100 books like Migration, Ethnicity, and Madness

Data-driven migration research is my absolute favorite kind of migration literature. While this book excels at this, and a truly robust sample of migrants underpins it as a whole, the statistics that underpin the research are presented so that they wouldn’t scare a non-specialist reader.

It is a model of how to make data-driven research accessible to a general readership. I love how it is neatly divided into thematic sections by birthplace, but nevertheless avoids repetition. If I had to recommend just one book to someone about British and Irish migration to Aotearoa this would be it. I can’t recommend it highly enough as a general overview of the major trends. 

What I love most about this book is the focus on women. That sounds really obvious, given the title, but it’s unusual. Male migrants are so easy to find in historical sources. On shipping lists, women and children were often only recorded as ‘wife and 5 children’ of a named man.

Due to this bias in the primary sources, men are usually at the center of 19th-century migration literature. Their experience is taken as the norm. Their motivations are assumed to be the ones guiding the migration. So I really love that this spotlight on women highlights the experiences and importance of these migrants to New Zealand and also that it has forced historians who have come after this publication to try harder to include women in their migration stories, too. 

There is a lot to love about this book. The level of detail about every element of Scottish ethnicity under consideration is extraordinary. Bueltmann seems to leave no stone unturned in her examination of Scottish associations. I am always a big fan of historical databases, so the analysis based on the database compiled for this research of society members, based on extant sources, is a big selling point for me.

Many society membership lists have been lost to history, and the New Zealand census returns were systematically destroyed, so compiling such a database was no mean feat. What has always most strongly stuck with me, though, is how the stories of individual migrants are woven throughout, not just thrown in as examples but integral to understanding the phenomena she is exploring. John Jack and family, for example, turn up at different points in their lives at different points in the… show more.

What I love most about this book is its challenge for New Zealand historians to examine the role of different British cultures in shaping New Zealand society. Akenson, a Canadian author, took a one-year research fellowship in New Zealand, and this resulting book has changed the face of migration studies in New Zealand in the decades since.

He describes previous works as cementing a tradition of biculturalism, ‘lumping… all white settlers into a spurious unity’, but more than just laying down the challenge to do something about that ‘lumping,’ he then shows a way forward, examining the Irish in New Zealand. Marvellous!

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.  

This is easily the best account of the complex, racialized history of U.S. immigration law, politics, and policy. One of the arguments in it that impressed me most is that the category “illegal aliens”—the “impossible subjects” of the title—barely existed in the pre-World War I years, when almost no European immigrants were turned away from the U.S. (Asians were another story). Ngai also brilliantly analyzes two landmark laws: the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which dramatically restricted immigration through nationality-based quotas limiting arrivals from Eastern and Southern Europe; and the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which eliminated the quotas and opened the door to a massive new immigrant influx. This is a densely written book, not an easy read, but no other text has taught me more about this topic.

Captivity Beyond Prisons blew me away in its explanations of criminalized deportation and the “good immigrant/bad immigrant binary” that has all too often defined immigration rights advocacy.

While familiar with this binary, I had never seen it so clearly explained before reading this book, particularly in its arguments about how women, imprisoned, and gender-non-conforming immigrants are commonly categorized as undeserving and expendable.

The included stories of Latina women impacted by intertwining systems of immigration and criminal justice enforcement affected me greatly, as did the argument that frameworks of prison abolition—which view all people as deserving of humanity, including those deemed “criminals”—should be further adopted in the fight for immigrant rights.

This book is distinctive in its focus on non-citizen women affected by the criminal justice system, which I have rarely seen elsewhere.

Chavez modernizes the Mexican miscreant myth, explaining how vivid TV news scenes of immigrants inspire visceral reactions.

He argues that the emotions inspired by media coverage of vigilante groups rounding up immigrants are a potent part of “the spectacle” that plays out on the news. Chavez also gives the xenophobic storytelling of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century an updated name: The Latino Threat Narrative.

The book powerfully picks apart ideas posited by the late Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington, among others, that suggest that Mexican Americans won’t assimilate, making them perennial “others” who threaten American democracy. Another thing I like about this book is that it includes a chapter on Latinas and how media coverage of Latina fertility and sexuality plays into racist stereotyping.

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.

While writing my own book, this is the book that I had to keep going back to for all the historical detail on the early Border Patrol. It’s an academic book, but it does a great job of explaining the story of the early Border Patrol from the perspective of the people in the borderlands.