Brief Description
"In Entitled to Nothing, Lisa Sun-Hee Park investigates how the politics of immigration, health care, and welfare are intertwined. Documenting the formal return of the immigrant as a "public charge," or a burden upon the State, the author shows how the concept has been revived as states adopt punitive policies targeting immigrants of color and require them to "pay back" benefits for which they are legally eligible during a time of intense debate regarding welfare reform.Park argues that the notions of "public charge" and "public burden" were reinvigorated in the 1990s to target immigrant women of reproductive age for deportation and as part of a larger project of "disciplining" immigrants. Drawing on nearly 200 interviews with immigrant organizations, government agencies and safety net providers, as well as careful tracking of policies and media coverage, Park provides vivid, first-person accounts of how struggles over the "public charge" doctrine unfolded on the ground, as well as its consequences for the immigrant community. Ultimately, she shows that the concept of "public charge" continues to lurk in the background, structuring our conception of who can legitimately access public programs and of the moral economy of work and citizenship in the U.S., and makes important policy suggestions for reforming our immigration system"--
Learn More about the Book
In Entitled to Nothing, Lisa Sun-Hee Park investigates how the politics of immigration, health care, and welfare are intertwined. Documenting the formal return of the immigrant as a public charge, or a burden upon the State, the author shows how the concept has been revived as states adopt punitive policies targeting immigrants of color and require them to pay back benefits for which they are legally eligible during a time of intense debate regarding welfare reform.
Park argues that the notions of public charge and public burden were reinvigorated in the 1990s to target immigrant women of reproductive age for deportation and as part of a larger project of disciplining immigrants. Drawing on nearly 200 interviews with immigrant organizations, government agencies and safety net providers, as well as careful tracking of policies and media coverage, Park provides vivid, first-person accounts of how struggles over the public charge doctrine unfolded on the ground, as well as its consequences for the immigrant community. Ultimately, she shows that the concept of public charge continues to lurk in the background, structuring our conception of who can legitimately access public programs and of the moral economy of work and citizenship in the U.S., and makes important policy suggestions for reforming our immigration system."
About the Author
Lisa Sun-Hee Park is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Consuming Citizenship: Children of Asian Immigrant Entrepreneurs and the co-author, with David Pellow, of The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America's Eden and Silicon Valley of Dreams: Immigrant Labor, Environmental Injustice, and the High Tech Global Economy, also available from NYU Press.
Review Quotes
1.
"[T]his commemorative collection captures the essence of New York's distinctive urban life."
-"Library Journal",
2.
"Former section editor Rosenblum gathers 50 of the best pieces of the post-September 11 era by masters of the form including Edwidge Danticat and Francine Prose this rich sampling delivers."
-"Publishers Weekly",
3.
"The City section was an invaluable counterpoint, almost a stowaway, on the cruise liner of the Sunday "New York Times". It delivered news that stays news--indelible and intimate stories of city life, by turns disturbing, amusing, and enchanting. The pieces in this collection are as alive now as they were when they first saw newsprint. Reading them again, even across a distance of years, was like bumping into old friends."
-Thomas Beller, author of "The Sleep-Over Artist" and "How to Be a Man"
4. "Three Hudson valley women contributed outstanding personal essays in this lively collection of urban musings."-Chronogram Magazine, "Chronogram Magazine"
5.
""New York is the plural city par excellence, the place of many tales. This new collection, taken from the pages of the city paper, gives us a new luxuriance of New York stories, neither neatly splashy nor narrowly sociological, but instead with the spice and eccentricity and plural energy that New Yorkers will recognize as ours and non-New Yorkers may wish was theirs."
-Adam Gopnik, author of "Through The Children's Gate: A Home In New York"
6. "Recommended [for] all levels/libraries."-"CHOICE",
7. "Recommended [for] all levels/libraries."-"CHOICE"
8. "Recommended [for] all levels/libraries."-CHOICE
9. "Informative and interesting...the book could not be timelier."-Marylin Aguirre-Molina, Health Affairs
