Book of the Week: (In)justice at the Margins of the State

Keeping Out the Other: A Critical Introduction to Immigration Enforcement Today
Edited by David C. Brotherton and Philip Kretsedemas

A collection of essays that examines immigration enforcement in the United States, excavating a history of discrimination and exclusion that extends far beyond the reactions of 9/11. Particularly poignant in the collection is Mr. Brotherton's case study of Robert Delgado, a Dominican father under deportation. The middle-aged man had grown up in the United States as a young boy, lived through shattered dreams of becoming a baseball player, and was to be deported to a foreign country that he had never known - away from his parents, his siblings, his wife and children, in a trial that was doomed to be a lost cause in justice by the immigration laws of the state. As Mr. Brotherton astutely points out, "The marginality of [Robert]'s race and class, the cynical mass packaging of the American Dream, the shattered hopes of his parents' generation, the children left fatherless, resentful, traumatized; these are all the truths embedded in his final plea."