A mini syllabus (Including four free books!)
Our friends at Verso have prepared this ultra thorough ABOLISH ICE reading list, featuring a number of excellent titles that can help explain how we got here.
Histories of American immigration, or the origins of the Department of Homeland Security, situate ICE in context. While manifestos like Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha’s Against Borders: The Case for Abolition lay out arguments against border control.
Thanks to Verso, readers can also currently enjoy a free ebook download of Stephen Graham’s Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. This is a good place to start if you’re curious about the Minneapolis resistance movement, or political violence in any urban space.
In some more solidarity news, Haymarket Books is also providing three titles gratis, for those craving context on America’s immigration policies.
Readers can now download John Washington’s The Case for Open Borders, Silky Shah’s Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition, and Harsha Walia’s Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.
Taken together, these three books cover policing tactics spanning multiple U.S. borders. Shah’s argument also explores how border policing feeds into mass incarceration.
These two indie publishers, with their long track records of publishing social histories, are great places to kick off a political education. (There’s also this great list from the folks at Raven Books, in Lawrence, Kansas.)
But in the interest of inundating, here are a few more recommended titles to add to your piles—especially if you’re looking to purchase something this week from a Minneapolis bookseller.
Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
This Pulitzer Prize-winning history from a feted American historian looks at the frontier “throughout the full sweep of U.S. history—from the American Revolution to the War of 1898, the New Deal to the election of 2016.” Grandin, also the author of the recent America, América: A New History of the New World, is interested in the wall as enduring symbol.
Todd Miller, Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border around the World
Billed as a “tremendous work of narrative investigative journalism,” Miller’s history traces the rise of the border regime, and examines the modern surveillance tactics that police would-be migrants from Syria, Guatemala, Kenya, Palestine, Mexico, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
Grace Chang, Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy
With a new foreword from Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, Chang’s exposé historicizes the plight of today’s immigrant working women. Special attention is paid to the colluding forces of “the U.S. government, the IMF and World Bank, corporations, and private employers” that create and maintain a vulnerable, exploited workforce.
Justin Akers Chacón, The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border
For a specific look at the U.S.-Mexico border, consider this history from a labor activist and educator. This book looks at our Southern neighbors specifically, and considers how a “vicious model of capitalist transnationalization has also created its own grave-diggers.”
With the late historian Mike Davis, Chacón also published No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border.(If you’re looking for a tactical guide.)
Nisha Kapoor, Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism.
This sharp study considers how the War on Terror shaped American immigration policies. By centering “stories of Muslim men accused of terrorism-related offenses,” Kapoor, an internationally renowned researcher, expands the typical border conversation, and looks at a sweeping, cruel infrastructure built on American fear.
Thanks again to the top minds at Verso and Haymarket for assembling these lists, pushing these titles, and making public history accessible. See you in the stacks or the streets.
