Showing titles in Emigration & Immigration

Postcolonialism explores the political, social, and cultural effects of decolonization, continuing the anti-colonial deconstruction of Western dominance. This Very Short Introduction discusses both the history and key debates of postcolonialism, and considers its importance as a means of changing the way we think about the world. Robert J. C. Young examines the key strategies that postcolonial thought has developed to engage with the impact of sometimes centuries of Western political and cultural domination.

When Aida Hernandez was born in 1987 in Agua Prieta, Mexico, the nearby US border was little more than a worn-down fence. Eight years later, Aida’s mother took her and her siblings to live in Douglas, Arizona. By then, the border had become one of the most heavily policed sites in America. Undocumented, Aida fought to make her way. She learned English, watched Friends, and, after having a baby at 16, dreamed of teaching dance and moving with her son to New York City. But life had other plans.

Setting out from her classroom, Jessica Lander takes the listener on a powerful and urgent journey to understand what it takes for immigrant students to become Americans. A compelling listen for everyone who cares about America’s future, Making Americans brims with innovative ideas for educators and policy makers across the country.

From the award-winning NBC News and MSNBC correspondent comes a powerful and deeply reported journey to lay bare the full truth behind the defining moral crisis of the Trump years: the systematic separation of thousands of desperate migrant families at the US-Mexico border....

A groundbreaking work of investigative journalism, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism exposes how the FBI has, under the guise of engaging in counterterrorism since 9/11, built a network of more than 15,000 informants whose primary purpose is to infiltrate Muslim communities to create and facilitate phony terrorist plots so that the Bureau can then claim it is winning the war on terror.

In an era of mass migration in which more than 100 million people are displaced comes this lyrical portrait of Syrian and Iraqi refugees and the belongings they carry. What We Remember Will Be Saved is a book of hope, home, and the stories we hold within us when everything else has been lost. Journalist and scholar Stephanie Saldaña, who lived in Syria before the war, sets out on a journey across nine countries to meet refugees and learn what they salvaged from the ruins when they escaped.

In 1975, during the fall of Saigon, Phuc Tran immigrates to America along with his family. By sheer chance, they land in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a small town where the Trans struggle to assimilate into their new life. In this coming-of-age memoir told through the themes of great books such as The Metamorphosis, The Scarlet Letter, The Iliad, and more, Tran navigates the push and pull of finding and accepting himself despite the challenges of immigration, feelings of isolation, and teenage rebellion.

Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather's nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. Despite all this, she finds love, and success as a teacher.

In May 2001, a group of men attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of southern Arizona, through the deadliest region of the continent, the "Devil's Highway." Three years later, Luis Alberto Urrea wrote about what happened to them. The result was a national bestseller, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a "book of the year" in multiple newspapers, and a work proclaimed as a modern American classic.

The dramatic real-life stories of four young people caught up in the mass exodus of Shanghai in the wake of China's 1949 Communist revolution. Benny must decide either to escape to Hong Kong or navigate the intricacies of a newly Communist China. Annuo, forced to flee with her father, a defeated Nationalist official, becomes an unwelcome exile in Taiwan. The financially strapped Ho fights deportation from the US in order to continue his studies while his family struggles at home. Bing, given away by her poor parents, faces the prospect of a new life among strangers in America.

At the center of the current immigration debate are migrants from Central America fleeing poverty, corruption, and violence in search of refuge in the United States. In Central America’s Forgotten History, Aviva Chomsky answers the urgent question “How did we get here?” Centering the centuries-long intertwined histories of US expansion and indigenous and Central American struggles against inequality and oppression, Chomsky highlights the pernicious cycle of colonial and neocolonial development policies.

In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday party. But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly 100, dies herself, leading to a farewell doubleheader in a single weekend. Among the guests is Big Angel's half-brother, known as Little Angel, who must reckon with the truth that although he shares a father with his siblings, he has not, as a half gringo, shared a life. Across two bittersweet days in their San Diego neighborhood, the revelers mingle.

Brian Buffini, an Irish immigrant who went from rags to riches, shares his strategies for anyone who wants to achieve the American dream. Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, Brian Buffini immigrated to San Diego, California, at the age of 19, with only 92 dollars in his pocket. Since then he has become a classic American rags-to-riches story. After discovering real estate, he quickly became one of the nation's top real estate moguls and founder of the largest business training company, Buffini & Co., in North America.

Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is a vivid portrait of life and death in a turn-of-the-century American meat-packing factory. A grim indictment that led to government regulations of the food industry, The Jungle is Sinclair's extraordinary contribution to literature and social reform.

LatinoLand is an exceptional, all-encompassing overview of Hispanic America based on personal interviews, deep research, and Marie Arana’s life experience as a Latina. At present, Latinos comprise twenty percent of the US population, a number that is growing. By 2050, census reports project that one in every three Americans will claim Latino heritage.

Immigration is one of the most controversial topics in the United States, typically framed as a battle between anti-immigrant conservatives and pro-immigrant liberals. Yet surprisingly, almost no one on either side of this issue seems to understand the true impact that immigrants have on any aspect of American life. In The Truth About Immigration, Wharton School professor Zeke Hernandez provides an accessible, apolitical, and evidence-based look at the effects of immigration on our local communities and our nation.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called “[T]he most famous undocumented immigrant in America”, tackles one of the defining issues of our time in this explosive and deeply personal call to arms.

From Annie Moore, the Irishwoman who was the first to be processed there, to Arne Peterssen, the Norwegian who was the last to be taken away from the island in 1954, Ellis Island weaves together the personal experiences of forgotten individuals with those who live on in history: Fiorello La Guardia, Lee Iacocca, and other American leaders whose paths led them to the island for various reasons.

In late 2006, Saket Soni, a 28-year-old, Indian-born community organizer received an anonymous phone call from an Indian migrant worker inside a Mississippi labor camp. He and 500 other men were living in squalor in Gulf Coast “man camps,” surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, crammed into cold trailers with putrid portable toilets, forced to eat moldy bread and frozen rice. Worse, lured by the promise of good work and green cards, the men had desperately scraped together up to $20,000 each to apply for this “opportunity”.

The dramatic true story of two brothers living parallel lives on either side of the US-Mexico border - and how their lives converged in a major criminal conspiracy.