The current immigration crisis on our southern borders is usually debated from a safe distance. Politicians create a fear of the migrant to garner votes, while academicians pontificate on the topic from the comfort of cushy armchairs. What would happen if instead the issue were explored with one's feet on the ground--what the author calls an "ethics of place"? As an organic intellectual, De La Torre writes while physically standing in solidarity with migrants who are crossing borders and the humanitarian organizations that accompany them in their journey. He painstakingly captures their stories, testimonies, and actions, which become the foundation for theological and ethical analysis. From this vantage point, the book constructs a liberative ethics based on what those disenfranchised by our current immigration policies are saying and doing in the hopes of not just raising consciousness, but also crafting possibilities for participatory praxis.

Victoria Carty uses theories of immigration, social movements, and critical race theory to study the recent immigration crises on both sides of the Atlantic. Carty shows that the high volume of immigration in both the European Union and the United States has led to a resurgence of nativist sentiments and white supremacy groups.

Why have Americans expressed concern about immigration at some times but not at others? In pursuit of an answer, this book examines America’s first nativist movement, which responded to the rapid influx of 4.2 million immigrants between 1840 and 1860 and culminated in the dramatic rise of the National American Party. As previous studies have focused on the coasts, historians have not yet completely explained why westerners joined the ranks of the National American, or “Know Nothing,” Party or why the nation’s bloodiest anti-immigrant riots erupted in western cities—namely Chicago, Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis. In focusing on the antebellum West, Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis illuminates the cultural, economic, and political issues that originally motivated American nativism and explains how it ultimately shaped the political relationship between church and state. In six detailed chapters, Ritter explains how unprecedented immigration from Europe and rapid westward expansion re-ignited fears of Catholicism as a corrosive force. He presents new research on the inner sanctums of the secretive Order of Know-Nothings and provides original data on immigration, crime, and poverty in the urban West. Ritter argues that the country’s first bout of political nativism actually renewed Americans’ commitment to church–state separation. Native-born Americans compelled Catholics and immigrants, who might have otherwise shared an affinity for monarchism, to accept American-style democracy. Catholics and immigrants forced Americans to adopt a more inclusive definition of religious freedom. This study offers valuable insight into the history of nativism in U.S. politics and sheds light on present-day concerns about immigration, particularly the role of anti-Islamic appeals in recent elections.

This edited book examines the experience of small states in Europe during the 2015–2016 migration crisis. The contributions highlight the challenges small states and the European Union faced in addressing the massive irregular flow of migrants and refugees into Europe and the Schengen Area. Small states adopted a number of coping strategies and proved relatively effective in navigating the storm they faced. Externally they pursued strategies of shelter-seeking, hiding, hedging and norm entrepreneurship, while domestically they tended to securitize migration and to pursue scapegoating by blaming the EU and other states for the nature and magnitude of the crisis. During this crisis management, their small administrations proved resilient and flexible in their responses, despite suffering from limited resources and being subject to the shifting preferences of stronger actors. This book shows that independent of whether we view the migration crisis as a crisis for the European Union or Europe as a whole, or how we interpret the intensity and severity of the crisis, this was a crisis for small states in Europe. The crisis disrupted the liberal and institutionalized order upon which small states in the region had increasingly based their policies and influence for more than 60 years.

This book examines the impact of immigration on U.S. society—on schools, social services, jobs, taxpayers. This book offers alternatives to present policies.

The United States in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation State argues that to preserve our freedom Americans must mount a defense of the nation state against the progressive forces who advocate for global government. The Founders of America were convinced that freedom would flourish only in a nation state. A nation state is a collection of citizens who share a commitment to the same principles. Today, the nation state is under attack by the progressive Left, who allege that it is the source of almost every evil in the world.

The Syrian refugee crisis seriously challenged countries in the Middle East, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in the world. It provoked reactions from humanitarian generosity to anti-immigrant warnings of the destruction of the West. It contributed to the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” from the European Union and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. This book is a unique study of rhetorical responses to the crisis through a comparative approach that analyzes the discourses of leading political figures in ten countries, including gateway, destination, and tertiary countries for immigration, such as Turkey, several European countries, and the United States. These national discourses constructed the crisis and its refugees so as to welcome or shun them, in turn shaping the character and identity of the receiving countries, for both domestic and international audiences, as more or less humanitarian, nationalist, Muslim-friendly, Christian, and so forth. This book is essential reading for scholars wishing to understand how European and other countries responded to this crisis, discursively constructing refugees, themselves, and an emerging world order.