The Roots of America's Lawless Immigration Regime

Model Citizen

In cities around the country, citizens assembled to demand racial justice and an end to police brutality have been met with ... border patrol agents? Why are CBP agents clubbing and gassing peaceful citizen protesters many, many miles from any border? Why are tens of thousands of completely innocent migrants, who pose no danger to anyone, imprisoned in abusive and subhuman conditions in a sprawling network of camps and detention centers? In her new book, "Illegal: How America’s Lawless Immigration Regime Threatens Us All," political theorist Elizabeth Cohen explains how out-of-control federal immigration enforcement agencies came to not only pointlessly terrorize and persecute immigrants, but to pose a clear and urgent danger to the safety and basic liberties of American citizens. We explore the roots of restrictive American immigration policy in skull-measuring eugenic pseudoscience, whom the Northeastern WASP elite did and did not consider to be white, and how every attempt to engineer the ethnic composition of the population through immigration policy has backfired. Elizabeth tells the story of her mother and grandparent's escape from the Nazis, their perilous statelessness, and eventual settlement in the U.S. as refugees. I talk about being a pompous descendant of old American stock who makes fun of his wife for being Irish-Italian. (I promise there's a good point in this.) And we talk about what should be done to fix our broken and dangerous immigration system. Elizabeth F. Cohen is Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University. In addition to "Illegal," she is author of "The Political Value of Time" and many other fine works of scholarship.