David Bacon, "Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants"
Beacon Press | 2008-09-17 | ISBN: 0807042269 | 261 pages | PDF | 1,4 MB
http://depositfiles.com/en/files/7705kl2kw
Immigration in America Today: An Encyclopedia by James Loucky, Jeanne Armstrong, Larry J. Estrada
Publisher: Greenwood Press | Number Of Pages: 392 | Publication Date: 2006-08-30 | ISBN-10: 0313312141 | PDF | 1 Mb
America today is witnessing the largest and most sustained wave of immigrants its borders have ever seen. Although factors like the Great Depression, World War II, and quota restrictions had slowed the massive influx of Europeans from the early part of the 20th century, policies like the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act have relaxed quotas and opened America's doors to hundreds of thousands of immigrants a year, from both Eastern and Western hemispheres, to reach a height of over 9 million immigrants in the 1990s. Today, immigrants and policy-makers alike grapple with issues regarding employment, education, refugee status, and family reunification; as well as illegal immigrants--many from Mexico, whose legal immigration alone accounts for more than 20% of immigrants in the US. Despite this, this comprehensive reference source allows a glimpse of the same motivating factors that drove earlier immigrants through Ellis Island's gates--the promise of economic opportunity and the hope of a better life.
Over 70 A-Z entries address topical and timely aspects of modern US immigration, including:
bilingual education domestic work employer sanctions gangs gender homeland security migrant education posttraumatic stress disorder stereotypesSummary: An excellent supplement for any collectionRating: 5From adoption and gangs to crime, domestic work, legal issues and social conflicts, the encyclopedia Immigration in America Today is a top, recommended pick for any high school to college-level collection strong in social issues. Entries here do more than define: they offer often pages of detail and insights, conclude with bibliographic references for further reading and research, and provide background history essential to understanding the foundations of modern immigrant rights and debates. An excellent supplement for any collection seeking a definitive starting point on immigration history and issues. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch
For two decades veteran photojournalist David Bacon has documented the connections between labor, migration, and the global economy. In Illegal People Bacon explores the human side of globalization, exposing the many ways it uproots people in Latin America and Asia, driving them to migrate. At the same time, U.S. immigration policy makes the labor of those displaced people a crime in the United States. Illegal People explains why our national policy produces even more displacement, more migration, more immigration raids, and a more divided, polarized society.
Through interviews and on-the-spot reporting from both impoverished communities abroad and American immigrant workplaces and neighborhoods, Bacon shows how the United States’ trade and economic policy abroad, in seeking to create a favorable investment climate for large corporations, creates conditions to displace communities and set migration into motion. Trade policy and immigration are intimately linked, Bacon argues, and are, in fact, elements of a single economic system.
In particular, he analyzes NAFTA’s corporate tilt as a cause of displacement and migration from Mexico and shows how criminalizing immigrant labor benefits employers. For example, Bacon explains that, pre-NAFTA, Oaxacan corn farmers received subsidies for their crops. State-owned CONASUPO markets turned the corn into tortillas and sold them, along with milk and other basic foodstuffs, at low, subsidized prices in cities. Post-NAFTA, several things happened: the Mexican government was forced to end its subsidies for corn, which meant that farmers couldn’t afford to produce it; the CONASUPO system was dissolved; and cheap U.S. corn flooded the Mexican market, driving the price of corn sharply down. Because Oaxacan farming families can’t sell enough corn to buy food and supplies, many thousands migrate every year, making the perilous journey over the border into the United States only to be labeled “illegal” and to find that working itself has become, for them, a crime.
Bacon powerfully traces the development of illegal status back to slavery and shows the human cost of treating the indispensable labor of millions of migrants—and the migrants themselves—as illegal. Illegal People argues for a sea change in the way we think, debate, and legislate around issues of migration and globalization, making a compelling case for why we need to consider immigration and migration from a globalized human rights perspective.
“David Bacon is the conscience of American journalism; an extraordinary social documentarist in the rugged humanist tradition of Dorothea Lange, Carey McWilliams, and Ernesto Galarza.” —Mike Davis, author of No One Is Illegal
“Illegal People documents how undocumented workers have become the world’s most exploited workforce—subject to raids and arrests, forced to work at low pay and under miserable conditions, and prevented from organizing on their own behalf. In this richly reported book, David Bacon makes a powerful case for the centrality of ‘illegals’—of all nationalities—in the global struggle for economic justice.” —Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
