The immigration debate divides Americans more stridently than ever, due to a chronic failure of national leadership by both parties. Bush and Bolick propose a six-point strategy for reworking our policies that begins with erasing all existing, outdated immigration structures and starting over. Their strategy is guided by two core principles: first, immigration is vital to America's future; second, any enduring resolution must adhere to the rule of law.

Two New York Times Washington correspondents provide a detailed, “fact-based account of what precipitated some of this administration’s more brazen assaults on immigration” (The Washington Post) filled with never-before-told stories of this key issue of Donald Trump’s presidency. No issue matters more to Donald Trump and his administration than restricting immigration. Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear have covered the Trump administration from its earliest days. In Border Wars, they take us inside the White House to document how Stephen Miller and other anti-immigration officials blocked asylum-seekers and refugees, separated families, threatened deportation, and sought to erode the longstanding bipartisan consensus that immigration and immigrants make positive contributions to America. Their revelation of Trump’s desire for a border moat filled with alligators made national news. As the authors reveal, Trump has used immigration to stoke fears (“the caravan”), attack Democrats and the courts, and distract from negative news and political difficulties. As he seeks reelection in 2020, Trump has elevated immigration in the imaginations of many Americans into a national crisis. Border Wars identifies the players behind Trump’s anti-immigration policies, showing how they planned, stumbled and fought their way toward changes that have further polarized the nation. “[Davis and Shear’s] exquisitely reported Border Wars reveals the shattering horror of the moment, [and] the mercurial unreliability and instability of the president” (The New York Times Book Review).

In the early years of the Cold War, the United States mounted expansive public diplomacy programs in the Global South, including initiatives with the recently partitioned states of India and Pakistan. U.S. operations in these two countries became the second- and fourth-largest in the world, creating migration links that resulted in the emergence of American universities, such as the University of Houston, as immigration hubs for the highly selective, student-led South Asian migration stream starting in the 1950s. By the late twentieth century, Houston's South Asian community had become one of the most prosperous in the metropolitan area and one of the largest in the country. Mining archives and using new oral histories, Uzma Quraishi traces this pioneering community from its midcentury roots to the early twenty-first century, arguing that South Asian immigrants appealed to class conformity and endorsed the model minority myth to navigate the complexities of a shifting Sunbelt South. By examining Indian and Pakistani immigration to a major city transitioning out of Jim Crow, Quraishi reframes our understanding of twentieth-century migration, the changing character of the South, and the tangled politics of race, class, and ethnicity in the United States.

The surveillance of immigrants and potential terrorists preoccupies leaders throughout the industrialized world. Yet these concerns are hardly new. Policing Paris examines a critical moment in the history of immigration control and political surveillance. Drawing on massive police archives and other materials, Clifford Rosenberg shows how in the years after the Great War the French police, terrified by the Bolshevik Revolution and the specter of immigrant criminality, became the first major force anywhere systematically to enforce distinctions of citizenship and national origins. As the French capital emerged as a haven for refugees, dissidents, and workers from throughout Europe and across the Mediterranean in the 1920s, police officers raided immigrant neighborhoods to scare illegal aliens into registering with authorities and arrested those whose papers were not in order. The police began to concentrate on colonial workers from North Africa, tracking these workers with a special police brigade and segregating them in their own hospital when they fell ill. Transformed by their enforcement, legal categories that had existed for hundreds of years began to matter as never before. They determined whether or not families could remain together and whether people could keep their jobs or were forced to flee. During World War II, identity controls marked out entire populations for physical destruction. The treatment of foreigners during the Third Republic, Rosenberg contends, shaped the subsequent treatment of Jews by Vichy. At the same time, however, he argues that the new methods of identification pioneered between the wars are more directly relevant to the present day. They created forms of inclusion and inequality that remain pervasive, as industrial welfare states around the world find themselves compelled to provide benefits to their own citizens and recruit foreign nationals to satisfy their labor needs.

Terry Greene Sterling enters the fearful ghettoes of Arizona, the gateway for nearly half of the nation's undocumented immigrants and the state that is the least welcoming toward them, to tell the stories of the men, women, and children who have crossed the border.

"Despite public concern with the increasing politicization of U.S. immigration courts, few people are aware of the system's fundamental flaw: the immigration courts are not really 'courts' but an office of the Department of Justice--the nation's law enforcement agency. Alison Peck's original and surprising account shows how paranoia sparked by World War II and the War on Terror drove the structure of the immigration courts. Focusing on previously unstudied decisions in the Roosevelt and Bush administrations, this book divulges both the human tragedy of our current immigration system and the human crises that led to its creation. Peck provides an accessible legal analysis of recent events to make the case for independent immigration courts, proposing that the courts be moved into an independent, Article I court system. As long as the immigration courts remain under the authority of the attorney general, the administration of immigration justice will remain a game of political football--with people's very lives on the line." -- back cover.

American history told from the vantage of immigration politics It is often said that with the election of Donald Trump nativism was raised from the dead. After all, here was a president who organized his campaign around a rhetoric of unvarnished racism and xenophobia. Among his first acts on taking office was to block foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. But although his actions may often seem unprecedented, they are not as unusual as many people believe. This story doesn’t begin with Trump. For decades, Republicans and Democrats alike have employed xenophobic ideas and policies, declaring time and again that “illegal immigration” is a threat to the nation’s security, wellbeing, and future. The profound forces of all-American nativism have, in fact, been pushing politics so far to the right over the last forty years that, for many people, Trump began to look reasonable. As Daniel Denvir argues, issues as diverse as austerity economics, free trade, mass incarceration, the drug war, the contours of the post 9/11 security state, and, yes, Donald Trump and the Alt-Right movement are united by the ideology of nativism, which binds together assorted anxieties and concerns into a ruthless political project. All-American Nativism provides a powerful and impressively researched account of the long but often forgotten history that gave us Donald Trump.