Immigration Matters: Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive Future

A provocative, strategic plan for a humane immigration system from the nation’s leading immigration scholars and activists

During the past decade, right-wing nativists have stoked popular hostility to the nation’s foreign-born population, forcing the immigrant rights movement into a defensive posture. In the Trump years, preoccupied with crisis upon crisis, advocates had few opportunities to consider questions of long-term policy or future strategy. Now is the time for a reset.

Immigration Matters offers a new, actionable vision for immigration policy. It brings together key movement leaders and academics to share cutting-edge approaches to the urgent issues facing the immigrant community, along with fresh solutions to vexing questions of so-called “future flows” that have bedeviled policy makers for decades. The book also explores the contributions of immigrants to the nation’s identity, its economy, and progressive movements for social change. Immigration Matters delves into a variety of topics including new ways to frame immigration issues, fresh thinking on key aspects of policy, challenges of integration, workers’ rights, family reunification, legalization, paths to citizenship, and humane enforcement.

The perfect handbook for immigration activists, scholars, policy makers, and anyone who cares about one of the most contentious issues of our age, Immigration Matters makes accessible an immigration policy that both remediates the harm done to immigrant workers and communities under Trump and advances a bold new vision for the future.

Ruth Milkman is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, where she also serves as research director, and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the co-editor (with Deepak Bhargava and Penny Lewis) of Immigration Matters (The New Press).

Deepak Bhargava has been an organizer and campaigner for over thirty years. A former distinguished lecturer at CUNY, president and executive director of Community Change, and senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, he is now president of the JPB Foundation. The co-editor (with Ruth Milkman and Penny Lewis) of Immigration Matters and co-author (with Stephanie Luce) of Practical Radicals (both published by The New Press), he lives in New York City.

Penny Lewis is an associate professor of labor studies, CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. She is the co-editor (with Ruth Milkman and Deepak Bhargava) of Immigration Matters (The New Press).