From a position of relative consensus on immigration after passage of the landmark 1965 law, both liberals and conservatives have gradually veered off toward a punitive neoliberal direction, with dire repercussions for immigrants, amounting to a veritable holocaust. Locked into an increasingly abstract inhumanity, the current stalemate threatens to undermine the very foundations of American citizenship. It is, at the moment, the greatest blight on our nation's human rights record. This book proposes a fundamental reset toward the largely self-created immigration "problem," a mess of bureaucratic making if ever there was one, and advocates the rational approach of unrestricted movement of all people, the recognition of all immigrants as "persons" with full constitutional rights, and not only an end to punitive treatment of immigrants but an end to the inherent racism of the federal immigration bureaucracy. With valuable contributions from leading immigration, citizenship, and human rights scholars John S.W. Park, Kevin R. Johnson, and David Brotherton, this book offers a radically different perspective on the history of our immigration policy, and its present and future, derived from an uncompromising human rights vision that leaves no person out of the jurisdiction of constitutional empathy. Activists, lawyers, scholars, and readers in general interested in understanding the roots of our immigration debacle and a path free of political posturing on either side, will find much to take away from this deeply researched and historically nuanced short book.
About the Author: Anis Shivani is a fiction writer, poet, literary critic, and political analyst living in Houston, Texas. His critically acclaimed books include Anatolia and Other Stories, The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, Karachi Raj: A Novel, My Tranquil War and Other Poems, Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish: Poems, Soraya: Sonnets, The Moon Blooms in Occupied Hours: Poems, Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies, and Literary Writing in the Twenty-First Century: Conversations. His work appears widely in such journals as the Yale Review, Georgia Review, Southwest Review, Boston Review, Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, Western Humanities Review, Boulevard, Pleiades, AGNI, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Subtropics, New Letters, Times Literary Supplement, London Magazine, Cambridge Quarterly, Contemporary Review, Meanjin, Fiddlehead, Dalhousie Review, Antigonish Review, and elsewhere. He has also written for many magazines and newspapers including Salon, Daily Beast, AlterNet, CommonDreams, Counterpunch, Truthout, Huffington Post, Texas Observer, In These Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Kansas City Star, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Baltimore Sun, Charlotte Observer, Austin American-Statesman, and elsewhere. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, and a graduate of Harvard University.