As the U.S. presidential election approaches, immigration is again a decisive issue. Over 60 percent of the electorate considers it a top concern. Crossings at America’s southern border, though now trending quickly downward, hit an all-time high in December. The backlog of asylum applications grew, even as cities scrambled to accommodate migrants fleeing instability in countries like Venezuela and Afghanistan.
Former President Donald Trump, who promises mass deportations if re-elected, has staked his campaign on conjured images of a “military invasion” of criminals and terrorists, falsely accusing migrants of being responsible for stagnating wages and housing shortages.
Democrats, in response to rising alarm from voters, have lurched rightward on the matter. Over the past few months, President Biden has introduced executive orders that severely curtailed asylum cases. Since taking over the ticket in July, Vice President Kamala Harris has campaigned for tougher border restrictions and blamed Trump for sinking attempts at bipartisan reform.
Immigration policy should be straightforward, a transparent decision made by the government about whom it allows in. But it’s not, and making sense of the issue often means wading through analysis riddled with legal jargon, agency names and the alphabet soup of our visa program. Sensible questions about how we ended up with such a flawed and bloated system or why so many people still risk the trip are mostly left unaddressed.
The good news is we don’t have to live like this. Here are some books that make the topic less muddled and offer a dose of perspective.
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide
By Jia Lynn Yang
You may have heard that the United States is less white than it used to be. That’s because, for decades, it was whiter by design. Jia Lynn Yang, the national editor at The New York Times, complicates the idea of America as a “nation of immigrants” by studying a crucial period of reform. Her story runs from the implementation of a racial quota system in the 1920s through the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which codified migration based on family, special skill and refugee status.
Yang shows how the racist pseudoscience of eugenics was as influential a century ago as it seems to be with Trump and his base now. She also details President Franklin Roosevelt’s attempts to work around the quota system during World War II by creating a special agency that saved thousands of Jewish refugees from the Nazis.
But this isn’t a simple account of enlightened moral crusaders against bigots and isolationists. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, Yang writes, the Japanese American Citizens League lobbied for a reform bill that, while granting Asian immigrants naturalization rights, would have also reinforced the U.S. quota system and restricted Black migration from the Caribbean. The bill’s supporters reasoned it was progress and worth the price. (Such divisions have only grown more complicated: Today, many U.S. Latinos are attracted to Trump’s rhetoric because they see in recent migrants the same violent threat their parents may have fled.)
Although Yang’s book ends with the passage of pro-immigration reforms, she explains that these laws were skewed against migrants from the Americas and “unwittingly helped spawn a shockingly unequal system” that would lay the groundwork for the undocumented migrant crisis to come.
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here
By Jonathan Blitzer
How did things get so bad at the southern border? The Central American migrant crisis is the subject of this sharp and rigorous book by the New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer. With a blend of history and reportage, much of it drawn from his articles for the magazine, he crafts an expansive narrative following migrants, activists and politicians.
American policy was a master class in shortsightedness. In the 1980s, Washington trained brutal Salvadoran military units and armed the Nicaraguan contras as part of Cold War counterinsurgency campaigns that fueled violence and displacement in the region. Central Americans found refuge in American cities including Los Angeles, where the urban “grid dictated do-or-die enmities and alliances” and gangs like MS-13 sprouted out of self-preservation. In the ’90s, American law enforcement deported thousands of immigrants, exporting gang violence back to the region. The resulting bloodshed helped prompt another mass migration to the United States. All the while, Blitzer notes, an uneven patchwork of policy reforms and harsher border measures flooded the asylum system, pushing migrants farther into the desert and into the hands of smugglers.
Few immigration books attempt to untangle — or even address — as Blitzer does, how America’s domestic and foreign policy compounded the immigration crisis. This might be the reason his book has generated so much buzz. Former President Barack Obama endorsed it in his summer reading list, despite Blitzer’s reminder that Obama was branded a “deporter in chief” whose pragmatism sometimes “blurred into conservatism.” Perhaps the president simply agrees with the author’s sober observation in the book’s introduction: “Immigration policy is governed by a politics of permanent crisis,” he writes, and “politics is a form of selective amnesia.”
The Border Within
By Tara Watson and Kalee Thompson
Experts are always telling us that immigration is good for the economy. Tara Watson, an economist, and Kalee Thompson, a senior editor at Wirecutter, give you the details. Theirs is the kind of moderate policy book you’ll find on bookshelves in Washington. Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, may not have read it, but someone on his staff probably has.
Watson and Thompson complement economic modeling and policy research with stories of documented and undocumented immigrants, drawing their synthesis of white papers and census surveys into the real world. “The Border Within” is authoritative and accessible, and it offers a cost-benefit approach to understanding immigration.
The authors’ suggestions for fixing the system — more legal pathways for visas and citizenship, tougher border security — are relatively anodyne by Beltway standards. The observations about the beneficial effects of immigration on the American economy are more illuminating. For instance, immigrants generally lower the costs of goods and services: They increase supply in the form of new small businesses and, by sending part of their earnings abroad, don’t spike demand. Tracking down and deporting undocumented immigrants is costly and does little to expand wages or labor opportunities. Instead, deportation separates families and leaves more migrants reliant on public services.
The Undocumented Americans
By Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Are you curious about how bad the U.S. immigration system actually is? Want to see the chaos up close? Try this collection of profiles, which Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, an Ecuadorean DACA recipient with an Ivy League education, assembled to show the roughest edge of the undocumented experience.
Cornejo Villavicencio follows day laborers in Staten Island, cleanup workers at ground zero, Haitians stuck in the “purgatory” of temporary protected status in Miami and families separated by ICE in rural Ohio. They share their nightmares. Health problems like cancer, heart disease and depression are rampant. Everything is paid out of pocket. In this world, migrants fearing deportation keep their doors shut when canvassers come to warn of incoming hurricanes. Minor relief comes in the form of support groups, churches offering sanctuary and underground pharmacies selling bootleg prescription drugs.
The author, who migrated to the United States as a child, also weaves in her own family history. Even just dwelling on the prospect of unexpected deportation, on a life without basic rights in the bowels of the American project, takes a toll. To write a book like this one, she explains, “you have to be a little crazy. And you certainly can’t be enamored by America, not still.”
Empire of Borders
By Todd Miller
U.S. border enforcement doesn’t just happen at the southern border. This investigation into the shadowy global surveillance industry shows how border technology has been spreading across the planet for decades now, hardening the arbitrary lines that define our modern world.
Our tool kit has evolved over the years, from asylum policy — remember “Remain in Mexico”? — to security partnerships and trainings abroad. As John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, put it: “I believe the defense of the southwest border starts 1,500 miles to the south,” as far as Peru.
Todd Miller, an immigration journalist and Substacker, interviews political leaders and officials in countries including Kenya and Guatemala. He also talks to surveillance industry executives, many of whom are retired military officers. In these circles, immigration policy is understood as a matter of national security, and each migrant is seen as a potential insurgent or terrorist. Even back in the late 2010s, as one former U.S. diplomat asserts, Miller’s subjects were thinking far beyond Trump’s border wall. What they wanted is better understood as a “cyber-physical” wall made up of drones, satellites, cameras and sensors.
Companies test these surveillance products in southern Arizona, manufacture them in Mexico and export them to the Middle East. Many are deployed in Israel, “a dominating force in the border enforcement global industry,” Miller writes. He visits the iron-barred checkpoints of the West Bank, funded in part by Washington. They are, he writes, “not just a security measure to protect Israelis, but also an exercise in pacification for everyone else — especially Palestinians.”
Miller’s thesis boils down to this: Border security tools, in the United States and abroad, are designed to insulate wealthy countries from the world’s poor. Today, millionaires and billionaires of most nationalities can effectively purchase citizenship, while asylum seekers hammer at the gates. As the walls close in, Miller’s vision of a world of free “mobility and equal access to resources” might offer the only sustainable solution to our perpetual border crisis.
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