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In a post-Cold War world of political unease and economic crisis, processes of securitisation are transforming nation-states, their citizens and non-citizens in profound ways.

The book shows how contemporary Europe is now home to a vast security industry which uses biometric identification systems, CCTV and quasi-military techniques to police migrants and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. This is the first collection of anthropological studies of security with a particular but not exclusive emphasis on Europe.

The Anthropology of Security draws together studies on the lived experiences of security and policing from the perspective of those most affected in their everyday lives. The anthropological perspectives in this volume stretch from the frontlines of policing and counter-terrorism to border control.

Explores efforts to restrict and expand notions of US citizenship as they relate specifically to the US-Mexico border and Latina/o identity.

Borders and citizenship go hand in hand. Borders define a nation as a territorial entity and create the parameters for national belonging. But the relationship between borders and citizenship breeds perpetual anxiety over the purported sanctity of the border, the security of a nation, and the integrity of civic identity.

In The Border Crossed Us, Josue David Cisneros addresses these themes as they relate to the US-Mexico border, arguing that issues ranging from the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 to contemporary debates about Latina/o immigration and border security are negotiated rhetorically through public discourse. He explores these rhetorical battles through case studies of specific Latina/o struggles for civil rights and citizenship, including debates about Mexican American citizenship in the 1849 California Constitutional Convention, 1960s Chicana/o civil rights movements, and modern-day immigrant activism.

Cisneros posits that borders—both geographic and civic—have crossed and recrossed Latina/o communities throughout history (the book’s title derives from the popular activist chant, “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us!”) and that Latina/os in the United States have long contributed to, struggled with, and sought to cross or challenge the borders of belonging, including race, culture, language, and gender.

The Border Crossed Us illuminates the enduring significance and evolution of US borders and citizenship, and provides programmatic and theoretical suggestions for the continued study of these critical issues.

Pioneering Indian American writer Bharati Mukherjee is best known for her novel, Jasmine, and her breakthrough collection, The Middleman and Other Stories, which won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her writing is distinguished as much by its narrative style and shifting points of view as it is by Mukherjee’s piercing emotional observations on the immigrant experience and her depiction of racism, nostalgia, and displacement.

The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee is the first volume to feature the author’s complete short fiction—all 35 stories. Leading Mukherjee scholar Ruth Maxey edits the collection, unearthing seven unknown stories: five in Mukherjee’s unpublished 1963 Iowa Writer’s Workshop M.F.A. thesis, The Shattered Mirror, and two tales from 2008. 

Arranged chronologically, this essential collection brings many of Mukherjee’s stories back into print, from the semi-autobiographical story, “Hindus,” in her 1985 debut collection, Darkness, to her late stories, published from 1997-2012, as well as her classic, “The Management of Grief.” 

A timeless call amid the challenging nature of public service to find the familiar in the foreign.

What does it mean to lead with compassion in a world riven by fear, at a time when the responses to forced displacement hold the power to reshape communities? How can institutions and individuals sustain solidarity amid rising division?

This moving reflection of Filippo Grandi’s ten years as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and four decades spent working in humanitarian crises across the world addresses the growing complexity of forced displacement, its repercussions for international relations, and the challenges it poses for governments. Grandi calls for greater cooperation between nations and considers measures—along displacement routes and in host countries—which would provide lifesaving assistance to refugees as well as preserve international cooperation and goodwill. He suggests a universal responsibility not to exacerbate division but to work diligently on the space between pragmatism and principle.

Taking up this challenge, Catherine Ashton’s response to Grandi draws on her own distinguished leadership during some of the most important moments that have shaped contemporary diplomacy and suggests how enduring principles can be retained within the realities of public life.

Migration is a way of life for many individuals and even families in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Some who leave their rural communities go only as far as the state capital, while others migrate to other parts of Mexico and to the United States. Most send money back to their communities, and many return to their homes after a few years. Migration offers Oaxacans economic opportunities that are not always available locally—but it also creates burdens for those who stay behind.

This book explores the complex constellation of factors that cause rural Oaxacans to migrate, the historical and contemporary patterns of their migration, the effects of migration on families and communities, and the economic, cultural, and social reasons why many Oaxacans choose not to migrate. Jeffrey Cohen draws on fieldwork and survey data from twelve communities in the central valleys of Oaxaca to give an encompassing view of the factors that drive migration and determine its outcomes. He demonstrates conclusively that, while migration is an effective way to make a living, no single model can explain the patterns of migration in southern Mexico.

The narrow Darién Gap, the only land bridge connecting South and Central America, encompasses a spectacularly hostile jungle, covered in steep mountains, dense rainforests, and flood-prone marshes. Known in Spanish as el infierno verde, or “the green hell,” it is one of the most inhospitable places in the world. Its terrain is too treacherous for roads, yet hundreds of thousands of refuge seekers contend with its horrors every year in the hopes of reaching the United States, still some three thousand miles away. And of the countless who set out for the border, an untold number never arrive.
 
In this book, journalist Belén Fernández travels through the Darién Gap to report on the dehumanizing and deadly stretch of land that has become a mass graveyard for migrants. Fernández’s journey brings her into contact with refuge seekers, people smugglers, law enforcement officials, and many more whose stories bring life to a place overwhelmingly associated with death. Combining history, on-the-ground reporting, travelogue, memoir, and searing politico-economic analysis, she shines light on a largely made-in-the-USA crisis that has come to define our modern era.
 
Engrossing and heartrending, The Darién Gap is a poignant and compassionate indictment of structural inequality and institutionalized inhumanity in a world where the have-nots must risk death for a chance at a better life—or any life at all.

Investigating the global system of detention centers that imprison asylum seekers and conceal persistent human rights violations

 

Remote detention centers confine tens of thousands of refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants around the world, operating in a legal gray area that hides terrible human rights abuses from the international community. Built to temporarily house eight hundred migrants in transit, the immigrant “reception center” on the Italian island of Lampedusa has held thousands of North African refugees under inhumane conditions for weeks on end. Australia’s use of Christmas Island as a detention center for asylum seekers has enabled successive governments to imprison migrants from Asia and Africa, including the Sudanese human rights activist Abdul Aziz Muhamat, held there for five years. 

In The Death of Asylum, Alison Mountz traces the global chain of remote sites used by states of the Global North to confine migrants fleeing violence and poverty, using cruel measures that, if unchecked, will lead to the death of asylum as an ethical ideal. Through unprecedented access to offshore detention centers and immigrant-processing facilities, Mountz illustrates how authorities in the United States, the European Union, and Australia have created a new and shadowy geopolitical formation allowing them to externalize their borders to distant islands where harsh treatment and deadly force deprive migrants of basic human rights.

Mountz details how states use the geographic inaccessibility of places like Christmas Island, almost a thousand miles off the Australian mainland, to isolate asylum seekers far from the scrutiny of humanitarian NGOs, human rights groups, journalists, and their own citizens. By focusing on borderlands and spaces of transit between regions, The Death of Asylum shows how remote detention centers effectively curtail the basic human right to seek asylum, forcing refugees to take more dangerous risks to escape war, famine, and oppression.

Immigration is at once a personal, immediate, and urgent issue that plays a central role in the United States’ perception of itself. In The Documented Child, scholar Maya Socolovsky demonstrates how the portrayal of Latinx children has shifted over the first two decades of the twenty-first century in literary texts aimed at children and young adults and looks at how these shifts map onto broader changes in immigration policy and discourse.

Through a critical inquiry into picture books and middle-grade and young adult literature, Socolovsky argues that the literary documentations of—and for—U.S. Latinx children have shifted over the decades, from an emphasis on hybrid transnationalism to that of a more American-oriented self. Socolovsky delves into texts written from 1997 to 2020, a period marked by tremendous changes in U.S. immigration policies, amplified discourses around nationhood, and an increasingly militarized border. The author shows how children’s and young adult books have shifted their depictions of the border, personal and national identity, and sovereignty.

Samir Chopra is an immigrant, a “voluntary exile,” who discovers he can tell the story of his life through cricket, a game that has long been an influence—really, an obsession—for him. In so doing, he reveals how his changing views on the sport mirror his journey of self-discovery. In The Evolution of a Cricket Fan, Chopra is thus able to reflect on his changing perceptions of self, and of the nations and cultures that have shaped his identity, politics, displacement, and fandom. 

Chopra’s passion for the sport began as a child, when he rooted for Pakistan and against his native India. When he migrated, he became a fan of the Indian team that gave him a sense of home among the various cultures he encountered in North America and Australia. This “shapeshifting” exposes the rift between the Old and the New world, which Chopra acknowledges is “cricket’s greatest modern crisis.” But it also illuminates the identity dilemmas of post-colonial immigrants in the Indian diaspora.

Chopra’s thoughts about the sport and its global influence are not those of a player. He provides access to the inner world of the global cricket fan navigating the world that colonial empire wrought and that cricket continues to connect and animate. He observes that the Indian cricket team carries many burdens—not only must they win cricket matches, but their style of play must generate a pride that assuages generations of wounds inflicted by history. And Chopra must navigate where he stands in that history.

The Evolution of a Cricket Fan shows Chopra’s own wins and losses as his life takes new directions and his fandom changes allegiances.

At the age of ten and without his parents, Easurk Charr, a convert to Christianity, came to Hawa'ii in 1904 to earn enough money to acquire an education and return to his native Korea as a medical missionary. The Golden Mountain is Charr's story of his early years in Korea, his migration to Hawai'i and the American mainland, and the joys and pain of his life as one of some seven thousand Koreans who migrated to the United States between 1903 and 1905. 

First published in 1961, Charr's memoir offers touching insights into the experience of early Korean immigrants. He tells eloquently of how difficult it was for him to become a naturalized citizen, even after serving in the U.S. Army. An introduction by Wayne Patterson provides a broader perspective on both Charr and the Korean immigrant experience.

Explores the relationship between immigrant and national culture

Yiddish melodramas about the tribulations of immigration. German plays about alpine tourism. Italian vaudeville performances. Rubbernecking tours of Chinatown. In the New York City of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these seemingly disparate leisure activities played similar roles: mediating the vast cultural, demographic, and social changes that were sweeping the nation’s largest city.

The Iranian revolution of 1978–1979 uprooted and globally dispersed an enormous number of Iranians from all walks of life. Bitter political relations between Iran and the West have since caused those immigrants to be stigmatized, marginalized, and politicized, which, in turn, has discredited and distorted Iranian migrants’ social identity; subjected them to various subtle and overt forms of prejudice, discrimination, and social injustice; and pushed them to the edges of their host societies. The Iranian Diaspora presents the first global overview of Iranian migrants’ experiences since the revolution, highlighting the similarities and differences in their experiences of adjustment and integration in North America, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East.

Written by leading scholars of the Iranian diaspora, the original essays in this volume seek to understand and describe how Iranians in diaspora (re)define and maintain their ethno-national identity and (re)construct and preserve Iranian culture. They also explore the integration challenges the Iranian immigrants experience in a very negative context of reception. Combining theory and case studies, as well as a variety of methodological strategies and disciplinary perspectives, the essays offer needed insights into some of the most urgent and consequential issues and problem areas of immigration studies, including national, ethnic, and racial identity construction; dual citizenship and dual nationality maintenance; familial and religious transformation; politics of citizenship; integration; ethnic and cultural maintenance in diaspora; and the link between politics and the integration of immigrants, particularly Muslim immigrants.

Latin America is home to 1.5 million persons of Japanese descent. Combining detailed scholarship with rich personal histories, Daniel M. Masterson, with the assistance of Sayaka Funada-Classen, presents the first comprehensive study of the patterns of Japanese migration on the continent as a whole. 

When the United States and Canada tightened their immigration restrictions in 1907, Japanese contract laborers began to arrive at mines and plantations in Latin America. The authors examine Japanese agricultural colonies in Latin America, as well as the subsequent cultural networks that sprang up within and among them, and the changes that occurred as the Japanese moved from wage labor to ownership of farms and small businesses. They also explore recent economic crises in Brazil, Argentina, and Peru, which, combined with a strong Japanese economy, caused at least a quarter million Latin American Japanese to migrate back to Japan. 

Illuminating authoritative research with extensive interviews with migrants and their families, The Japanese in Latin America tells the story of immigrants who maintained strong allegiances to their Japanese roots, even while they struggled to build lives in their new countries.

In this groundbreaking study, The Language of Political Incorporation, Amy Liu focuses on Chinese migrants in Central-Eastern Europe and their varying levels of political incorporation in the local community. She examines the linguistic diversity of migrant networks, finding institutional trust and civic engagement depend not on national identity, but on the network’s linguistic diversity—namely, whether the operating language is a migrant’s mother tongue or a lingua franca.

The Language of Political Incorporation uses original survey data to assess when the Chinese engage positively with the authorities and when they become civic minded. The results are surprising. In Hungary, the Chinese community has experienced high levels of political incorporation in part because they have not been targeted by anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. In contrast, migrants in Romania sought the assistance of the Chinese embassy to fight an effort to collect back taxes. 

Liu also compares the Chinese experiences in Central-Eastern Europe with those of Muslims in the region, as well as how the Chinese are treated in Western Europe. Additionally, she considers how the local communities perceive the Chinese. The Language of Political Incorporation concludes by offering best practices for how governments can help migrants become more trusting of—and have greater involvement with—locals in their host countries. Ultimately, Liu demonstrates the importance of linguistic networks for the incorporation of immigrants.