Here are 56 books that Impossible Subjects fans have personally recommended if you like
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I first got seriously interested in immigration when I moved to L.A. in the late 1980s. I had been a sociologist of labor for over a decade already, and now found myself in a city whose working class was overwhelmingly foreign-born. I was amazed to discover that L.A.’s immigrant workers, even the undocumented, were actively organizing into unions and community-based organizations. Trying to understand how this came about, my fascination with the larger dynamics of migration grew, and immigrant labor became central to my research agenda.
This is an “oldie but goodie” – a classic text that has stood the test of time. Its critique of neoclassical economic theories shifted the paradigm for understanding labor migration. One key takeaway is Piore’s argument that the primary driver of immigration is employer demand for low-wage labor; the “push” factors previous commentators often emphasized are secondary. Another is that even when migrants themselves, and/or the countries that receive them, expect them to be temporary sojourners who will soon return to their countries of origin, most end up settling permanently, encouraging their children’s aspirations for upward mobility. Drawing on rich fieldwork from around the world as well as deep historical research, this book illuminates not only the past but also immigration developments since its publication over four decades ago.
Birds of Passage presents an unorthodox analysis of migration ion to urban industrial societies from underdeveloped rual areas. It argues that such migrations are a continuing feature of industrial societies and that they are generated by forces inherent in the nature of industrial economies. It explains why conventional economic theory finds such migrations so difficult to comprehend, and challenges a set of older assumptions that supported the view that these migrations were beneficial to both sending and receiving societies. Professor Piore seriously questions whether migration actually relieves population pressure and rural unemployment, and whether it develops skills necessary for the…
I first got seriously interested in immigration when I moved to L.A. in the late 1980s. I had been a sociologist of labor for over a decade already, and now found myself in a city whose working class was overwhelmingly foreign-born. I was amazed to discover that L.A.’s immigrant workers, even the undocumented, were actively organizing into unions and community-based organizations. Trying to understand how this came about, my fascination with the larger dynamics of migration grew, and immigrant labor became central to my research agenda.
Drawing on original data collected by the authors, this book’s focus is Mexican immigration to the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s, when the U.S. ramped up border enforcement to deter undocumented immigration. It illuminates the dysfunctionality of the U.S. immigration system, highlighting the unintended consequences of legislation like the 1986 Immigration Control and Reform Act (IRCA), which utterly failed to achieve its objectives. Rather than coming under “control,” the flow of undocumented immigrants across the U.S.-Mexico border instead skyrocketed after IRCA. The reason, the authors show, is that intensified border enforcement raised the costs and risks of crossing the border without authorization, leading many Mexican workers who once had gone back and forth across the border to permanently settle in the U.S., soon joined by family members.
Migration between Mexico and the United States is part of a historical process of increasing North American integration. This process acquired new momentum with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, which lowered barriers to the movement of goods, capital, services, and information. But rather than include labor in this new regime, the United States continues to resist the integration of the labor markets of the two countries. Instead of easing restrictions on Mexican labor, the United States has militarized its border and adopted restrictive new policies of immigrant disenfranchisement. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors examines the…
By Laura Hooton, Paul Spickard, and Francisco Beltrán
Author
Why are we passionate about this?
Paul Spickard wrote the first edition of Almost All Aliens. He invited Francisco Beltrán and Laura Hooton, who worked under Dr. Spickard at UC Santa Barbara, to co-author the second edition after working as research assistants and providing suggestions for the second edition. We are all historians of race, ethnicity, immigration, colonialism, and identity, and in our other works and teaching we each think about these topics in different ways. We did the same for this list—this is a list of five books that talk about topics that are important to Almost All Aliens and approaches that have been influential in how we think about the topic.
Why did Laura, Paul, and Francisco love this book?
For readers interested in undocumented immigration, especially from Mexico, Minian’s book provides important and necessary historical context for present-day issues. In particular, the book explains how undocumented immigrants were caught in the middle of economic and political policies in the United States and Mexico. As the title implies, the lives of these immigrants are at the heart of the story, including how these much broader systems impacted their individual lives.
Frederick Jackson Turner Award Finalist Winner of the David Montgomery Award Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Book Award Winner of the Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award Winner of the Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize Winner of the Americo Paredes Book Award
"A deeply humane book." -Mae Ngai, author of Impossible Subjects
"Necessary and timely...A valuable text to consider alongside the current fight for DACA, the border concentration camps, and the unending rhetoric dehumanizing Mexican migrants." -PopMatters
"A deep dive into the history of Mexican migration to and from the United States." -PRI's The World
I first got seriously interested in immigration when I moved to L.A. in the late 1980s. I had been a sociologist of labor for over a decade already, and now found myself in a city whose working class was overwhelmingly foreign-born. I was amazed to discover that L.A.’s immigrant workers, even the undocumented, were actively organizing into unions and community-based organizations. Trying to understand how this came about, my fascination with the larger dynamics of migration grew, and immigrant labor became central to my research agenda.
Although Trump is out of the White House (for now) and the pandemic has taken center stage politically, this book by two New York Times reporters remains invaluable. It analyzes the origins of the xenophobic immigrant-bashing that paved the way for Trump’s election in 2016, as well as the ways in which his administration systematically sought to restrict both unauthorized and legalimmigration. Hirschfeld Davis and Shear document in chilling detail the machinations of Stephen Miller, a senior Trump advisor and the administration’s point person on immigration policy. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the power of populist anti-immigrant politics in the U.S. as they unfolded in the 2010s, a phenomenon that may well re-emerge in the years to come.
Two New York Times Washington correspondents provide a detailed, "fact-based account of what precipitated some of this administration's more brazen assaults on immigration" (The Washington Post) filled with never-before-told stories of this key issue of Donald Trump's presidency.
No issue matters more to Donald Trump and his administration than restricting immigration.
Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear have covered the Trump administration from its earliest days. In Border Wars, they take us inside the White House to document how Stephen Miller and other anti-immigration officials blocked asylum-seekers and refugees, separated families, threatened deportation, and sought to erode the longstanding…
Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, I was acutely aware of the way my non-white and non-citizen classmates were treated differently by police and other authorities. Studying racial inequality in the War on Drugs as an undergraduate and graduate-level Sociology student, I began to understand the many links between the criminal and immigration systems, and how often the stories of criminalized people are left behind. I became committed to bringing attention to the racially inequalities that shape these systems. In doing so, I aim to uplift resistance to the “good immigrant/bad immigrant” binary that frames non-citizens with criminal records as undeserving and disposable.
I loved this anthology of writing by undocumented scholars for its disruption of the “dreamer” narrative so popular in mainstream arguments for the rights and potential of immigrant youth.
Reading the essays in this edited volume, I was struck by the many ways this meritocratic narrative denies the nuances that define the everyday lives of undocumented people, privileging one specific picture of the “deserving” immigrant who should receive legal status and human rights.
I appreciate the diverse perspectives included—particularly those often excluded from this picture of deservingness—for example, Black, queer, trans, and criminalized migrants, as well as older people, parents, and youth who struggle academically.
We Are Not Dreamers inspires me to strive for a broader understanding of undocumented people in my own work, through the breaking of binaries that uplift certain migrants through the alienation of others.
The widely recognized "Dreamer narrative" celebrates the educational and economic achievements of undocumented youth to justify a path to citizenship. While a well-intentioned, strategic tactic to garner political support of undocumented youth, it has promoted the idea that access to citizenship and rights should be granted only to a select group of "deserving" immigrants. The contributors to We Are Not Dreamers-themselves currently or formerly undocumented-poignantly counter the Dreamer narrative by grappling with the nuances of undocumented life in this country. Theorizing those excluded from the Dreamer category-academically struggling students, transgender activists, and queer undocumented parents-the contributors call for an expansive…
I first became aware of harms of immigration enforcement policies while volunteering to tutor kids of undocumented migrant farmworkers in the 1990s. Through a variety of jobs in the U.S. and Latin America, my eyes were opened to reasons driving people to migrate and challenges immigrants face. I eventually went to graduate school in Geography to study local to transnational reverberations of immigration policies. A project in Ecuador where I helped families of people detained in the U.S. led me to realize how huge, cruel, and ineffective U.S. immigration detention is. I hope these books help you break through myths about detention and make sense of the chaos.
This book explicitly ties the explosion in immigration detention to goals of political gain and corporate profit, pairing careful historical and legal analysis with piercing personal stories of detention.
After laying out how U.S. foreign policy has triggered the migration patterns that now send lawmakers and the public into a nativist frenzy, legal scholar García Hernández breaks down how laws have been warped to make more people detainable.
He zeroes in on the role of private prison companies, and he explains how Latino immigrants have been turned into fodder for the detention system through lobbying and manipulation of the public narrative. The book finishes by laying out a framework for curbing this corrupt and abusive system.
A powerful, in-depth look at the imprisonment of immigrants, addressing the intersection of immigration and the criminal justice system, with a new epilogue by the author
"Argues compellingly that immigrant advocates shouldn't content themselves with debates about how many thousands of immigrants to lock up, or other minor tweaks." -Gus Bova, Texas Observer
For most of America's history, we simply did not lock people up for migrating here. Yet over the last thirty years, the federal and state governments have increasingly tapped their powers to incarcerate people accused of violating immigration laws.
I’m an American intellectual historian and professor at Vanderbilt University. I’ve long been fascinated by the history and politics of data: the question of how publicly available knowledge shapes societies as well as individual selves. It’s led me to research the effects of popular polls and statistics on mid-century U.S. culture and to write about how ever-advancing techniques for “knowing” citizens shaped modern privacy sensibilities. My current obsession is with official identity documents—how they infiltrate people’s lives in ways that are at once bureaucratic and curiously intimate. The books I’ve selected lay bare the promise and the peril of documentation in wonderfully vivid detail.
Vargas’s memoir begins, “I do not know where I will be when you read this book.” An undocumented immigrant (and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist) who was brought to the United States from the Philippines as a child, Vargas only learned that he was in the country illegally when he applied for a driver’s license at age 16. In 2011, after two decades in the shadows, Vargas publicly revealed his legal status. His anxious, tireless quest for a driver’s license, like his quest to belong in the only country he knows as home, raises urgent questions about the power of documents and borders to define people’s life chances. I’ve taught this beautifully written book several times and it never fails to move my students – and me.
"This riveting, courageous memoir ought to be mandatory reading for every American." -Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The New Jim Crow
"l cried reading this book, realizing more fully what my parents endured." -Amy Tan, New York Times bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and Where the Past Begins
"This book couldn't be more timely and more necessary." -Dave Eggers, New York Times bestselling author of What Is the What and The Monk of Mokha
Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called "the most famous undocumented immigrant in America," tackles one of the…
I am a biographer, and my biography of E.E. Cummings centers on his unjust imprisonment in France during the Great War in dangerously brutal conditions—cold, underfed, and subject to the sadism of the prison guards. It is hard to imagine anything more imperative than writing about injustice. But perhaps for that very reason, it is difficult to write without the consciousness of a deep inadequacy to the task. I feel therefore an enormous gratitude towards those writers, five of whom I have chosen here, whose honesty and courage in writing about injustice serves as an inspiration and a beacon.
Cummings and his friend William Slater Brown were imprisoned in a detention center for foreign ‘undesirables,’ and to this day we are guilty of locking people up because they are stateless or nationals of another country. Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, translated by Omid Tofighian,recounts his imprisonment along with fellow refugees on Manus Island. It is a visceral and vivid account, and it speaks in an unrefusable voice. I think it is an act of true human generosity that someone who has suffered so much at our collective hands would still choose to reach out and tell his own story; simply choosing to speak is an act of great hope and belief.
The Award-winning International Bestselling Story of One Man's Six Year Detention in Australia
'A powerfully vivid account of the experiences of a refugee: desperation, brutality, suffering, and all observed with an eye that seems to see everything and told in a voice that's equal to the task.' - Phillip Pullman
In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani sought asylum in Australia but was instead illegally imprisoned in the country's most notorious detention centre on Manus Island. This book is the result.
Boochani spent nearly five years typing passages of this book one text at a time from a secret mobile phone…
Ilya Somin is a Professor of Law at George Mason University. He is the author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter, and The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London, and the Limits of Eminent Domain. Somin has also published articles in a variety of popular press outlets, including The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, CNN, The Atlantic, and USA Today. He is a regular contributor to the popular Volokh Conspiracy law and politics blog, affiliated with Reason.
This is the single best book on the political philosophy of immigration. Canadian political philosopher Joseph Carens makes a wide-ranging philosophical defense of “open borders” migration rights – not just from the standpoint of some one particular political theory, but from that of many. Whether you are a free-market libertarian, an egalitarian liberal, or a moderate, Carens has a case to make to you. He also has compelling responses to a variety of objections. A key strength of the book is that Carens defends his seemingly radical conclusion based on relatively uncontroversial premises of liberty and equality that are widely accepted by supporters of liberal democracy around the world.
In The Ethics of Immigration, Joseph Carens synthesizes a lifetime of work to explore and illuminate one of the most pressing issues of our time. Immigration poses practical problems for western democracies and also challenges the ways in which people in democracies think about citizenship and belonging, about rights and responsibilities, and about freedom and equality.
Carens begins by focusing on current immigration controversies in North America and Europe about access to citizenship, the integration of immigrants, temporary workers, irregular migrants and the admission of family members and refugees. Working within the moral framework provided by liberal democratic values, he…
My writing career has been in middle grade and YA, but as a reader I’m always trying to branch out. When I was a kid, literature opened the door to the whole world, and as an adult, I’m still exploring. When I read work in translation I can feel the literary connection to other writers and thinkers and simultaneously appreciate the differences that arise through geographic and cultural heritage. I hope my selections here might help readers like myself who enjoy reaching out to new voices and places.
Translated from Spanish and 128 pages in length, Herrera’s short novel is a beautiful evocation of one woman's journey from Latin America to the US. Evoked with the brushstrokes of a fairy tale and suffused with a luminous surreality, the book has stuck with me. This is Herrera’s first novel to be published in English, and it has made quite a splash, giving me hope that more will soon follow.
Signs Preceding the End of the World is one of the most arresting novels to be published in Spanish in the last ten years. Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there's no going back. Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to…
