An accessible and pointed study in the law of both education and citizenship.
Should a child whose parents entered the country illegally be granted the privilege of enrolling in school here? It’s a question that has excited much discussion—but that has yet to be decided.
Immigration reform is one of those political third rails that can fry an unwary politician, and the thought of granting citizenship to immigrants who have entered the U.S. illegally has divided Congress since at least the Reagan era. And what of their children? As University of Houston law professor Olivas writes, there is widespread support both for a path to citizenship and for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act and related legislation, which would both grant legal status to such children and allow them to enter school at resident rates of tuition. Residence and domicile are legally not the same thing. The last time the DREAM Act had a chance of passing through Congress unscathed was 2007, Olivas suggests, but it encountered difficulties: Sponsor Edward Kennedy became ill, Arlen Specter backed away from it, and when Barack Obama, another sponsor, entered the White House, he propounded “so many major initiatives” that “all the oxygen in the room was being inhaled.” It wasn’t until 2009 that Janet Napolitano, head of Homeland Security, acknowledged the plight of undocumented children, though she placed emphasis on border security instead. Thus it is that the individual states essentially decide the issue for themselves and are likely to continue to do so until truly comprehensive immigration reform is undertaken at the national level, something unlikely to happen under Donald Trump. Indeed, notes the author, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, sheltering those undocumented children from deportation, has suffered “death by a thousand cuts” under the hostile eye of the Trump system, and the DREAM Act continues to languish, as it has for two decades.
An accessible and pointed study in the law of both education and citizenship.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4798-7828-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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