No Justice in the Shadows

How America Criminalizes Immigrants

De: Alina Das

Narrado por: Alina Das, Roxana Ortega

A provocative account of the long, racist history of our immigration system, revealing how it has become the brutal machine that today upends the lives of millions of immigrants

Each year in the United States, hundreds of thousands of people are arrested, imprisoned, and deported, trapped in what leading immigrant rights activist and lawyer Alina Das calls the "deportation machine". The bulk of the arrests target people who have a criminal record - so-called "criminal aliens" - the majority of whose offenses are immigration-, drug-, or traffic-related. These individuals are uprooted from their homes, their families, and their communities, and banished.

Through the stories of those caught in the system, Das traces the ugly history of immigration policy to explain how the US constructed the idea of the "criminal alien", effectively dividing immigrants into the categories "good" and "bad", "deserving" and "undeserving". As Das argues, we need to confront the cruelty of the machine so that we can build an inclusive immigration policy premised on human dignity and break the cycle once and for all.

©2020 Alina Das (P)2020 Bold Type Books

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Alina Das' book is a necessary and compelling read to understand how the immigration system in the United States targets Black and Brown immigrants. Das writes with compassion about her clients whose lives are altered by cruel and arbitrary immigration policies that aim to exclude, ban, separate, detain and deport millions of people. Das' book urgently reminds us that ending white supremacy requires the dismantlement of the structures and policies that undergird today's immigration system." (Deepa Iyer, author of We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future)

"This insightful, accessible book from the trenches of deportation defense connects the reader deeply to the actual human beings who suffer, fight and - win or lose - assert their own dignity and that of all migrants. Das' breakdown of punitive 1990s policies reveals not only how harmful and discriminatory each is on its own, but also their devastating effect when stacked on top of each other. There is no victory over a racialized immigration system without challenging the hierarchy of 'good' and 'bad' immigrants, a framework that even well-meaning advocates have accepted. There is another way, if we have the courage and the vision to pursue it." (Rinku Sen, former publisher, Colorlines)

"A one-stop shop for anyone who wants to know how the Age of Mass Incarceration fueled the rise of the Deportation Nation, and a stellar unmasking of how legacies of white supremacy continue to stoke the criminalization of non-white immigrants today." (Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History, UCLA, and author of City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965)

Eye-opening

The mission of this book opened my eyes and moved me with the stories of the people mentioned. I appreciate the amount of information the author provided for this book to educate readers such as myself.