Those damned immigrants: America's hysteria over undocumented immigration Book

Romän, E, Olivas, MA. (2013). Those damned immigrants: America's hysteria over undocumented immigration . 1-186.

cited authors

  • Romän, E; Olivas, MA

authors

abstract

  • “This data-driven and massively documented study replaces rhetoric with analysis, myth with fact, and apocalyptic predictions with sane and realizable proposals.“ —Stanley Fish, Florida International University The election of Barack Obama prompted people around the world to herald the dawning of a new, postracial era in America. Yet a scant one month after Obama’s election, Jose Oswaldo Sucuzhanay, a 31-year old Ecuadorian immigrant, was ambushed by a group of white men as he walked with his brother. Yelling anti-Latino slurs, the men beat Sucuzhanay into a coma. He died 5 days later. The incident is one of countless attacks that Latino/a immigrants have confronted for generations in America. And these attacks are accepted by a substantial number of American citizens and elected officials. Quick to cast all Latino/a immigrants as illegal, opponents have place undocumented workers at the center of their anti-immigrant movement, targeting them as being responsible for increasing crime rates, a plummeting economy, and an erosion of traditional American values and culture. In Those Damned Immigrants, Ediberto Romän takes on critics of Latina/o immigration, using government statistics, economic data, historical records, and social science research to provide a counter-narrative to what he argues is a largely one-sided public discourse on Latino/a immigration.

publication date

  • January 1, 2013

start page

  • 1

end page

  • 186