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In the shadow of liberty : the invisible history of immigrant detention in the United States
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2024
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Publishers Weekly Review
In this harrowing account of immigrants' experiences in American detention centers, Stanford historian Minian (Undocumented Lives) outlines the central role incarceration has played in the past century of U.S. immigration policy. In 2018, furor over Donald Trump's family separation policy led to a wellspring of outrage over the punitive conditions of immigrant detention, but Minian demonstrates that "Guantánamo-like facilities have arisen in towns and cities across America since the nineteenth century" and that the U.S. has long been "crisscrossed by a vast network of facilities where people are detained without basic rights." She tells this history through profiles of four immigrants, among them Fu Chi Hao, who in 1901 fled Christian repression in China and, after a monthslong detention in unsanitary conditions upon entering the U.S., endured a costly, burdensome, and years-long parole process, and Ellen Knauff, the German wife of a U.S. soldier, who arrived in 1948 and was incarcerated on Ellis Island for nearly two years. Minian's up-close narration of her subjects' lives brings home the intimate and unbearable human suffering of incarceration, and her analysis is fueled by anger at both the hypocrisy of a country that denies freedom-seeking immigrants their liberty and the fickleness of protestors who no longer care about immigrant detention (in 2022, America detained approximately 307,000 immigrants). It's a must-read for anyone invested in U.S. immigration policy. (Apr.)
Kirkus Review
A strong indictment of long-standing anti-immigrant practices in the U.S. "Since its inception, immigrant detention has been an affront to basic ideals of justice and compassion," writes Stanford historian Minian, author of Undocumented Lives. Even if the numbers of detained didn't change much from Obama to Trump to Biden, the practice of separating families and detaining children apart from their parents was employed more vigorously in that middle term than on either side. The author chronicles how draconian measures such as imprisonment without due process and even torture have been in place since the 1980s, used as an instrument of policy "by design" to deter immigration with the promise that only trouble awaits. Minian examines immigrants from the 19th century to the present to note that, of course, this determent doesn't really apply to white Europeans: The exclusions were intended for Chinese and other Asians, then Latinx people, then Jews, and so on. In one case study, the author writes about two Chinese deportees who saved American lives at danger to their own during the Boxer Rebellion, a story similar to that of recent Afghan military interpreters denied admission. In addition, countless Mexican farm workers kept the American agricultural economy afloat during the labor shortages of World War II, only to be deported or jailed afterward. "Before 1954, the government did not even consider that there were options other than detention for dealing with arriving migrants," writes Minian. However, apart from a period where parole was an option, the government has ended up back where it started: jailing or interning people arriving from Cuba and Vietnam, building ever higher walls, militarizing the border, and reinforcing the fact that "if the United States is a nation of immigrants, then it is also a nation of prisoners." A grimly persuasive history, of broad interest to immigration rights activists and reformers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Summary
In 2018, many Americans watched in horror as children were torn from their parents at the US-Mexico border under Trump's 'family separation' policy. But as historian Ana Raquel Minian reveals in In the Shadow of Liberty, this was only the latest chapter in a saga tracing back to the 1800s - one in which immigrants to the United States have been held without recourse to their constitutional rights. Braiding together the vivid stories of four migrants seeking to escape the turmoil of their homelands for the promise of America, In the Shadow of Liberty gives this history a human face, telling the dramatic story of a Central American asylum seeker, a Cuban exile, a European war bride, and a Chinese refugee. As we travel alongside these indelible characters, In the Shadow of Liberty explores how sites of rightlessness have evolved, and what their existence has meant for our body politic. Though these 'black sites' exist out of view for the average American, their reach extends into all of our lives: the explosive growth of the for-profit prison industry traces its origins to the immigrant detention system, as does the emergence of Guantanamo and the gradual unraveling of the right to bail and the presumption of innocence. Through these narratives, we see how the changing political climate surrounding immigration has played out in individual lives, and at what cost. But as these stories demonstrate, it doesn't have to be like this, and a better way might be possible.
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