immigration

• 
• SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
  10/25/2020
  

  Sanctuary Unmasked: The First Time Los Angeles (Sort of) Became a City of Refuge

  by Paul A. Kramer

  Los Angeles’s first sanctuary law grew out of the refugee wave that had brought Alicia Rivera to the city. By 1982, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 refugees from El Salvador — a country with fewer than 5,000,000 people — and tens of thousands of Guatemalans had fled to the United States to escape murder, poverty, and starvation.  

• 
• SOURCE: National History Center
  10/14/2020
  

  Julia Rose Kraut: Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States

  Julia Rose Kraut's "Threat of Dissent" examines major court decisions and legislation affecting the deportation of political radicals in the face of the First Amendment and America's stated ideals, while showing the lives of the people involved. She addressed the National History Center's Washington History Seminar this October.

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
  

  Trump’s Attacks on Refugees Expose the Inadequacy of the Current System

  by Carl J. Bon Tempo

  The Refugee Act of 1980 is the law allowing the President to set an annual ceiling for refugee admissions to the United States, and is in urgent need of revision by Congress. 

• 
• SOURCE: CNN
  9/16/2020
  

  In a Horrifying History of Forced Sterilizations, Some Fear the US is Beginning a New Chapter

  Historians and ethnic studies and legal scholars Natalia Molina, Alexandra Minna Stern, Alan Kraut and Maybell Romero comment on recent whistleblower allegations that ICE detention facilities forced migrant women to have hysterectomies. American racism has long showed itself around questions of who gets to control their own bodies.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/11/2020
  

  The Secret History of America’s Only WWII Refugee Camp

  The response to the settlement of fewer than 1,000 refugees in New York State roused fierce opposition and often ethnic prejudice as the United States was fighting fascism in Europe. 

• 
• 9/13/2020
  

  Prop 16 and the "Chinese Virus" Bring Two Views of Asian American History into Conflict

  by Hao Zou

  Many Chinese Americans oppose California's Proposition 16, which would reinstate race-based affirmative action in state university admissions. This support stems from a meritocratic interpretation of Chinese American experiences that is challenged by the xenophobic "Chinese Virus" discourse around COVID-19.

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  9/8/2020
  

  Trump’s Law-and-Order Campaign Relies on a Historic American Tradition of Racist and Anti-Immigrant Politics

  by Austin Sarat

  "Throughout this nation’s history, appeals to law and order have been as much about defending privilege as dealing with crime. They have been used in political campaigns to stigmatize racial, ethnic and religious groups and resist calls for social justice made by, and on behalf of, those groups."

• 
• SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
  9/5/2020
  

  Beyond Jermag Yev Sev: A Roundtable on Armenian American Identity

  A dialogue with a historian of Armenians in the United States shows that the boundaries of the "white race" have shifted historically and been determined not by biology but by politics played out in immigration courts. 

• 
• 9/6/2020
  

  Trump Can Use MS-13 as a Prop Because the US Won't Acknowledge a Role in Creating It

  by Roberto Lovato

  Roberto Lovato's new book "Unforgetting: " examines how policing in the United States, including a combined crackdown on immigration and gang activity led by William Barr after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, helped create MS-13 as a transnational criminal gang and a political symbol of fear to be exploited in election years. 

• 
• SOURCE: Haymarket Books
  9/2/2020
  

  Book Launch: Roberto Lovato's Unforgetting: Family, Migration, Gangs, Borders, and Revolution

  Roberto Lovato discusses his new book "Unforgetting" with Mike Davis.   

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/1/2020
  

  A Salvadoran-American Assembles the Fragments of a Violent Cultural History (Review)

  Carolyn Forché reviews Roberto Lovato's book "Unforgetting" on the transnational history of the Salvadoran people.

• 
• 8/30/2020
  

  Constitutional Textualism and Congressional Debate Over the 14th Amendment

  by Alan J. Singer

  Supreme Court decisions based on text without context have been responsible for some of the greatest perversions of justice in United States history, mostly around denying the scope of authority the 14th Amendment grants to the government to enforce civil equality.

• 
• SOURCE: The Intercept
  8/18/2020
  

  Trump Said Two Years Ago That He Would Deny Citizenship to Americans Like Kamala Harris

  In 2018, the president called birthright citizenship “ridiculous” and vowed to stop it by executive order.

• 
• SOURCE: TIME
  8/19/2020
  

  We Can't Tell Kamala Harris' Story Without the British Empire. We Can't Tell America's Without It Either

  by Priya Satia

  As Kamala Harris vies for the Vice Presidency, a complete recounting of her formation requires recognizing her as both a quintessentially American politician—because of, not despite, her being a child of immigrants—and part of a global story of the former British empire.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  8/15/2020
  

  Kamala Harris, Daughter of Immigrants, Is the Face of America’s Demographic Shift

  At 55, Ms. Harris is on the older side of this second generation of Americans whose parents came in those early years. But her family is part of a larger trend that has broad implications for the country’s identity, transforming a mostly white baby-boomer society into a multiethnic and racial patchwork.

• 
• 8/16/2020
  

  Of Course Kamala Harris is a Citizen

  by Derek Litvak

  John Eastman's claims that Kamala Harris is not a natural-born U.S. citizen fly in the face of 14th Amendment jurisprudence and Eastman's own prior defenses of Ted Cruz's eligibility for the presidency. 

• 
• 8/16/2020
  

  Citizenship, the 14th Amendment, and Trump’s War on Undocumented Immigrants

  by Alan J. Singer

  Recent attacks on Kamala Harris's citizenship and eligibility to serve as Vice President depend on willful misreading of the Fourteenth Amendment and ignorance of the specific racist injustices it was written to prevent. 

• 
• 8/9/2020
  

  Reflections from "That Further Shore": A Constitutional Lawyer's Immigrant Family History

  by John Feerick

  John Feerick's work in constitutional law helped create the 25th Amendment, and an unadopted amendment to abolish the Electoral College. His recent family history and memoir shows how his immigrant parents laid a foundation for this success. 

• 
• 8/2/2020
  

  Constitutional Textualism, Slavery and Undocumented Immigrants

  by Alan J. Singer

  Just reading the Constitutional text, without context, does not help us understand what Antonin Scalia called “the fairly understood meaning of those words.”

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  7/28/2020
  

  Refugee Resettlement Is Close to Collapse. That Was Trump’s Plan.

  In the 40 years since the program was established, no refugee who has entered the country through the resettlement program has killed anyone in a terrorist attack in the United States.