Immigrants To Freedom

A compelling account of the threat immigration control poses to the citizens of free societies Immigration is often seen as a danger to western liberal democracies because it threatens to undermine their fundamental values, most notably freedom and national self-determination. In this book, however, Chandran Kukathas argues that the greater threat comes not from immigration but from immigration control. Kukathas shows that immigration control is not merely about preventing outsiders from moving across borders. It is about controlling what outsiders do once in a society: whether they work, reside, study, set up businesses, or share their lives with others. But controlling outsiders—immigrants or would-be immigrants—requires regulating, monitoring, and sanctioning insiders, those citizens and residents who might otherwise hire, trade with, house, teach, or generally associate with outsiders. The more vigorously immigration control is pursued, the more seriously freedom is diminished. The search for control threatens freedom directly and weakens the values upon which it relies, notably equality and the rule of law. Kukathas demonstrates that the imagined gains from efforts to control immigration are illusory, for they do not promote economic prosperity or social solidarity. Nor does immigration control bring self-determination, since the apparatus of control is an international institutional regime that increases the power of states and their agencies at the expense of citizens. That power includes the authority to determine who is and is not an insider: to define identity itself. Looking at past and current practices across the world, Immigration and Freedom presents a critique of immigration control as an institutional reality, as well as an account of what freedom means—and why it matters.

Chronicles mass immigration to the United States from the time of the early colonies to today.

The Sweetness of Freedom presents an eclectic grouping of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrants' narratives and the personal artifacts, historical documents, and photographs these travelers brought on their journeys to Michigan. Most of the oral histories in this volume are based on interviews conducted with the immigrants themselves. Some of the immigrants presented here hoped to gain better education and jobs. Others—refugees—fled their homelands because of war, poverty, repression, religious persecution, or ethnic discrimination. All dreamt of freedom and opportunity. They tell why they left their homelands, why they chose to settle in Michigan, and what they brought or left behind. Some wanted to preserve their heritage, religious customs, traditions, and ethnic identity. Others wanted to forget past conflicts and lost family members. Their stories reveal how they established new lives far away from home, how they endured homesickness and separation, what they gave up and what they gained.

"Immigrants to Freedom is not a volume of past circumstances; it details the continuing quest of the Jewish people to find a more perfect union with lands and peoples of expanding freedom." from the Preface by Moshe Davis An almost unknown chapter in the story of U.S. immigration and social history opened in 1882 with the creation Southern New Jersey of Alliance, the first rural Jewish settlement in the New World. Escaping from the pogroms of Eastern Europe, disillusioned with the poverty-ridden slums of the big cities, and inspired by popular leaders such as Michael Bakal and Moshe Herder who taught the dignity of manual labor, four hundred Jews chose to become American farmers. Thousands more followed, to settle within the triangular district bounded by Vineland, Millville, and Bridgeton, all searching for individual transformation as well as group transplantation, all seeking to disprove the stereotype of the Jew as small trader and middleman. Their successes, failures, conflicts with the urban Jews of nearby New York and Philadelphia these are the fascinating subjects of this intimately written history. These organized agricultural communities were not primarily Zionist, unlike the pioneering settlements of the same period in Eretz Yisrael. Originally conceived as privately subsidized social experiments, free of socialist or nationalist ringes, these groups sought to overcome anti-Semitism while striving for a more creative life and almost at once, true to their basic Jewish sense of family and self-help, the experiments in farming became programs for saving lives, first from the sanctioned savagery of Alexander III, later from the holocaust of Nazi Germany. These colonizing experiments, says Dr. Brandes, were "both a kaleidoscope and a mirror of the major forces in modern Jewish life. Agrarianism, Americanism, Zionism, a testing traditional values all were to be found here in microcosm. [They are] a significant chapter in the history of a people straining from oppression to freedom."

Collection of over 350 German immigrant letters composed by one individual or family group.

"The Freedom of the Migrant presents a series of reflections on national, ethnic, and cultural identity, offering a unique perspective on such topics as communication, nomadism, housing, nationalism, migrant cultures, and Jewish identity."--BOOK JACKET.