A powerful, cogent indictment.
A professor of immigration law with five decades of experience offers some fixes for a broken system.
Arguing from the outset that U.S. immigration laws are fundamentally racist and unjust, Hing, the author of Deporting Our Souls and American Presidents, Deportations, and Human Rights Violations: From Carter to Trump, presents ample evidence of their sometimes Kafkaesque, frequently wantonly cruel applications. In service of his argument, he looks at five different types of immigration dysfunction, illustrating each with stories of individuals affected. He leads with the detention of minors at the southern border, plunging readers into the shocking conditions endured by children, some as young as toddlers, held for days in overcrowded rooms and given insufficient nutrition. He then turns to the deportation of permanent residents for aggravated felony convictions, a category of infractions that includes crimes U.S. citizens experience as misdemeanors; the inconsistency—all too often based in racism—of application of prosecutorial discretion; the difficulties faced by asylum seekers; and the general chaos of the immigration court system. Throughout, Hing writes with emotion but moves back and forth smoothly between human stories and legal ones, ensuring that lay readers have the context necessary to understand how the latter affect the former. Within each discussion of specific immigration topics, the author suggests concrete reforms, such as applying reasonable proportionality to the cases of noncitizens accused of crimes. He doesn’t stop there, however; his eyes are on a bigger prize: “I count myself among those who call for the abolition of the immigration system altogether. Migrants should have the right to free movement across borders and the right to live free of harassment over immigration status. Our system must be transformed into one that prioritizes our humanity first.” By the time they finish the concluding capsule history of U.S. immigration policy’s structural racism, many readers will agree with him.
A powerful, cogent indictment.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9780807008027
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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