Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the Criminal Alien

(Hardback)

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A powerful argument for separating immigration enforcement from the criminal justice system, from one of the nations foremost crimmigration experts

In the fevered battles over immigration, Democrats and Republicans alike agree on this: that migrants who have committed a crime have no place in this country. Yet time and again, it has been shown that targeting migrants because they have committed a crime is a short-sighted appeal to nativist fear. To predicate a migrants right to stay in the country on whether they are law-abiding and therefore deserving or criminal and undeserving does little to improve public safety and has an especially devastating impact on low-income migrants of color.

While Csar Cuauhtmoc Garca Hernndezs first book, Migrating to Prison, focuses on the explosion of migrant detention centers over the past decades, Welcome the Wretched tackles head-on what happens when a deeply flawed and racist criminal legal system and immigration system converge to senselessly cruel effect. Drawing on everything from history to legal analyses and philosophy, Garca Hernndez counters the fundamental assumption that criminal activity has a rightful place in immigration matters, arguing that instead of using the criminal legal system to identify people to deport, the United States should place a reimagined sense of citizenship and solidarity at the center of immigration policy.

Author Bio

Csar Cuauhtmoc Garca Hernndez is a professor of law at the University of Denver and an immigration lawyer. He regularly speaks on immigration law and policy issues and has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and many other venues. The author of Crimmigration Law as well as Migrating to Prison and Welcome the Wretched (The New Press), he lives in Denver.