Bad Apples? The "Illegal People" Controversy

A Few Bad Apples...Or a Rotten System?
Laura Carlsen, Foreign Policy in Focus
December 12, 2008

Since President-elect Barack Obama promised to deal with immigration reform in the early part of his presidency, the nation began gearing up for another round in what has been one of the most contentious issues of our time. Faced with a vociferous anti-immigrant right wing, failed reform attempts in Congress, and the human tragedy of criminal raids against immigrants, it's crucial that we get it right this time. The immediate challenge is to build a broad-based movement to pass a fair and humane reform that grants all workers and their families equal rights and protections under the law.

David Bacon's book, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Immigration and Criminalizes Immigrants provides essential tools to envision and fight for this reform. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5734

Review: Illegal People
Mary Bauer, Foreign Policy in Focus
December 10, 2008

Michele Wucker's review of David Bacon's excellent book, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Immigration and Criminalizes Immigrants, misses the mark. Wucker is put off by Bacon's supposed emphasis on "bad apple" employers. In fact, Bacon's book argues compellingly that the problem with the American immigration system isn't bad-apple employers (although there are certainly many of them); the problem is structural. And Bacon's book shows that it's a structure the United States has created that leads directly to the abuses Bacon highlights. Reading this book as merely a condemnation of bad corporations misses the real insights the book has to offer. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5727

Review: Broken Immigration System
Michele Wucker, Foreign Policy in Focus
September 25, 2008

Immigration reform advocates still disagree over the Senate's failed 2007 attempt to push through legislation that would have provided a path to legalization for the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Unions and big business had briefly allied in supporting a legalization program combined with an increase in visas. But the partnership collapsed after an ill-begotten attempt to secure the bill's passage, which added so many noxious provisions that it lost many of its supporters while failing to win over implacable opponents.
David Bacon's new book, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Immigration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press), suggests that no reform was better than the half-hearted measure that crashed and burned. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5557