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Why Immigrants Come to America Braceros, Indocumentados, and the Migra
Robert Joe Stout
Book Code: C34830
ISBN: 0-313-34830-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-313-34830-3
200 pages, n/a
Praeger Publishers
Publication: 11/30/2007
List Price: $49.95 (UK Sterling Price: £27.95)
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects: Reviews:
  • In the wake of several years of contentious debate about how to deal with illegal immigration to the United States and in the midst of a presidential election year in which immigration is likely to feature heavily, Stouts clear-eyed look at what drives illegal immigration is a welcome contribution to the discussion. A journalist, Stout relies on hundreds of interviews with immigrants to explore the motivations of workers coming here illegally from Central and South America. He takes a historical perspective, showing how the status of the Spanish-speaking immigrant worker has changed legally and culturally over the years. The assertions regarding the economic impact of immigrant workers are very well sourced by means of excellent notes and references. Though the text is leavened throughout by the personal stories of immigrants, the work is still fairly dense and will interest primarily scholars and students of illegal immigration from Central and South America. For academic libraries.
    —Library Journal     April 15, 2008
  • Stout....incorporates material from interviews, conversations, and current newspaper and media accounts to provide readers and researchers with a human view of the undocumented immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, and the problems and challenges they face.
    —SciTech Book News     February 2008
Description: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents sweep through factories, farms and construction sites from Maine to California herding handcuffed "illegals" into detention facilities. Immigrants and their supporters block highways, repudiating a House of Representatives proposal to make undocumented entry into the United States a felony. National Guardsmen head towards the U. S.- Mexico frontier where hundreds of men, women and children die every year of heat stroke, dehydration, and starvation. Few other issues have provoked such national outrage since integration and opposition to the war in Vietnam crested in the 1960s. Despite the clamor, the rhetoric, the accusations and the arrests, few people really understand who the undocumented immigrants are, how they get into the United States and why they keep coming. Stout explains in vivid detail why Spanish-speaking workers leave their homes--and often risk their lives--to seek employment north of the border. The book includes hundreds of interviews and experiences he has shared with migrants, politicians, law officers and farm and sweatshop employers. "It's a battleground--it never was before," Mexican-born immigrant Jesus Francisco Reyes told Stout as he watched Border Patrol officers follow helicopter searchlights across a brambled mountainside 80 miles east of San Diego, California. The indocumentados the migra apprehend and send back across the border will add to already overwhelming statistics: over 1 million deportations every year, an estimated 600,000 successful new arrivals, and expenditures on so-called border security topping billions of dollars a year. More than 23 million Americans of Mexican descent live in the United States, 7 million of whom do not have valid work or residency papers. Millions of these immigrants live in poverty but more than 90 percent find employment and over 60 percent send portions of their earnings to their families south of the border. Their remittances provide nearly 70 percent of the incomes of thousands of towns and villages throughout northern and central Mexico and much of Central America. Without them, the economies of those countries would have foundered.
LC Card Number: 2007036175
LCC Class: HD8081
Dewey Class: 304
PDF Catalogs:
Praeger Politics 2007.pdf
Greenwood Multicultural Spring 2008.pdf
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