Immigrants in the United States during the pandemic faced the same discrimination, disenfranchisement, violence, and terror as before—only intensified.
Tag: Immigration
Let Families and Communities Seek Asylum Together
Why not redefine our asylum system to accommodate the complex and multiple reasons people flee?
Refuge: Denied. Asylum: Pending
The United States originates in settler colonialism, slavery, empire, and a long history of giving refuge to some while refusing refuge to others.
Borders Don’t Stop Violence—They Create It
The “border” is not a line on the ground, but a tool to enable violence and surveillance.
Abolish Migrant Prisons: A Manifesto
So long as the state can criminalize movement and eliminate groups deemed undesirable, no one is free.
From “Crisis” to Futurity
Introducing a new series to push forward our thinking and action about immigration and borders.
Public Thinker: Catherine S. Ramírez on Measuring the Unmeasurable
“That is the paradox of assimilation … You can be essential—an essential worker—and at the same time excluded from the CARES Act.”
The DREAM Act Was Never Enough
In 20 years, Congress has never passed the DREAM Act. What has been lost in chasing this legislation’s narrow dreams?
Immigration: What We’ve Done, What We Must Do
Once, abolitionists had to imagine a world without slavery. Can we similarly envision a world where migrants are offered justice?
As American as Child Separation
The United States tears families apart—during slavery, in the wars against indigenous people and the war on drugs, and, today, at the border.
Solidarity Is a Process: Talking with Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Josh Kun, and Destin Jenkins
“Solidarity is not a thing. There’s no formula, no exact science. There is ongoing process.”
The Enduring Disposability of Latinx Workers
When employers fail to provide PPE, testing, sick pay, or job protection, the message is clear: Latinx laborers are “not us.”
Karen Carpenter’s Afterlives
Everyone knows that feeling when a song—written by someone else in some other place or time—sees you so completely in the present. But how does that happen?
Necessary Documents, Undocumented Americans
It doesn’t matter if they are innocent parents or 9/11 heroes: undocumented Americans have been villainized and brutalized by the United States.
Mexico: The Essential Neighbor
Paul Theroux’s On the Plain of Snakes is the richest portrayal of contemporary Mexico available to Americans, and an urgent one.
Deep Focus: “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming”
It’s hardly a secret, but, for a land that bills itself as a land of freedom and ...
What Does Assimilation Mean?
When Samuel P. Huntington first published “The Hispanic Challenge,” in Foreign Policy in 2004, I was an assistant professor of American studies ...
Public Thinker: A. Naomi Paik on a Future without Rights
What is specific to or even unique about the condition of “rightlessness,” to the ...
The Immigration Crisis Archive
Back in 1954, the Eisenhower administration shut down the US government’s last remaining long-term immigrant holding facility, an ...
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 ...