Undocumented Immigrants / Dream Act: Home

The Americas are witnessing an era of unprecedented human mobility. With their families or unaccompanied, children are part of this immense movement of people. Children Crossing Borders explores the different meanings of the lives of borderland children in the Americas. It addresses migrant children's struggle to build a sense of belonging while they confront racism and estrangement on a daily basis. Unified in their common interest in the well-being of children, the contributors bring an unrivaled breadth of experience and research to offer a transnational, multidimensional, and multilayered look at migrant childhoods in Latin America. Organized around three main themes--educational experiences; literature, art and culture, and media depictions; and the principle of the "best interest of the child"--this work offers both theoretical and practical approaches to the complexity of migrant childhood. The essays discuss family and school lives, children's experience as wage laborers, and the legislation and policies that affect migrants. This volume draws much-needed attention to the plight of migrant children and their families, illuminating the human and emotional toll that children experience as they crisscross the Americas. Exploring the connections between education, policy, cultural studies, and anthropology, the essays in this volume navigate a space of transnational children's rights central to Latin American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contributors Marissa Bejarano-Fernbaugh Nancie Bouchard Lina M. Caswell Irasema Coronado Valentina Glockner Alejandra J. Josiowicz Patrícia Nabuco Martuscelli María Inés Pacecca Martha Rodríguez-Cruz Emily Ruehs-Navarro Kathleen Tacelosky Élisabeth Vallet

Taking as its focal point the Trump administration's decision to rescind the Obama-era DACA protection for the children of undocumented immigrants, Dreams Derailed delves into the economic, political, and social factors that inform the public conversation about immigration, making a clear case for the many benefits of inclusive policies. It also takes a close look at the factors that carried Donald Trump to the White House, demonstrating how economic upheaval and historic levels of immigration influenced the 2016 presidential election, analyzing current immigration laws, and suggesting next steps for reform. Dreams Derailed utilizes individual narratives from the diverse economic landscape of Northwest Arkansas to address common misconceptions about immigrants and immigration.

People around the world move from their homes for different reasons. Some seek opportunity. Others are fleeing dangerous conditions or have been displaced by environmental disasters. How welcoming should countries be toward immigrants and refugees, and what value do such migrants add to their new surroundings? The diverse viewpoints in this resource explore the benefits and shortcomings of strict immigration policies and open borders, how immigrants can sustain countries and how they can create larger problems, and what the international community is or is not obligated to do to help.

This volume presents a comprehensive, unbiased, and easily accessible review of U.S. immigration reform, and explains why reform efforts have resulted in the current state of political deadlock over the issue in the United States Congress. Provides readers with a succinct and unbiased examination of the political complexities involved in attempts to reform legal and unauthorized immigration to the United States Enables readers to understand why immigration reform so often ends in stalemate and why comprehensive immigration reform is so difficult to achieve Demonstrates why every major immigration reform law has unanticipated consequences that may resolve one set of problems only to engender a new set of problems Shows the adverse economic impact of efforts to tighten control procedures for the issuing of visas to the United States

They are called the DREAMers: young people who were brought, or sent, to the United States as children and who have lived for years in America without legal status. Growing up, they often worked hard in school, planned for college, only to learn they were, in the eyes of the United States government and many citizens, "illegal aliens." The Making of a Dream begins at the turn of the millennium, with the first of a series of "Dream Act" proposals; follows the efforts of policy makers, activists, and undocumented immigrants themselves, and concludes with the 2016 presidential election and the first months of the Trump presidency. The immigrants' coming of age stories intersect with the watershed political and economic events of the last two decades: 9/11, the recession, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama presidency, and the rebirth of the anti-immigrant right. In telling their story, Laura Wides-Muñoz forces us to rethink our definition of what it means to be American.

Perchance to DREAM is the first comprehensive history of the DREAM Act, which made its initial congressional appearance in 2001, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the discretionary program established by President Obama in 2012 out of Congressional failure to enact comprehensive immigration reform. Michael A. Olivas relates the history of the DREAM Act and DACA over the course of two decades. With the Trump Administration challenging the legality of DACA and pursuing its elimination in 2017, the fate of DACA is uncertain. Perchance to DREAM follows the political participation of DREAMers, who have been taken hostage as pawns in a cruel game as the White House continues to advocate anti-immigrant policies.

Citizenship is invaluable, yet our status as citizens is always at risk - even for those of us born on US soil. From emancipated slaves through the US-born children of undocumented immigrants in the 21st century, citizenship stripping is an important history previously neglected. In You Are Not American, writer, law professor and historian Amanda Frost tells little known stories of how our government has systematically expatriated people for its own benefit. Harriet Scott, wife of Dred, needed to be denied citizenship to profit white men; children of Chinese immigrants needed to be denied to keep them out; today, in "Operation Janus," the Trump administration has created a mass denaturalization campaign, for naturalized citizens and even people born on US soil. Through nine powerful chapters of our history, Frost explores how the concept of citizenship and the rights of citizens has evolved, and especially how it has been challenged.