Michael Kagan, "The Battle to Stay in America: Immigration's Hidden Front Line" (U of Nevada Press, 2020)
The debate over American immigration policy has obsessed politicians and disrupted the lives of millions of people for decades. In\xa0The Battle To Stay in America: Immigration's Hidden Front Line\xa0(University\xa0of Nevada Press, 2020),\xa0Professor Michael Kagan focuses\xa0on Las Vegas, Nevada. Las Vegas is\xa0a city where more than one in five residents was born in a foreign country. It's a city dependent on its immigrant population, but one\xa0where the community is struggling to defend itself against the federal government\u2019s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.\xa0\nProfessor Kagan\xa0tells this story not just as a front-line\xa0immigration lawyer, but also\xa0as a citizen, as a friend, and a parent. His intensely\xa0personal account converts headlines, complicated and punitive\xa0legal processes, and unjust bureaucratic procedures into the personal stories of the struggles to survive the severe immigration policing of the current administration. This is the immigration story that needs to be told: the disappearances of neighbors, the breaking up of families, the parents who are forever relegated to working jobs below their potential because immigration laws prevent them ever being free and equal.\nKagan explains how American immigration law often gives good people no recourse. Under President Trump complex bureaucracies that administer immigration law have been re-engineered to carry out a relentless but often invisible attack against people and families who are integral to American communities. Professor Kagan tells the stories of people desperate to escape unspeakable violence in their homeland, children separated from their families and trapped in a tangle of administrative regulations, and hardworking long-time residents suddenly ripped from their productive lives when they fall unwittingly into the clutches of the immigration enforcement system. He considers how the crackdown on immigrants negatively impacts the national economy and offers a deeply considered assessment of the future of immigration policy in the United States. Kagan also captures the psychological costs exacted by fear of deportation and by increasingly overt expressions of hatred against immigrants.\nThe Battle to Stay in America\xa0could not be more timely; with a changing Administration it's time not just to rethink America's immigration policy, but change how we think about immigration entirely.\nProfessor Michael Kagan\xa0is the director of the UNLV Immigration Clinic, which defends children and families fighting deportation in Las Vegas, and is a Joyce Mack Professor of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He was a plaintiff that prevented the Trump administration from adding a question about citizenship to the 2020 census. He has written for\xa0The Washington Post, Salon.com\xa0and\xa0The Daily Beast,\xa0and is a leading national scholar of immigration and refugee law. He is one of the most widely cited immigration scholars in the United States, and his work has been relied on in courts in the United States and beyond.\xa0\xa0\nJane Richards is a doctoral candidate in human rights law at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter @JaneRichardsHK where she follows the Hong Kong protests and its politics.\xa0\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law