories of rhetorical studies but also on women of color feminisms, ethnic studies, critical theory, and queer theory. In this way, the book looks across disciplines to illustrate the rhetorical savvy of one of the most important US social movements of our time.
 

U.S.-born Mexicans in New York City have achieved perhaps the biggest single generation jump in mobility in American immigration history. In 2020, 42-percent of second-generation U.S.-born Mexican men and 49-percent of U.S.-born Mexican women in New York City had graduated from college – versus a 13-14-percent second-generation college graduation rate for most places for most studies done in recent decades. How did U.S.-born Mexicans in New York City achieve such remarkable mobility? In Dreams Achieved and Denied, sociologist Robert Courtney Smith examines the laws, policies, and individual and family practices that promoted – and inhibited – their social mobility.
 
For over twenty years, Smith followed the lives and mobility of nearly one hundred children of Mexican immigrants in New York City. Smith’s longitudinal, ethnographic data enabled him to intimately describe how specific mechanisms blocked or promoted mobility for years as his participants moved from adolescence through early adulthood and into established adulthood. Smith documents how having or gaining legal status made certain New York City or New York State policies and practices more efficacious in supporting individual and family efforts and strategies for mobility. Such immigrant-inclusive and mobility-promoting measures include enabling undocumented people to attend public colleges at in-state tuition rates, and later to get driver’s licenses, offering healthcare to all in New York City, and the City’s subway and school choice systems, which enabled students to attend better schools or take opportunities outside their neighborhoods.
Smith finds that keeping the immigrant bargain – whereby children of immigrants redeem their parents’ sacrifice by doing well in school, helping their parents and siblings, and becoming “good” people (in their parents’ words) – helped them towards better adult outcomes and lives. Having mentors, picking academically stronger schools and friends, and using second chance mechanisms also promoted more adult mobility.  However, lacking legal status blocked mobility, by preventing them from benefiting from these same mobility-promoting city and state policies, from mentors, or from working hard and keeping the immigrant bargain.
​
Dreams Achieved and Denied deeply analyzes the historic upward mobility of U.S.-born Mexicans in New York City. Itcounters the dominant story research and public discourse tell about Mexican mobility in the U.S. and shows how thoughtful public policy can improve the lives of young immigrants and families.