Tag
Citizenship
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A Tale of Two Families: Birthright Citizenship and Family Reunification for Chinese Migrants in 1925
“As the families in Cheung Sum Shee v. Nagle and Chang Chan v. Nagle went to court to establish their right to reunite, these men and women also sought the answer to a core question that is still under debate today: Whose families belong together?”
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Public Thinker: A. Naomi Paik on a Future without Rights
What is specific to or even unique about the condition of “rightlessness,” to the …
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Oedipus at the Border
The US has never been a democracy. Perhaps, for some, the most recent indefinite imprisonment of undocumented immigrants in concentration camps finally shattered confidence in this US fantasy. And yet, for others, no amount of …
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The Future of Migration
In 2008, in a town of about 2,000 people, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained 389 workers and charged them with civil immigration violations and identity theft. The Bush administration had decided to experiment with mass workplace arrests and assembly-line judicial proceedings. The target was a kosher meatpacking plant in rural Postville, Iowa. What most…
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Citizens: 150 Years of the 14th Amendment
It is possible to tell the story of the 14th Amendment’s adoption as one driven by the maneuvering of highly placed lawmakers—judges and members of …
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The Right to Have Rights
Since the election of Donald Trump, sales of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism have soared. Driving the new attention to this three-volume work of political theory published in 1951 is …
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The Big Picture: The Promise of Sanctuary
In June 2015, during the early days of his candidacy during the Republican primaries, Donald Trump declared: “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.” These sentences seemed to signify a new low in anti-Latino speech, but they are not new.…
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The Big Picture: The Right Type of Citizenship
“The prime problem of our nation,” explained Teddy Roosevelt in his 1910 Osawatomie, Kansas, speech on economic nationalism, “is to get the right type of good citizenship.” It still is. Working people want to pledge their allegiance to a country that will reciprocate with a pledge of allegiance to them. That is the lesson of…
