Political Science

Traveling across the country, journalist Karla Cornejo Villavicencio risked arrest at every turn to report the extraordinary stories of her fellow undocumented Americans. Her subjects have every reason to be wary around reporters, but Cornejo Villavicencio has unmatched access to their stories. Her work culminates in a stunning, essential read for our times. Born in Ecuador and brought to the United States when she was five years old, Cornejo Villavicencio has lived the American Dream. Raised on her father's deliveryman income, she later became one of the first undocumented students admitted into Harvard. She is now a doctoral candidate at Yale University and has written for The New York Times. She weaves her own story among those of the eleven million undocumented who have been thrust into the national conversation today as never before. Looking well beyond the flashpoints of the border or the activism of the DREAMERS, Cornejo Villavicencio explores the lives of the undocumented as rarely seen in our daily headlines. In New York, we meet the undocumented workers who were recruited in the federally funded Ground Zero cleanup after 9/11. In Miami we enter the hidden botanicas, which offer witchcraft and homeopathy to those whose status blocks them from any other healthcare options. In Flint, Michigan, we witness how many live in fear as the government issues raids at grocery stores and demands identification before offering life-saving clean water. In her book, Undocumented America, Cornejo Villavicencio powerfully reveals the hidden corners of our nation of immigrants. She brings to light remarkable stories of hope and resilience, and through them we come to understand what it truly means to be American--Provided by publisher.

In this provocative and deeply researched work of history, Akst takes readers into the wild, heady, and uncertain times of America on the brink of a world war, following four fascinating resisters -- four figures who would subsequently become famous political thinkers and activists -- and their daring exploits: David Dellinger, Dorothy Day, Dwight MacDonald, and Bayard Rustin. The lives of these diverse anti-war advocates--a principled and passionate seminary student, a Catholic anarchist, a high-brow intellectual leftist, and an African-American pacifist and agitator--create the perfect prism through which to see World War II from a new angle, that of the opposition, as well as to show how great and lasting their achievements were. The resisters did not stop the war, of course, but their impact would be felt for decades. Many of them went on to lead the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, the two most important social stands of the second half of the twentieth century. The various World War II resisters pioneered non-violent protest in America, popularized Gandhian principles, and desegregated the first prison mess halls. Theirs is a story that has never been told.--

In this vital, incisive book, Honig explains how men like Trump repeatedly beat the system. He goes inside the hall of the Justice Department to report for the first time on how federal prosecutors went light on Trump in an infamous case involving hush money payments and campaign finance violations. From his insider's perspective, Honig exposes what makes so many prosecutors treat powerful criminals as untouchable--and how we can upend this untenable situation. -- adapted from jacket

SPYFAIL is about the highly dangerous and growing capability of foreign countries to conduct large-scale espionage within the United States and how the FBI and other agencies have failed to prevent it. These covert operations involve a variety of foreign countries--North Korea, Russia, Israel, China, and others--and include cyberattacks, espionage, psychological warfare, the infiltration of presidential campaigns, the smuggling of nuclear weapons components, and other incredibly nefarious actions. With his trademark deep investigative style, James Bamford digs as deep as one can go into these clandestine invasions and attacks, uncovering who's involved, how these spygames were carried out, and why none of this was stopped. Full of revelations, SPYFAIL includes access to previously secret and withheld documents, such as never-before-seen parts of the Mueller Report, and interviews with confidential sources. Throughout this stunning, eye-opening account, SPYFAIL demonstrates again and again how large a role politics, special interests, and corruption play in allowing these shocking foreign intrusions to continue--leaving America and its secrets vulnerable and undefended--

Throughout its quest for freedom from colonial rule, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PNPR) created strategy through a solidarity that moved far beyond the archipelago. The hemispheric connections between supporters of Puerto Rican independence have been obscured by larger, later liberation movements as well as the island's ultimate failure in its quest for independence, but they were nonetheless at the vanguard of the postcolonial revolutions that swept the world after the Cuban revolution. Margaret M. Power's new history of the PNPR focuses on how it built a broad movement with active networks in virtually all of Latin America, much of the Caribbean, and New York City--

In this powerful and deeply felt memoir of translation, storytelling, and borders, Alejandra Oliva, a Mexican-American translator and immigrant justice activist, offers a powerful chronical of her experience interpreting at the US-Mexico border. Having worked with asylum seekers since 2016, she knows all too well the gravity of taking someone's trauma and delivering it to the warped demands of the U.S. immigration system. As Oliva's stunning prose recounts the stories of the people she's met through her work, she also traces her family's long and fluid relationship to the border--each generation born on opposite sides of the Rio Grande.

In the 1950s and 1960s, immigration bureaucrats in the Department of Citizenship and Immigration played an important yet unacknowledged role in transforming Canada's immigration policy. In response to external economic and political pressures for change, high-level bureaucrats developed new admissions criteria gradually and experimentally while personally processing thousands of individual immigration cases per year. Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism shows how bureaucrats' perceptions and judgements about the admissibility of individuals - in socioeconomic, racial, and moral terms - influenced the creation of formal admissions criteria for skilled workers and family immigrants that continue to shape immigration to Canada. A qualitative content analysis of archival documents, conducted through the theoretical lens of a cultural sociology of immigration policy, reveals that bureaucrats' interpretations of immigration files generated selection criteria emphasizing not just economic utility, but also middle-class traits and values such as wealth accumulation, educational attainment, entrepreneurial spirit, resourcefulness and a strong work ethic. By making middle-class multiculturalism a demographic reality and basis of nation-building in Canada, these state actors created a much-admired approach to managing racial diversity that has nevertheless generated significant social inequalities.--

In 1990, the United States Diversity Visa Lottery became part of U.S. immigration policy. As with many U.S. immigration policies over the years, the actual lived experience of the lottery generated unintended and unexpected consequences, becoming more powerful and important than its creators could envision. Dreamland tells the story of the lottery, correcting the sometimes willful misconceptions of how it works, explaining its importance, and revealing what it has to teach us. Because the program was open to all countries that sent fewer than 50,000 immigrants in the previous five years, nearly all that had previously been shut out of the immigration system were suddenly eligible for consideration, including a vast swath of African nations. The lottery became an economic boon, as Africans provided visa-related services for fees, and used the annual event to bring in needed revenues to their photo shops, print stores, and cyber cafes. The policy fueled a rapid increase in African immigration to the United States, enriching U.S. life in the process--