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ahendricks040's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.75
Great introduction to the history of immigration & how undocumented people are treated in the US
vaykay's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racial slurs, Racism, Slavery, Violence, Xenophobia, Trafficking, Kidnapping, Religious bigotry, Murder, Colonisation, Classism, and Deportation
Minor: Drug use, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Medical trauma, Pregnancy, Abandonment, and War
floralfox's review against another edition
4.0
I checked this book out from the library but it had a lot of important things I want to remember for future reference so I'm going to diligently re-type a lot of the facts and tidbits I found particularly important/insightful:
"Was it a paradox that the Border Patrol was created in the 1920s, just when agribusiness, with its need for migrant labor, was rapidly expanding in the Southwest? Several scholars argue that in fact the system worked well for farmers who needed migrant workers. Mexican workers could still cross the border easily, but because they became more deportable, the new laws also made them more exploitable. 'Agribusiness kicked, winked, screamed, lobbied, and cajoled for border patrol practices that allowed unrestricted access to Mexican workers while promoting effective discipline over the region's Mexican workforce.' Deportability was part of that discipline. Local officials served farmers' interests by carrying out deportation raids in cases of union organizing or, sometimes, just before payday" (54).
"Mexican workers' theoretical deportability became real in 1929, as the country entered the Great Depression. On the pretext that they were like to 'become a public charge' as employment opportunities evaporated, both Mexicans and Mexican Americans were rounded up for deportation. A 'frenzy of anti-Mexican hysteria' justified roundups of entire Mexican neighborhoods and hundreds of thousands were deported with little attention to legal niceties" (55).
"[T]he Eisenhower administration initiated Operation Wetback, a massive, military-style sweep of Mexican and Mexican American neighborhoods aimed at deporting en masse those deemed to be in the country 'illegally.' Over a million were deported. Like the deportations of the 1930s, Operation Wetback snared many individuals, including US citizens, simply for being ethnically Mexican" (58).
"The 1986 law also for the first time made it illegal to employ a worker without proper documents. Employer sanctions created an enormous and costly illegal infrastructure that migrants had to navigate to obtain false documents in order to work, but did little to reduce the numbers of undocumented workers. Moreover, the law left employers virtually immune to prosecution, and with even greater ability to exploit their now more legally vulnerable workers" (62).
"Among the undocumented Mayans of Providence, Rhode Island, Patricia Foxen found a very different conception than what most citizens understand about illegality. Rather than imagining themselves as autonomous individuals making a decision to break the law, they, like Rigoberta Menchu, understand their migration as a requirement imposed on them by outsiders, which they have no right or opportunity to question.
The coyotes that offer to take them across the border may be considered smugglers under US law, but to the Mayans Foxen studied, they were no different from the labor contrators who had been forcibly recruiting them--legally--for generations ... 'As did their forefathers centuries ago,' Lutz and Lovell write, 'Guatemalan Mayas continue to migrate in order to survive" (68).
"Foxen also notes a 'total confusion surrounding understandings about the legality and illegality of different types of documentation' that stems from the population's long history of the law being used against them. Some of her informants had paid hundreds of dollars to a notario for a temporary work permit. These notarios often had no legal credentials, but played on a semantic confusion, since in Latin American the term often refers to a lawyer. The notarios would file a fraudulent asylum application, which would nonetheless entite the migrant to a temporary, legal work permit, until their asylum hearing, which would generally result in deportation" (68-69).
"The complexity of the H-2 program and the gap between the overwhelming demand on both sides and the small number of visas actually available make the program ripe for fraud and exploitation. 'Illegality' enters the system in numerous ways, as uncovered by a 2010 United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. In six cases the GAO reviewed, 'employers charged their H-2B workers fees that were for the benefit of the employer or charged excessive fees that brought employees' wages below the hourly federal minimum wage. These charges included visa processing fees far above actual costs, rent in overcrowded apartments that drastically exceeded market value, and transportation charges subject to arbitrary 'late fees.' Workers left the United States in greater debt than when they arrived. in one case, these fees reduced employees' paychecks to as little as $48 for a 2-week period.' In eight cases, 'employers were alleged to have submitted fraudulent documentation to Labor, USCIS, and State to either exploit their H-2B employees or hire more employees than needed. Employers and recruiters misclassified employee duties on Labor certification applications to pay lower prevailing wages; used shell companies to file fraudulent labor certification applications for unneeded employees, then leased the addiction employees to businesses not on the visa petitions; and preferentially hired H-2B employees over American workers in violation of federal law" (75).
"Although illegality resides inherently in the realm of law, it has significant economic implications ... Employers of low-wage labor benefit from the illegal status of some workers, as do consumers of low-cost goods and services. State and local budgets face costs that result from the economic marginalization of the undocumented, while federal programs like Social Security benefit handsomely from payments into the system by undocumented workers who will never be eligible for benefits.
Illegality also has significant benefits for the prison system, in particular, the new and mushrooming private prison system. Immigration enforcement creates jobs in the prison industry, which in 2011 employed eight hundred thousand people and cost some $75 billion a year.
But beyond the economic costs and benefits to different sectors of society, there are other, intangible benefits. Politicians and talk-show hosts have zeroes in on the issue to whip up audiences and support. Anti-immigrant sentiment and, especially, the demonization of the undocumented can bring votes and attention.
When Leo Chavez calls the 'Latino threat narrative' overlaps with anti-undocumented sentiment, as 'Mexican immigration, the Mexican-origin population, and Latin American immigration in general [came] to be perceived as a national security threat' in the 1990s. The threat narrative, Chavez explains, has been expressed so repeatedly that its components have become culturally accepted. Mexican immigrants are 'illegal aliens' or criminals, the narrative suggests. They want to create a 'Quebec' (i.e.,a culturally and linguistically distinct region), invade the country, and reconquer the Southwest. They refuse to learn English or assimilate, procreate too rapidly, and threaten nation security.
In addition to attracting votes or increasing ratings, the Latino threat narrative services the more subtle purpose of channeling national anxieties about social inequality; environmental crisis; economic downturn; lack of access to jobs, housing, health care, and education; deteriorating social services; and other real issues facing the US population away from their real causes. Those who benefit from the status quo would rather have people blame immigrants than fight for real social and economic change" (101-102).
"A new twist in the system emerged at the border in 2005 with Operation Streamline ... which takes migrants caught at the border out of the civil immigration system and lodges criminal border-crossing charges against them. After a criminal conviction, they are generally sentenced to time served and returned to ICE for civil removal procedures. The program has been expanded along the border, so that by 2012 every border sector participated, with some referring all of those apprehended for criminal prosecution. Tens of thousands of migrants who would have been returned to Mexico are now instead detained, tried, and incarcerated at government expense" (104).
"If undocumented Mexican labor was so necessary, why make it illegal? But IRCA made it illegal with a large wink. Employers were required to obtain proof of eligibility to work from new hires, but they were not required to evaluate the documents they were shown. They could be punished for knowingly hiring undocumented workers, but usually only received a small fine. IRCA, it turned out, was more for show than for changing the country's labor structure. It was a bumbling intervention that succeeded in making migrant workers more vulnerable, while actually contributing to increasing the numbers of the undocumented"(114).
"As president, Obama pursued a policy during his first term that some have termed 'silent raids.' Instead of descending on the workplace and making arrests, the new policy used audits. ICE would require a business to turn over employment eligibility forms for all its workers. 'Since Jan. 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported in May 2012, 'the Obama administration has audited as least 7,533 employers suspected of hiring illegal labor and imposed about $100 million in administrative and criminal fines--more audits and penalties than were imposed during the entire GWB administration." With the audits, workers are not deported. But they do lose their jobs" (117).
"Given the way the agricultural system currently works, farm labor is so precarious and so harsh that only displaced migrants, the majority of them rendered illegal by US laws, are willing and able to carry it out. Paradoxically, most of these migrants were in fact displaced from centuries-old systems of subsistence agriculture in Mexico by precisely the same agricultural modernization that now demands their labor elsewhere. A truly comprehensive approach to immigration reform would look at these interlocking economic and structural systems, not merely make more narrow changes in immigration law.
We must recognize the basic irrationality, immorality, and unsustainability of the food production system. Farmers overwhelmingly oppose the harsh state-level immigration laws that make it more difficult for them to find the seasonal workers they need. In the short term, simply making it legal for immigrants to work in agriculture would address the needs of both farmers and immigrant farm workers who are undocumented. The larger problems await a longer-term and more profound reform for the global agricultural system. We can begin by acknowledging that our access to relatively cheap and abundant food in the US exists because of the hard labor poor Mexicans, in their country and in our own" (129).
To be continued...
"
"Was it a paradox that the Border Patrol was created in the 1920s, just when agribusiness, with its need for migrant labor, was rapidly expanding in the Southwest? Several scholars argue that in fact the system worked well for farmers who needed migrant workers. Mexican workers could still cross the border easily, but because they became more deportable, the new laws also made them more exploitable. 'Agribusiness kicked, winked, screamed, lobbied, and cajoled for border patrol practices that allowed unrestricted access to Mexican workers while promoting effective discipline over the region's Mexican workforce.' Deportability was part of that discipline. Local officials served farmers' interests by carrying out deportation raids in cases of union organizing or, sometimes, just before payday" (54).
"Mexican workers' theoretical deportability became real in 1929, as the country entered the Great Depression. On the pretext that they were like to 'become a public charge' as employment opportunities evaporated, both Mexicans and Mexican Americans were rounded up for deportation. A 'frenzy of anti-Mexican hysteria' justified roundups of entire Mexican neighborhoods and hundreds of thousands were deported with little attention to legal niceties" (55).
"[T]he Eisenhower administration initiated Operation Wetback, a massive, military-style sweep of Mexican and Mexican American neighborhoods aimed at deporting en masse those deemed to be in the country 'illegally.' Over a million were deported. Like the deportations of the 1930s, Operation Wetback snared many individuals, including US citizens, simply for being ethnically Mexican" (58).
"The 1986 law also for the first time made it illegal to employ a worker without proper documents. Employer sanctions created an enormous and costly illegal infrastructure that migrants had to navigate to obtain false documents in order to work, but did little to reduce the numbers of undocumented workers. Moreover, the law left employers virtually immune to prosecution, and with even greater ability to exploit their now more legally vulnerable workers" (62).
"Among the undocumented Mayans of Providence, Rhode Island, Patricia Foxen found a very different conception than what most citizens understand about illegality. Rather than imagining themselves as autonomous individuals making a decision to break the law, they, like Rigoberta Menchu, understand their migration as a requirement imposed on them by outsiders, which they have no right or opportunity to question.
The coyotes that offer to take them across the border may be considered smugglers under US law, but to the Mayans Foxen studied, they were no different from the labor contrators who had been forcibly recruiting them--legally--for generations ... 'As did their forefathers centuries ago,' Lutz and Lovell write, 'Guatemalan Mayas continue to migrate in order to survive" (68).
"Foxen also notes a 'total confusion surrounding understandings about the legality and illegality of different types of documentation' that stems from the population's long history of the law being used against them. Some of her informants had paid hundreds of dollars to a notario for a temporary work permit. These notarios often had no legal credentials, but played on a semantic confusion, since in Latin American the term often refers to a lawyer. The notarios would file a fraudulent asylum application, which would nonetheless entite the migrant to a temporary, legal work permit, until their asylum hearing, which would generally result in deportation" (68-69).
"The complexity of the H-2 program and the gap between the overwhelming demand on both sides and the small number of visas actually available make the program ripe for fraud and exploitation. 'Illegality' enters the system in numerous ways, as uncovered by a 2010 United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. In six cases the GAO reviewed, 'employers charged their H-2B workers fees that were for the benefit of the employer or charged excessive fees that brought employees' wages below the hourly federal minimum wage. These charges included visa processing fees far above actual costs, rent in overcrowded apartments that drastically exceeded market value, and transportation charges subject to arbitrary 'late fees.' Workers left the United States in greater debt than when they arrived. in one case, these fees reduced employees' paychecks to as little as $48 for a 2-week period.' In eight cases, 'employers were alleged to have submitted fraudulent documentation to Labor, USCIS, and State to either exploit their H-2B employees or hire more employees than needed. Employers and recruiters misclassified employee duties on Labor certification applications to pay lower prevailing wages; used shell companies to file fraudulent labor certification applications for unneeded employees, then leased the addiction employees to businesses not on the visa petitions; and preferentially hired H-2B employees over American workers in violation of federal law" (75).
"Although illegality resides inherently in the realm of law, it has significant economic implications ... Employers of low-wage labor benefit from the illegal status of some workers, as do consumers of low-cost goods and services. State and local budgets face costs that result from the economic marginalization of the undocumented, while federal programs like Social Security benefit handsomely from payments into the system by undocumented workers who will never be eligible for benefits.
Illegality also has significant benefits for the prison system, in particular, the new and mushrooming private prison system. Immigration enforcement creates jobs in the prison industry, which in 2011 employed eight hundred thousand people and cost some $75 billion a year.
But beyond the economic costs and benefits to different sectors of society, there are other, intangible benefits. Politicians and talk-show hosts have zeroes in on the issue to whip up audiences and support. Anti-immigrant sentiment and, especially, the demonization of the undocumented can bring votes and attention.
When Leo Chavez calls the 'Latino threat narrative' overlaps with anti-undocumented sentiment, as 'Mexican immigration, the Mexican-origin population, and Latin American immigration in general [came] to be perceived as a national security threat' in the 1990s. The threat narrative, Chavez explains, has been expressed so repeatedly that its components have become culturally accepted. Mexican immigrants are 'illegal aliens' or criminals, the narrative suggests. They want to create a 'Quebec' (i.e.,a culturally and linguistically distinct region), invade the country, and reconquer the Southwest. They refuse to learn English or assimilate, procreate too rapidly, and threaten nation security.
In addition to attracting votes or increasing ratings, the Latino threat narrative services the more subtle purpose of channeling national anxieties about social inequality; environmental crisis; economic downturn; lack of access to jobs, housing, health care, and education; deteriorating social services; and other real issues facing the US population away from their real causes. Those who benefit from the status quo would rather have people blame immigrants than fight for real social and economic change" (101-102).
"A new twist in the system emerged at the border in 2005 with Operation Streamline ... which takes migrants caught at the border out of the civil immigration system and lodges criminal border-crossing charges against them. After a criminal conviction, they are generally sentenced to time served and returned to ICE for civil removal procedures. The program has been expanded along the border, so that by 2012 every border sector participated, with some referring all of those apprehended for criminal prosecution. Tens of thousands of migrants who would have been returned to Mexico are now instead detained, tried, and incarcerated at government expense" (104).
"If undocumented Mexican labor was so necessary, why make it illegal? But IRCA made it illegal with a large wink. Employers were required to obtain proof of eligibility to work from new hires, but they were not required to evaluate the documents they were shown. They could be punished for knowingly hiring undocumented workers, but usually only received a small fine. IRCA, it turned out, was more for show than for changing the country's labor structure. It was a bumbling intervention that succeeded in making migrant workers more vulnerable, while actually contributing to increasing the numbers of the undocumented"(114).
"As president, Obama pursued a policy during his first term that some have termed 'silent raids.' Instead of descending on the workplace and making arrests, the new policy used audits. ICE would require a business to turn over employment eligibility forms for all its workers. 'Since Jan. 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported in May 2012, 'the Obama administration has audited as least 7,533 employers suspected of hiring illegal labor and imposed about $100 million in administrative and criminal fines--more audits and penalties than were imposed during the entire GWB administration." With the audits, workers are not deported. But they do lose their jobs" (117).
"Given the way the agricultural system currently works, farm labor is so precarious and so harsh that only displaced migrants, the majority of them rendered illegal by US laws, are willing and able to carry it out. Paradoxically, most of these migrants were in fact displaced from centuries-old systems of subsistence agriculture in Mexico by precisely the same agricultural modernization that now demands their labor elsewhere. A truly comprehensive approach to immigration reform would look at these interlocking economic and structural systems, not merely make more narrow changes in immigration law.
We must recognize the basic irrationality, immorality, and unsustainability of the food production system. Farmers overwhelmingly oppose the harsh state-level immigration laws that make it more difficult for them to find the seasonal workers they need. In the short term, simply making it legal for immigrants to work in agriculture would address the needs of both farmers and immigrant farm workers who are undocumented. The larger problems await a longer-term and more profound reform for the global agricultural system. We can begin by acknowledging that our access to relatively cheap and abundant food in the US exists because of the hard labor poor Mexicans, in their country and in our own" (129).
To be continued...
"
maariitza's review against another edition
5.0
i feel like most nonfiction books focus solely on facts and statistics as opposed to approaching topics with emotions, but the author manages to find a balance with both — along with presenting history and statistics, she also shares her own experiences with immigrants and shares a fraction of their stories, truly an interesting read
cdbaker's review against another edition
3.0
I found this book to be really informative, but it was written in the Obama era, so there are sections that are becoming out of date.
sjbshannon's review against another edition
5.0
A good primer on the criminalisation of immigration from Latin America, starting off with the beginnings and detailing recent developments including the mass deportations under President Obama. A must read for everyone wanting a basic overview, for everyone asking "How did America get here?" as well as for everyone insisting that their ancestors "immigrated to this country 'the right way'"