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Forever Prisoners offers the first broad history of immigrant detention in the United States. Elliott Young focuses on five stories, including Chinese detained off the coast of Washington in the late 1880s, an insane Russian-Brazilian Jew caught on a ship shuttling between New York and South America during World War I, Japanese Peruvians kidnapped and locked up in a Texas jail during World War II, a prison uprising by Mariel Cuban refugees in 1987, and a Salvadoran mother who grew up in the United States and has spent years incarcerated while fighting deportation. Young shows how foreigners have been caged not just for immigration violations, but also held in state and federal prisons for criminal offenses, in insane asylums for mental illness, as enemy aliens in INS facilities, and in refugee camps. Since the 1980s, the conflation of criminality with undocumented migrants has given rise to the most extensive system of immigrant incarceration in the nation's history. Today over half a million immigrants are caged each year, some serving indefinite terms in what has become the world's most extensive immigrant detention system. And yet, Young finds, the rate of all forms of incarceration for immigrants was as high in the early twentieth century as it is today, demonstrating a return to past carceral practices.

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9781665189279

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Elliott Young is a professor in the History Department at Lewis and Clark College. He is the author of Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II and Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border and coeditor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping US-Mexico Borderlands History. He is cofounder of the Tepoztlan Institute for Transnational History of the Americas. He has also provided expert witness testimony for over 200 asylum cases and has written for the Huffington Post, the Oregonian, and the Utne Reader. Elliott Young is a professor in the History Department at Lewis and Clark College. He is the author of Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II and Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border and coeditor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping US-Mexico Borderlands History. He is cofounder of the Tepoztlan Institute for Transnational History of the Americas. He has also provided expert witness testimony for over 200 asylum cases and has written for the Huffington Post, the Oregonian, and the Utne Reader. Paul Brion has a passion for storytelling. He believes that audiobooks--our most current form of the oral tradition--are the purest of the interactive and co-creative arts. An autodidact with eclectic interests, he enjoys learning about a wide variety of subjects, as he has an avaricious hunger for knowledge.

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