Fans pick 100 books like Not "A Nation of Immigrants"

Danticat offers a gorgeously written memoir tracing her father’s life as US migrant, her uncle’s life as community leader who stayed in Haiti, and her relationship to both across both countries. The book was motivated by her Uncle Joseph’s horrifying, tragic death in the Krome Detention Center (originally built to detain Haitian refugees and notorious for abuses) after he fled home to claim asylum. But it is much more than a recounting of his death. It is a chronicle of a deeply connected family whose love exceeded borders. I cannot get this book out of my head. It helps my students understand that the violence of US borders is not abstract and cannot be captured in statistics or political rhetoric. It is about real people who navigate seemingly overwhelming obstacles put before them—sometimes building new lives from nothing, sometimes succumbing to the violence of US regimes. 

This book has hugely influenced my thinking on US racism, imprisonment, and immigration, especially my second book. By studying a long history of incarceration in Los Angeles, Lytle Hernandez demonstrates how “mass incarceration is mass elimination.” This argument was a revelation that opened new ways for me to see the connections among different people swept away into cages. Like Dunbar-Ortiz, she reveals how settler colonialism connects working-class white, Black, Indigenous, Chinese, and Mexican people targeted for arrest, imprisonment, and removal. Crucially, she reads “rebel archives” of those people who resisted their subjugation and fought for justice, showing how they never relinquished themselves to racist incarceration. 

Borders are far more than mere demarcations of territory, argues Canadian academic and activist Harsha Walia in a book I greatly appreciated for connecting seemingly disparate phenomena into a cohesive takedown of the modern state and its service of corporate power.

The conventional wisdom that corporate globalization eliminates national boundaries is only true, Walia explains, for an increasingly mobile global ruling class. For a global underclass of migrant labourers and asylum seekers, borders are increasingly entrenched, segregating newcomers as a source of cheap labour from the working class and fuelling the exploitation of both.

Walia describes how this segmentation undermines labour standards for all and fuels a xenophobic backlash against the depredations of global capitalism. 

This recently published collection brings together writings by the abolitionist organizer and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who has worked against the prison industrial complex with organizations and communities for decades. On its surface, it is not a book about immigration, and yet Gilmore offers crucial insights for understanding the shifting forces in the state and capitalism that have decimated communities both within and beyond the US. Those forces have abandoned working-class communities (largely of color; see Detroit), uprooted migrants, and criminalized both, targeting them for removal—to prisons, detention centers, and deportations to other countries. Her work also gives us concrete examples of the solidarity organizing that connects different groups, whose interests might not seem to align and whose locations might be spread across distances. If the previous books clarify the roots of the problems, Gilmore not only digs even deeper, but she also shows us examples of the work needed… show more.

I loved this book most because my late father recommended that we read it together when it first came out in the early 2000s. To me, it demonstrates Everett’s brilliance with a pen, and he captures the Black experience in America well, especially identity negotiation.

He was speaking about racial assimilation before I even knew the word for it. I love how he narrows the gap between the Black and the Black who prescribes to white norms. The voice actor who read the book was so entertaining that I have listened to it almost daily for the past five months!

I could not bear to put this book down. Each time I reached the end, I started again from the beginning. It lived on my bedside table for months. It was only after three readings that I could let it go.

Gregory Day had drawn me right into the places and times of early settler colonialism; his characters formed, against the odds, a way of life that was creative—poetic, musical, sensual, and, above all, ecological. They listened to the earth and found their place as part of it, belonging to it and belonging to the Earth. 

Cutcha Risling Baldy is shaking up the terms of engagement for Indigenous cultural reclamation in far Northern California. A Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk scholar and an enrolled member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, Risling Baldy describes both the why and the how of Indigenous cultural survival in this book. Through a detailed description of girls’ coming-of-age ceremonies, Risling Baldy’s commitment to resisting settler colonialism shows a path forward for Indigenous communities.

I loved this book because it provided a geographic perspective that deepened my understanding of how Native people in the Lower Chaco of Paraguay are mobilizing to reclaim their land. Like Indigenous people throughout the world, the transition to ranching pushed these people off their homelands and made them dispensable peons.

Refusing to give up, the Enxet and Sanapaná employed international advocates to pressure neoliberal politicians to return their lands. I was so impressed by Correia’s years of participant observations and the insights he provides into the Native peoples’ changing world.

Starting with the public claim that Canadian society exhibits social indifference to the racialized and gendered violence connected to murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, Granzow interrogates the presumed absence suggested the word indifference, showing that it hides something present and active: a social investment and authorization of this violence as part of the maintenance of the settler-colonial state.

Looking at the city of Edmonton historically, ways that this investment – or commitment – has materialized are elaborated, including a policing initiative (Project Kare) that collects demographic information on individuals expected to be subject to (colonial) violence and the former Charles Camsell Hospital that incarcerated Indigenous peoples from where many disappeared. This impacted my thinking on the contradictions inherent to the notion of care and the place I call home.

What would we do in a world lacking police, prisons, surveillance, borders, wars, nuclear weapons, and capitalism? Well, we might survive. We might sustain life on this little blue dot a little longer. That—in contrast to the status quo—ought to be sufficient. We might, in addition, do a lot more than sustain life. We might transform the lives of billions of people, including each person reading these words. We might have lives with less fear and worry, more joy and accomplishment, more control and cooperation.

But, of course, the question might be asked in the sense of “Wouldn’t the criminals get us, and the forces of law and order be imperiled, and evildoers take away our freedoms, and sloth and laziness deprive us of updated phone models every few months?” As a way to begin answering those concerns, I recommend this tremendous resource of a book which surveys seven candidates… show more.