Overview

Few topics generate as much heated public debate in the United States today as immigration across our southern border. Two positions have been staked out, one favoring the expansion of guest-worker programs and focusing on the economic benefits of immigration, and the other proposing greater physical and other barriers to entry and focusing more on the perceived threat to national security from immigration. Both sides of this debate, however, rely in their arguments on preconceived notions and unexamined assumptions about assimilation, national identity, economic participation, legality, political loyalty, and gender roles. In American Immigration After 1996, Kathleen Arnold aims to reveal more of the underlying complexities of immigration and, in particular, to cast light on the relationship between globalization of the economy and issues of political sovereignty, especially what she calls “prerogative power” as it is exercised by the U.S. government.

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9780271048895

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Reviews

Kathleen Arnold examines the contemporary 'problem' of immigration--and 'illegal' migrants specifically--in a unique and fascinating manner that illuminates how it came to be. In doing so, she identifies and challenges widely held assumptions and provides invaluable insights into globalization, sovereignty, citizenship, and human rights. She puts critical theory to work as one should: to help us understand a messy and complicated 'reality' and, more important, to imagine and put into practice a profoundly transformational politics to bring about a more just world. American Immigration After 1996 is of great importance and deserves a wide audience. --Joseph Nevins, Vassar College, author of Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid

This book will be of great interest to scholars of immigration across the disciplines and, more generally, to political theorists and international relations scholars. --Maria Cristina Garcia, Bulletin of Latin American Research

Author Information

Kathleen R. Arnold is currently Visiting Professor at DePaul University in Chicago. She is the author of America's New Working Class: Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Biopolitical Age (Penn State, 2007).

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