A compassionate, reasoned look at the left- and right-wing origins of anti-immigration sentiment.
A political work examines anti-immigrant ideas and policies in America from the 19th century to the present.
As an Arizona state senator, Worsley (who also founded the company SkyMall) broke ranks with his fellow Republicans in his vocal opposition to a bill that would allow law enforcement to racially profile and arrest undocumented immigrants. A descendant of Europeans who joined the mass migration movement of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to Utah, the author sees the immigration issue as personal. He also spent years as a missionary in South America and helped start multiple Latino Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints congregations in Mesa, Arizona. The book’s metaphor of describing anti-immigration ideas as a “horseshoe” contends that the “radical ends of the political spectrum often have more in common with each other than they do with the moderate political center.” Indeed, his well-researched history not only critiques today’s xenophobia from the right, particularly from President Donald Trump, but also ironically traces its ideological origins to the left. For example, notable early- 20th-century progressives, such as the leader of the conservationist movement, Madison Grant, and the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, included strict immigration restrictions and racist eugenics in their platforms. Worsley convincingly connects the pseudoscientific racism that permeated the anti-immigration wing of the Progressive Movement to today’s ethnocentrists, particularly John Tanton (the co-founder of the controversial Center for Immigration Studies), who deploy similar environmental and eugenicist arguments in their opposition to immigration. Moreover, even icons of the modern Democratic Party, such as Barbara Jordan—the first Black woman elected to Congress from the South—placed a dramatic reduction of total immigration as a centerpiece of their political agendas through the 1990s. Given Worsley’s proximity to Mesa’s immigrant community, he also provides a detailed look at how state and federal enforcement of racially motivated immigration policies have disrupted the lives of Arizona’s immigrant population. Though the book’s history of the Progressive Movement leaves out supporters of immigration (such as Jane Addams), the work is a solid primer for those looking for an accessible history of anti-immigration movements in the United States and their continued reverberations in contemporary politics.
A compassionate, reasoned look at the left- and right-wing origins of anti-immigration sentiment. (acknowledgements, endnotes, index)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64543-650-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: RealClear Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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