The go-to book on immigration: fact-based, comprehensive, and nonpartisan.

Immigration is one of the most controversial topics in the United States and everywhere else. Pundits, politicians, and the public usually depict immigrants as either villains or victims. The villain narrative is that immigrants pose a threat--to our economy because they steal our jobs; our way of life because they change our culture; and to our safety and laws because of their criminality. The victim argument tells us that immigrants are needy outsiders--the poor, huddled masses whom we must help at our own cost if necessary. But the data clearly debunks both narratives. From jobs, investment, and innovation to cultural vitality and national security, more immigration has an overwhelmingly positive impact on everything that makes a society successful.

In The Truth About Immigration, Wharton professor Zeke Hernandez draws from nearly 20 years of research to answer all the big questions about immigration. He combines moving personal stories with rigorous research to offer an accessible, apolitical, and evidence-based look at how newcomers affect our local communities and our nation. You'll learn about the overlooked impact of immigrants on investment and job creation; realize how much we take for granted the novel technologies, products, and businesses newcomers create; get the facts straight about perennial concerns like jobs, crime, and undocumented immigrants; and gain new perspectives on misunderstood issues such as the border, taxes, and assimilation.

Most books making a case for immigration tell you that immigration is good for immigrants. This book is all about how newcomers benefit you, your community, and your country. Skeptics fear that newcomers compete economically with locals because of their similarities and fail to socially assimilate because of their differences. You'll see that it's exactly the opposite: newcomers bring enduring economic benefits because of their differences and contribute positively to society because of their similarities. Destined to become the go-to book on one of the most important issues of our time, this book turns fear into hope by proving a simple truth: immigrants are essential for economically prosperous and socially vibrant nations.

An urgent, global account of the migration crisis and the function of borders across political, social, cultural, and economic systems.

A Finalist for the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize

Meticulous . . . Storytelling allows Minian to convey the physical and emotional toll of detention with potent specificity. The result is a book-length plea against dehumanization, at least for those who are willing to listen.
--Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

A probing work of narrative history that reveals the hidden story of immigrant detention in the United States, deepening urgent national conversations around migration.

In 2018, many Americans watched in horror as children were torn from their parents at the US-Mexico border under Trump's family separation policy. But as historian Ana Raquel Minian reveals in In the Shadow of Liberty, this was only the latest chapter in a saga tracing back to the 1800s--one in which immigrants to the United States have been held without recourse to their constitutional rights. Braiding together the vivid stories of four migrants seeking to escape the turmoil of their homelands for the promise of America, In the Shadow of Liberty gives this history a human face, telling the dramatic story of a Central American asylum seeker, a Cuban exile, a European war bride, and a Chinese refugee.

As we travel alongside these indelible characters, In the Shadow of Liberty explores how sites of rightlessness have evolved, and what their existence has meant for our body politic. Though these black sites exist out of view for the average American, their reach extends into all of our lives: the explosive growth of the for-profit prison industry traces its origins to the immigrant detention system, as does the emergence of Guantanamo and the gradual unraveling of the right to bail and the presumption of innocence. Through these narratives, we see how the changing political climate surrounding immigration has played out in individual lives, and at what cost. But as these stories demonstrate, it doesn't have to be like this, and a better way might be possible.

A beautifully-written, broadly accessible, and forthright argument for a solution to the migration crisis: open the gates.

Because of restrictive borders, human beings suffer and die. Closed borders force migrants seeking safety and dignity to journey across seas, trudge through deserts, and clamber over barbed wire. In the last five years alone, at least 60,000 people have died or gone missing while attempting to cross a border. As we deny, cast out, and crack down, we have stripped borders of their creative potential - as lines of contact, catalyst, and blend - turning our thresholds into barricades.
Brilliant and provocative, The Case for Open Borders deflates the mythology of national security through border lockdowns by revisiting their historical origins; it counters the conspiracies of immigration's economic consequences; it urgently considers the challenges of climate change beyond the boundaries of narrow national identities.
This book grounds its argument in the experiences and thinking of those on the frontlines of the crisis, spanning the world to do so. In each chapter, through detailed reporting, journalist and translator John Washington profiles a character impacted by borders. He adds to those portraits provocative analyses of the economics and ethics of bordering, concluding that if we are to seek justice or sustainability we must fight for open borders.
In recent years, important thinkers have begun to urge a profoundly different approach to migration, but no book has made the argument as accessible or as compelling. Washington's case shines with the multitudinous voices of people on the move, a portrait in miniature of what a world with open borders will give to our common future.

This stunning meditation on nostalgia, heritage, and compassion asks us to dismantle the stories we've been told--and told ourselves--in order to naturalize the forms of injustice we've come to understand as order. --Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

When and how did migration become a crime? Why does ancient Greece remain so important to the West's idea of itself? How does nostalgia fuel the exclusion and demonization of migrants today?
In 2021, Lauren Markham went to Greece, in search of her own Greek heritage and to cover the aftermath of a fire that burned down the largest refugee camp in Europe. Almost no one had wanted the camp--not activists, not the country's growing neo-fascist movement, not even the government. But almost immediately, on scant evidence, six young Afghan refugees were arrested for the crime.
Markham soon saw that she was tracing a broader narrative, rooted not only in centuries of global history but also in myth. A mesmerizing, trailblazing synthesis of reporting, history, memoir, and essay, A Map of Future Ruins helps us see that the stories we tell about migration don't just explain what happened. They are oracles: they predict the future.

With a foreword by E. Tendayi Achiume

A chilling exposé of the inhumane and lucrative sharpening of borders around the globe through experimental surveillance technology

Finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction

In 2022, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced it was training robot dogs to help secure the U.S.-Mexico border against migrants. Four-legged machines equipped with cameras and sensors would join a network of drones and automated surveillance towers--nicknamed the smart wall. This is part of a worldwide trend: as more people are displaced by war, economic instability, and a warming planet, more countries are turning to AI-driven technology to manage the influx.

Based on years of researching borderlands across the world, lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar's The Walls Have Eyes is a truly global story--a dystopian vision turned reality, where your body is your passport and matters of life and death are determined by algorithm. Examining how technology is being deployed by governments on the world's most vulnerable with little regulation, Molnar also shows us how borders are now big business, with defense contractors and tech start-ups alike scrambling to capture this highly profitable market.

With a foreword by former UN Special Rapporteur E. Tendayi Achiume, The Walls Have Eyes reveals the profound human stakes of the sharpening of borders around the globe, foregrounding the stories of people on the move and the daring forms of resistance that have emerged against the hubris and cruelty of those seeking to use technology to turn human beings into problems to be solved.

The definitive book on the border crisis by Tom Homan, who President Trump appointed border czar.

Former ICE Director Tom Homan has been at the forefront of the conservative fight to secure our borders and offers proof that illegal immigration is not a victimless crime.

Illegal immigration is the most controversial and emotional issue this country faces today. President Trump was elected on his promise to fix illegal immigration and build a wall on our southern border. Because he won on this issue, the Democrats refuse to work with him, and we experienced a government shutdown as a result of this divide. The Democrats have supported funding in the past and, in his State of the Union, the President said that he wants to unify and work together to resolve this and all the other challenges facing America. The Democrats sat on their hands. They won't budge. Clearly, as a party, they don't care about the facts, only about denying whatever success they can to this president.

Former ICE Director and Fox News contributor Tom Homan knows the facts. He's spent his life on the border and knows that if we don't control illegal immigration now, this country will continue to suffer the consequences of crime, drugs, and financial strain--and it will get much much worse.

In Defend the Border and Save Lives, Homan shares what illegal immigration is really about. Illegal immigration should not be a partisan issue. Now is the time to fix this issue that has claimed so many victims and divided this country. We need to pull the curtain back and expose what truly happens and separate facts from fiction. Illegal immigration is not a victimless crime, and the victims are the illegals and their innocent children as well as the Americans who suffer at the hand of the criminals who sneak into this country.

A powerful argument for separating immigration enforcement from the criminal legal system, by one of the nation's foremost crimmigration experts

In the fevered battles over immigration, Democrats and Republicans alike agree on this: that migrants who have committed a crime have no place in this country. But targeting migrants because they have committed a crime is a short-sighted appeal to nativist fear. To predicate a migrant's right to stay in the country on whether they are law-abiding and therefore deserving or criminal and undeserving does little to improve public safety and has an especially devastating impact on low-income migrants of color.

While César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández's first book, Migrating to Prison, focuses on the explosion of migrant detention centers over the past decades, Welcome the Wretched tackles head-on what happens when a deeply flawed and racist criminal legal system and immigration system converge to senselessly cruel effect. Drawing on everything from history to legal analyses and philosophy, García Hernández counters the fundamental assumption that criminal activity has a rightful place in immigration matters, arguing that instead of using the criminal legal system to identify people to deport, the United States should place a reimagined sense of citizenship and solidarity at the center of immigration policy.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

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.

Migrating to Prison takes a hard look at the immigration prison system's origins, how it currently operates, and why. A leading voice for immigration reform, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández explores the emergence of immigration imprisonment in the mid-1980s and looks at both the outsized presence of private prisons and how those on the political right continue, disingenuously, to link immigration imprisonment with national security risks and threats to the rule of law.

Now with an epilogue that brings it into the Biden administration, Migrating to Prison is an urgent call for the abolition of immigration prisons and a radical reimagining of who belongs in the United States.

The early 1980s marked a critical turning point for the rise of modern mass incarceration in the United States. The Mariel Cuban migration of 1980, alongside increasing arrivals of Haitian and Central American asylum-seekers, galvanized new modes of covert warfare in the Reagan administration's globalized War on Drugs. Using newly available government documents, Shull demonstrates how migrant detention operates as a form of counterinsurgency at the intersections of US war-making and domestic carceral trends. As the Reagan administration developed retaliatory enforcement measures to target a racialized specter of mass migration, it laid the foundations of new forms of carceral and imperial expansion.

Reagan's war on immigrants also sowed seeds of mass resistance. Drawing on critical refugee studies, community archives, protest artifacts, and oral histories, Detention Empire also shows how migrants resisted state repression at every turn. People in detention and allies on the outside--including legal advocates, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, and the Central American peace and Sanctuary movements--organized hunger strikes, caravans, and prison uprisings to counter the silencing effects of incarceration and speak truth to US empire. As the United States remains committed to shoring up its borders in an era of unprecedented migration and climate crisis, reckoning with these histories takes on new urgency.

In late 2006, Saket Soni, an Indian-born community organizer, received an anonymous phone call from an Indian migrant worker in Mississippi. He was one of five hundred men trapped in squalid Gulf Coast man camps, surrounded by barbed wire, watched by guards, crammed into cold trailers, and watched by guards. The men had scraped up $20,000 each for this opportunity to rebuild hurricane-wrecked oil rigs in return for promised green cards. Soni and the workers devised a bold plan: The Great Escape traces the workers' extraordinary escape, their march on foot to Washington, DC, and their twenty-three-day hunger strike to bring attention to their cause.

Weaving a deeply personal journey with a riveting tale of twenty-first-century forced labor, Soni takes us into the lives of the immigrant workers the United States increasingly relies on to rebuild after climate disasters. The Great Escape is the gripping story of one of the largest human trafficking cases in modern American history--and the workers' heroic journey for justice.

Incisive and compelling, reflecting the painful wisdom and knowledge that Bill Ong Hing has accrued over the course of fifty years . . . --Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

First book to argue that immigrant and refugee rights are part of the fight for racial justice; offers a humanitarian approach to reform and abolition

Representing non-citizens caught up in what he calls the immigration and enforcement meat grinder, Bill Ong Hing witnessed their trauma, arriving at this conclusion: migrants should have the right to free movement across borders--and the right to live free of harassment over immigration status.

He cites examples of racial injustices endemic in immigration law and enforcement, from historic courtroom cases to the recent treatment of Haitian migrants. Hing includes histories of Mexican immigration, African migration and the Asian exclusion era, all of which reveal ICE abuse and a history of often forgotten racist immigration laws.

While ultimately arguing for the abolishment of ICE, Hing advocates for change now. With 50 years of law practice and litigation, Hing has represented non-citizens--from gang members to asylum seekers fleeing violence, and from individuals in ICE detention to families at the US southern border seeking refuge.

Hing maps out major reforms to the immigration system, making an urgent call for the adoption of a radical, racial justice lens. Readers will understand the root causes of migration and our country's culpability in contributing to those causes.

Despite Japan's long-held reputation as an ethnically homogeneous country largely closed to foreigners, the number of immigrants in Japan has been increasing, partially as a direct result of government policies to address labor shortages associated with Japan's aging and declining population. What have these changes meant for Japan as a nation, as well as for foreign communities living in Japan? With contributions from a diverse group of thirteen scholars representing five academic disciplines, No Island Is an Island puts recent changes to the nature of immigration to Japan as well as the foreign population of Japan into social, political, historical, cultural, and religious context.

The book addresses four questions related to the changing situation of immigration and immigrants to and in Japan: First, what can previous immigration regimes tell us about recent efforts to reform immigration in Japan? Second, how do the new visa categories set up to promote the admission of foreign manual laborers into Japan influence existing foreign populations in Japan? Third, how have local and national governments adapted to the increase in immigration to Japan and to the changing nature of Japan's foreign community? Fourth, what kind of immigration country will Japan become?

The nature of the foreign communities in Japan has undergone several major changes since the end of World War II and the US Occupation, and there continue to be major changes in the composition of those communities. The essays in this volume highlight both the various dimensions of Japan's complicated relationship with its foreign communities as well as several possible directions in which Japan's immigration policy might continue to evolve.

Economist Bryan Caplan makes a bold case for unrestricted immigration in this fact-filled graphic nonfiction.

American policy-makers have long been locked in a heated battle over whether, how many, and what kind of immigrants to allow to live and work in the country. Those in favor of welcoming more immigrants often cite humanitarian reasons, while those in favor of more restrictive laws argue the need to protect native citizens.

But economist Bryan Caplan adds a new, compelling perspective to the immigration debate: He argues that opening all borders could eliminate absolute poverty worldwide and usher in a booming worldwide economy―greatly benefiting humanity.

With a clear and conversational tone, exhaustive research, and vibrant illustrations by Zach Weinersmith, Open Borders makes the case for unrestricted immigration easy to follow and hard to deny.

How the UK's immigration detention and deportation system turns people into monetized, measurable units on a supply chain

In the UK's fully outsourced immigration detainee escorting system, private sector security employees detain, circulate and deport foreign national citizens. Run and organized like a supply chain, this system dehumanises those who are detained and deported, treating them as if they were packages to be moved from place to place and relying on poorly paid, minimally trained staff to do so. In Supply Chain Justice, Mary Bosworth offers the first empirically grounded, scholarly analysis of the British detention and deportation system. Drawing on four years of extensive ethnographic research, Bosworth examines what keeps the system in place and whether it might be effectively challenged.

Told by a senior manager that this is a logistics business, Bosworth documents how the public and private sectors have built a supply chain in which people's humanity is transformed both symbolically and tangibly through administrative processes and bureaucracy into monetized, measurable units. Like all logistics, the system has failure built into it. The contract does not seek to eradicate risk but rather to manage it, determining responsibility and apportioning a financial value to such failures as delay, escape, aborted flight or death in custody. Front-line workers and managers depoliticise and normalise their efforts by casting their duties in familiar bureaucratic terms, with targets, service level agreements and key performance indicators. Focusing on first-hand accounts from workers and lengthy observation and document analysis, Bosworth explores the impact of border logistics in order to ask what it would take to build inclusive infrastructures rather than those designed to exclude.

Illustrates how the children of immigrants use art to grapple with issues of citizenship, state violence, and belonging

Young immigrant children often do not have the words to express how their lives are shaped by issues of immigration, legal status, and state-sanctioned violence. Yet they are able to communicate its effects on them using art.

Based on ten years of work with immigrant children as young as six years old in Arizona and California-- and featuring an analysis of three hundred drawings, theater performances, and family interviews--Silvia Rodriguez Vega provides accounts of children's challenges with deportation and family separation during the Obama and Trump administrations. While much of the literature on immigrant children depicts them as passive, when viewed through this lens they appear as agents of their own stories.

The volume provides key insights into how immigrant children in both states presented creative, out-of-the-box, powerful solutions to the dilemmas that anti-immigrant rhetoric and harsh immigration laws present. Through art, they demonstrated a righteous indignation against societal violence, dehumanization, and death as a tool for navigating a racist, anti-immigrant society.

When children are the agents of their own stories, they can reimagine destructive situations in ways that adults sometimes cannot, offering us alternatives and hope for a better future. At once devastating and revelatory, Drawing Deportation provides a roadmap for how art can provide a safe and necessary space for vulnerable populations to assert their humanity in a world that would rather divest them of it.

Canada in Decay is the first scholarly book questioning the undemocratic policy of mass immigration and racial diversification in Canada. This book demolishes the myth that Canada is a nation of immigrants by demonstrating that Canada was founded by Indigenous Quebecois, Acadians, and English speakers. This book exposes the rewriting of Canada's history in the media, schools, and universities, as an attempt to rob Euro-Canadians of their own history by inventing a past that conforms to the ideological goals of a future multiracial Canada. Canada in Decay explains the origins of the ideology of immigrant multiculturalism and the inbuilt radicalizing nature of this ideology, and argues that the theory of multicultural citizenship is marred by a double standard which encourages minorities to affirm their collective cultural rights while Euro-Canadians are excluded from affirming theirs.

Dr. Duchesne combines a scholarly method with an approachable style that makes Canada in Decay a significant manual for those resisting the deconstruction of Western societies through multiculturalism as a dogma and as a demographic assault. - Dr Kerry Bolton. Author of The Psychotic Left, and The Decline and Fall of Civilisations.

Canada in Decay is a bold, compelling, and often devastating deconstruction of the Left-Liberal narrative which has dominated Canadian politics since the 1970s. It is bound to put on the defensive both the politically correct Left and the globalist Right not just in Canada but across the entire western world. - Grant Havers, author of Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique.

This critical biography of Winston Churchill is a powerful corrective as it shines a light on the real history and war crimes of 'Britain's greatest leader' (Independent).

The subject of numerous biographies and history books, Winston Churchill has been repeatedly voted as one of the greatest of Englishmen. The wartime leader has become a household god for many, preserving an antiquated vision of Britain still shared by all 3 parties. Yet, was he anything more than a plump carp happy to swim in the foulest of ponds to defend the Empire?

In this coruscating biography, Tariq Ali challenges Churchill's vaulted record. Churchill himself never bothered to conceal his passionate defense of the British Empire or its attendant racism. On a more personal level, his complacent self-belief influenced his every step and frequently tripped him up. As the head of the British Navy during WWI, he was responsible for a series of calamitous errors that cost thousands of lives. His attempt to crush the Irish nationalists left wounds that have yet to heal. His attacks on striking workers in Glasgow and Tonypandy, his posturing when calling in the army to burn two anarchists in London's East End, his vicious propaganda during the General Strike were not forgotten or forgiven.

During the war against Germany, the most revered period of his career, Churchill's crimes abroad continued, including the brutal assault on the Greek Resistance, the Bengal Famine that cost over 3 million Indian lives, the all-out assault on civilians in Dresden and Hamburg, and the insistence on the use of nuclear weapons in Japan. Even as the Empire was starting to crumble, Churchill never questioned his imperial philosophy as he became one of the architects of the postwar world we live in today. His is a terrible record, amply documented in Tariq Ali's indictment.

An insightful, persuasive, and honest defense of immigration as central to the United States' economic power and national security.

America was built by immigrants, yet there has long been strong political opposition to immigration. In recent years, the hostility toward immigration has reached a tipping point. While partisan fighting and confusion over basic policy dominate a broken conversation, we often overlook a fundamental American truth: immigration makes America great.

In The Immigrant Superpower, Tim Kane argues that immigration has been a source of American strength and American exceptionalism since the nation's founding. This book explores how immigration is essential to the military strength, economic power, and innovation of the United States. By combining stories of immigrants who have contributed to the American experience, including in the military and business, with analysis of immigration's effects on wages and unemployment, Kane presents a clear defense of greater immigration as a matter of national security. The only way to win the great power competition of the twenty-first century is to embrace America's identity as a nation of immigrants. As politicians in Washington continue to negotiate with no intention to reach an agreement, Kane exposes the immigration consensus hiding in plain sight. Using original, in-depth surveys of American attitudes toward immigration reform he maps out a step-by-step process to achieve reform.

Straight-talking and full of common sense, The Immigrant Superpower stands in sharp contrast to the wholly dysfunctional debate about immigration in the United States.

Canada in Decay is the first scholarly book questioning the undemocratic policy of mass immigration and racial diversification in Canada. This book demolishes the myth that Canada is a nation of immigrants by demonstrating that Canada was founded by Indigenous Quebecois, Acadians, and English speakers. This book exposes the rewriting of Canada's history in the media, schools, and universities, as an attempt to rob Euro-Canadians of their own history by inventing a past that conforms to the ideological goals of a future multiracial Canada. Canada in Decay explains the origins of the ideology of immigrant multiculturalism and the inbuilt radicalizing nature of this ideology, and argues that the theory of multicultural citizenship is marred by a double standard which encourages minorities to affirm their collective cultural rights while Euro-Canadians are excluded from affirming theirs.

Dr. Duchesne combines a scholarly method with an approachable style that makes Canada in Decay a significant manual for those resisting the deconstruction of Western societies through multiculturalism as a dogma and as a demographic assault. - Dr Kerry Bolton. author of The Psychotic Left, and The Decline and Fall of Civilisations.

Canada in Decay is a bold, compelling, and often devastating deconstruction of the Left-Liberal narrative which has dominated Canadian politics since the 1970s. It is bound to put on the defensive both the politically correct Left and the globalist Right not just in Canada but across the entire western world. - Grant Havers, author of Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique.