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Illegal : how America's lawless immigration regime threatens us all / Elizabeth F. Cohen.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Basic Books, 2020Edition: First editionDescription: vii, 261 pages : illustrations ; 22 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9781541699847
  • 154169984X
Subject(s): Summary: "In Illegal, prominent political scientist Elizabeth Cohen explores the dark history of US immigration policy and proposes a major new plan for full-scale reform. As Cohen shows, the US has always maintained the right to exclude people from entry-from those deemed to have seditious intent to a broad category of "undesirables," which has at times included epileptics, prostitutes, beggars, and anarchists. Cohen traces the particular invention of "illegal" immigration to 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted to suppress immigration by "undesirable" peoples of the world. Later, through the 1924 National Origins Quota Act, Congress massively expanded the scope of racial immigrant exclusions. However, as Cohen points out, the Registry Act of 1929 quietly provided a way for people who had come to the US without legal status to eventually become legal and to naturalize. In subsequent decades, Congress began to distinguish legal from illegal immigration by mapping out the first roads to citizenry. Yet when the registry system was eventually undone in 1986 with the introduction of selective "amnesty" for documented immigrants, the problem of "the undocumented" snowballed into a legal and economic disaster. Employers kept hiring undocumented workers, incentivizing immigration, but a lack of papers could place migrant families in legal limbo. Thus, by 1996, we had a citizenship crisis -- one exacerbated when terrorism became linked with unlawful immigration, manufactured by a Congress that had allowed its citizenship -- related functions to atrophy"-- Provided by publisher.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 325.73 C678 Available 33111009586674
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A political scientist explains how the American immigration system ran off the rails -- and proposes a bold plan for reform

Under the Trump administration, US immigration agencies terrorize the undocumented, target people who are here legally, and even threaten the constitutional rights of American citizens. How did we get to this point?

In Illegal , Elizabeth F. Cohen reveals that our current crisis has roots in early twentieth century white nationalist politics, which began to reemerge in the 1980s. Since then, ICE and CBP have acquired bigger budgets and more power than any other law enforcement agency. Now, Trump has unleashed them. If we want to reverse the rising tide of abuse, Cohen argues that we must act quickly to rein in the powers of the current immigration regime and revive saner approaches based on existing law. Going beyond the headlines, Illegal makes clear that if we don't act now all of us, citizen and not, are at risk.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"In Illegal, prominent political scientist Elizabeth Cohen explores the dark history of US immigration policy and proposes a major new plan for full-scale reform. As Cohen shows, the US has always maintained the right to exclude people from entry-from those deemed to have seditious intent to a broad category of "undesirables," which has at times included epileptics, prostitutes, beggars, and anarchists. Cohen traces the particular invention of "illegal" immigration to 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted to suppress immigration by "undesirable" peoples of the world. Later, through the 1924 National Origins Quota Act, Congress massively expanded the scope of racial immigrant exclusions. However, as Cohen points out, the Registry Act of 1929 quietly provided a way for people who had come to the US without legal status to eventually become legal and to naturalize. In subsequent decades, Congress began to distinguish legal from illegal immigration by mapping out the first roads to citizenry. Yet when the registry system was eventually undone in 1986 with the introduction of selective "amnesty" for documented immigrants, the problem of "the undocumented" snowballed into a legal and economic disaster. Employers kept hiring undocumented workers, incentivizing immigration, but a lack of papers could place migrant families in legal limbo. Thus, by 1996, we had a citizenship crisis -- one exacerbated when terrorism became linked with unlawful immigration, manufactured by a Congress that had allowed its citizenship -- related functions to atrophy"-- Provided by publisher.

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