Results by title
52 books match the query 'Noncitizens' and 8 start with t
The Border Within
The Economics of Immigration in an Age of FearTara Watson and Kalee Thompson
University of Chicago Press, 2021
For decades, immigration has been one of the most divisive, contentious topics in American politics. And for decades, urgent calls for its policy reform have gone mostly unanswered. As the discord surrounding the modern immigration debate has intensified, border enforcement has tightened. Crossing harsher, less porous borders makes unauthorized entry to the United States a permanent, costly undertaking. And the challenges don’t end on the other side.
At once enlightening and devastating, The Border Within examines the costs and ends of America’s interior enforcement—the policies and agencies, including ICE, aimed at removing immigrants already living in the country. Economist Tara Watson and journalist Kalee Thompson pair rigorous analysis with deeply personal stories from immigrants and their families to assess immigration’s effects on every aspect of American life, from the labor force to social welfare programs to tax revenue. What emerges is a critical, utterly complete examination of what non-native Americans bring to the country, including immigration’s tendency to elevate the wages and skills of those who are native-born.
News coverage has prompted many to question the humanity of American immigration policies; The Border Within opens a conversation of whether it is effective. The United States spends billions each year on detention and deportation, all without economic gain and at a great human cost. With depth and discipline, the authors dissect the shock-and-awe policies that make up a broken, often cruel system, while illuminating the lives caught in the chaos. It is an essential work with far-reaching implications for immigrants and non-immigrants alike.
The Dead Ladies Project
Exiles, Expats, and Ex-CountriesJessa Crispin
University of Chicago Press, 2015
The Dead Ladies Project is an account of that journey—but it’s also much, much more. Fascinated by exile, Crispin travels an itinerary of key locations in its literary map, of places that have drawn writers who needed to break free from their origins and start afresh. As she reflects on William James struggling through despair in Berlin, Nora Barnacle dependant on and dependable for James Joyce in Trieste, Maud Gonne fomenting revolution and fostering myth in Dublin, or Igor Stravinsky starting over from nothing in Switzerland, Crispin interweaves biography, incisive literary analysis, and personal experience into a rich meditation on the complicated interactions of place, personality, and society that can make escape and reinvention such an attractive, even intoxicating proposition.
Personal and profane, funny and fervent, The Dead Ladies Project ranges from the nineteenth century to the present, from historical figures to brand-new hangovers, in search, ultimately, of an answer to a bedrock question: How does a person decide how to live their life?
The Duplex Nature of Indigeneity
Navigating Identity in the Ahuehuepan DiasporaFrans J. Schryer
University Press of Colorado, 2025
Using a variety of sources, perspectives, and methods, Schryer takes a duplexity approach, which allows understanding the complexity of social reality and its complementary nature—it identifies fields, clusters, and layers as interconnected components of social life. The innovative methods consist of the combination of ethnographic description and an ethnohistorical census that provides information on every person going back to approximately 1850. That census is further examined with the use of inferential and non-inferential statistical techniques, archival research in locations not normally accessible to scholars, Facebook, phone interviews conducted over several years, and help from Nahuatl-speaking people whose perspectives on the findings generate additional information and insights.
Unique in this presentation, which dips into the lives of generations of people to draw insight on those who lay claim to transnational Indigeneity, Schryer’s work contributes to research and theoretical discussion in the field of migration and globalization studies through a close examination of one Indigenous community over the course of many years, utilizing a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods in anthropology.
The Fifth Sun
Mary Helen Lagasse
Northwestern University Press, 2004
Winner of the 3rd Annual Miguel Mármol Prize from Curbstone Press, Mary Helen Lagasse's The Fifth Sun is an inspiring story of an immigrant who struggles valiantly for a better life for herself and her family. A young Mexican woman, Mercedes, leaves her village to work as a housemaid in New Orleans. This fast-paced novel takes us through her adventures in New Orleans, her marriage, her struggle to raise her children, her deportation, and her attempt to re-cross the river and be reunited with her children.
The Law Into Their Own Hands
Immigration and the Politics of ExceptionalismRoxanne Lynn Doty
University of Arizona Press, 2009
Doty examines the social and political contexts that have enabled these civilian groups to flourish and gain legitimacy amongst policy makers and the public. The sentiments underlying the vigilante movement both draw upon and are channeled through a diverse range of organizations whose messages are often reinforced by the media. Taking action when they believe official policy is lacking, groups ranging from elements of the religious right to anti-immigrant groups to white supremacists have created a social movement.
Doty seeks to alert us to the consequences related to this growing movement and to the restructuring of our society. She maintains that with immigrants being considered as enemies and denied basic human rights, it is irresponsible of both citizens and policy makers to treat this complicated issue as a simple black or white reality.
In this solid and theoretically grounded look at contemporary, post-9/11 border vigilantism, the author observes the dangerous and unproductive manner in which private citizens seek to draw firm and uncompromising lines between who is worthy of inclusion in our society and who is not.
The Law of the Other
The Mixed Jury and Changing Conceptions of Citizenship, Law, and KnowledgeMarianne Constable
University of Chicago Press, 1994
The "mixed jury" doctrine allowed resident foreigners to have law suits against English natives tried before juries composed half of natives and half of aliens like themselves. As she traces the transformations in this doctrine from the Middle Ages to its abolition in 1870, Constable also reveals the emergence of a world where law rooted in actual practices and customs of communities is replaced by law determined by officials, where juries no longer strive to speak the truth but to ascertain the facts.
The Undocumented Everyday
Migrant Lives and the Politics of VisibilityRebecca M. Schreiber
University of Minnesota Press, 2018
Examining how undocumented migrants are using film, video, and other documentary media to challenge surveillance, detention, and deportation
As debates over immigration increasingly become flashpoints of political contention in the United States, a variety of advocacy groups, social service organizations, filmmakers, and artists have provided undocumented migrants with the tools and training to document their experiences.
In The Undocumented Everyday, Rebecca M. Schreiber examines the significance of self-representation by undocumented Mexican and Central American migrants, arguing that by centering their own subjectivity and presence through their use of documentary media, these migrants are effectively challenging intensified regimes of state surveillance and liberal strategies that emphasize visibility as a form of empowerment and inclusion. Schreiber explores documentation as both an aesthetic practice based on the visual conventions of social realism and a state-administered means of identification and control.
As Schreiber shows, by visualizing new ways of belonging not necessarily defined by citizenship, these migrants are remaking documentary media, combining formal visual strategies with those of amateur photography and performative elements to create a mixed-genre aesthetic. In doing so, they make political claims and create new forms of protection for migrant communities experiencing increased surveillance, detention, and deportation.
Threatening Others
Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa RicaCarlos Sandoval-Garcia
Ohio University Press, 2004
During the last two decades, a decline in public investment has undermined some of the national values and institutions of Costa Rica. The resulting sense of dislocation and loss is usually projected onto Nicaraguan “immigrants.”
Threatening Others: Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa Rica explores the representation of the Nicaraguan “other” in the Costa Rican imagery. It also seeks to address more generally why the sense of national belonging constitutes a crucial identification in contemporary societies. Interdisciplinary and based on extensive fieldwork, it looks critically at the “exceptionalism” that Costa Ricans take for granted and view as a part of their national identity.
Carlos Sandoval-García argues that Nicaraguan immigrants, once perceived as a “communist threat,” are now victims of an invigorated, racialized politics in which the Nicaraguan nationality has become an offense in itself.
Threatening Others is a deeply searching book that will interest scholars and students in Latin American studies and politics, cultural studies, and ethnic studies.