Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship

by Rachel Ida Buff

Overview

Punctuated by marches across the United States in the spring of 2006, immigrant rights has reemerged as a significant and highly visible political issue. Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of U.S. Citizenship brings prominent activists and scholars together to examine the emergence and significance of the contemporary immigrant rights movement. Contributors place the contemporary immigrant rights movement in historical and comparative contexts by looking at the ways immigrants and their allies have staked claims to rights in the past, and by examining movements based in different communities around the United States. Scholars explain the evolution of immigration policy, and analyze current conflicts around issues of immigrant rights; activists engaged in the current movement document the ways in which coalitions have been built among immigrants from different nations, and between immigrant and native born peoples. The essays examine the ways in which questions of immigrant rights engage broader issues of identity, including gender, race, and sexuality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814799918
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	08/17/2008
Series:	Nation of Nations , #15
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Rachel Ida Buff teaches History and Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction: Toward a Redefinition of Citizenship Rights   Rachel Ida Buff     1
Narratives of Refuge and Resistance     23
On Being Here and Not Here: Noncitizen Status in American Immigration Law   John S. W. Park     26
Acts of Resistance in Asylum Seekers' Persecution Narratives   Connie G. Oxford     40
Family, Unvalued: Sex and Security: A Short History of Exclusions   Scott Long   Jessica Stern   Adam Francouer     55
Primary Source: Boutilier v. Immigration Service, 1967     79
Beyond the Day without an Immigrant: Immigrant Communities Building a Sustainable Movement   Eunice Hyunhye Cho     94
Primary Source: National Network on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Statements of Support, Spring 2006     122
Groups Endorsing the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, 2006     134
Ambivalent Allies, Reluctant Rivals, and Disavowed Deviants     139
"Pale Face 'Fraid You Crowd Him Out": Racializing "Indians" and "Indianizing" Chinese Immigrants   Dustin Tahmakera     142
Primary Source: People v. Hall, 1854     156
A History of Black Immigration into the United States through the Lens of the African American Civil and Human Rights Struggle   Zachery Williams   Robert Samuel Smith   Seneca Vaught   Babacar M'Baye     159
Rescuing Elian: Gender and Race in Stories of Children's Migration   Isabel Guzman Molina     179
The Rights of Respectability: Ambivalent Allies, Reluctant Rivals, and Disavowed Deviants   Lisa Marie Cacho     190
Immigrant Acts     207
What Explains the Immigrant Rights Marches of 2006? Xenophobia and Organizing with Democracy Technology   Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo   Angelica Salas     209
Primary Source: Shame of a Nation: A Documented Story of Polie-State Terror against Mexican-Americans in the USA, 1954   Patricia Morgan     226
Si, Se Puede! Spaces for Immigrant Organizing   Christine Neumann-Ortiz     246
Immigrant Workers Take the Lead: A Militant Humility Transforms L.A. Koreatown   Glenn Omatsu     266
Questions of Democracy     283
Who Should Manage Immigration-Congress or the States? An Introduction to Constitutional Immigration Law   Victor C. Romero     286
The Undergraduate Railroad: Undocumented Immigrant Students and Public Universities   Rachel Ida Buff     301
Our Immigrant Coreligionists: The National Catholic Welfare Conference as an Advocate for Immigrants in the 1920s   Jeanne Petit      315
Building Coalitions for Immigrant Power   Fred Tsao     329
Primary Source: Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, 2006     343
Their Liberties, Our Security   David Cole     347
Primary Source: The Deportation Terror: A Weapon to Gag America, 1950   Abner Green     363
Afterwords     383
The Mexican-American War and Whitman's "Song of Myself": A Foundational Borderline Fantasy   Donald Pease     385
Rights in a Transnational Era   Monisha Das Gupta     402
About the Contributors     425
Index     433

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Impressive, provocative and smart. Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship is breathtaking in its timeliness and its broad scope.-Erika Lee,author of At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943

An urgent collection of essays by both activists and scholars that puts legislative and judicial histories into dialogue with activists' struggles to bring about social justice for immigrant communities. Its ever-present focus on social justice connects the specificity of individual historical struggles to broader political aspirations.-Wendy Kozol,Oberlin College

"A probing examination of the mechanics of immigration control. The book reaches beyond the growing nationalism of the post-9/11 era and the Mexican immigrant experience by examining federally sanctioned discrimination of other ethnic and social groups like South Asians, Arabs and gays throughout the nation's history."-Expressmilwaukee.com,

“Rachel Buff's edited collection, Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship offers a nuanced and sharply critical perspective on the common narrative of the USA as an uncommonly successful immigrant society.”
-The Journal Of Intercultural Studies

,

“In the end, the most compelling scholarship lays bare the paradoxes of the past. The best historians go beyond identifying such paradoxes to redress gaps in analysis that reshape the field, and in Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship, Buff skillfully does this.”
-The Journal of American History

Editorial Reviews

"Impressive, provocative and smart. Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship is breathtaking in its timeliness and its broad scope."

Erika Lee

"In the end, the most compelling scholarship lays bare the paradoxes of the past. The best historians go beyond identifying such paradoxes to redress gaps in analysis that reshape the field, and in Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship, Buff skillfully does this."

The Journal of American History

"An urgent collection of essays by both activists and scholars that puts legislative and judicial histories into dialogue with activists' struggles to bring about social justice for immigrant communities. Its ever-present focus on social justice connects the specificity of individual historical struggles to broader political aspirations."

Wendy Kozol