Customer Reviews

Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants

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David Bacon has been fighting for the rights of working people for decades. This book is a monument to a life well spent. Bacon goes through the issues around immigration in a highly readable way. The impact of NAFTA and Neoliberalism. The dangers and hardships faced by economic refugees, documented or not. The exploitative conditions that employers force economic refugees to work under. Bacon is very good on the history of guest worker programs and how they oppress its participants. His book is a great mix of hard facts and analysis plus heart wrenching stories from the front lines. I fear that anti-immigrant sentiment may turn even uglier as the economy weakens. We desperately need the information that Bacon provides to counter the bigotry and ignorance in our work places and among our friends and family.

This is a must read for anyone feeling pinched by a job loss in the US or who is boiling mad about illegal immigration to the US. This book goes a long way toward developing a context and the reasons for the mass migrations of labor throughout societies. If you are not mad at the US government and the Corporations who own it- you soon will be!

In Illegal People, labor movement veteran David Bacon asks the question of why Americans fail to appreciate the connections between issues like free trade, unionization, widening disparities between rich and poor--and immigration, a natural corollary of these and other topics. Bacon then proceeds to answer the question in a tough, thorough, and insightful work that combines straight-up political analysis with the stories of migrant workers and labor movements across the globe. Bacon's ultimate point--that western governments (especially the USA), in the service of capital, use exclusive immigration policies to undermine rights and depress wages for both native and immigrant laborers--is a sophisticated one, yet argued so brilliantly that the observation seems natural and obvious by the time he's finished.

I cannot agree more with the author about revealing the fact that illegals are needed by both the government and corporate America to minimized cost to any service/product in this country. Both slaves and illegals have been making possible the American dream for the original invaders of this land. And they will continue to...

Those who shout "illegals go home" profit the most. Lou Dobbs and others like him should read this book and shot their mouths once and for all. This book also, should be read by all those occupying a possition at any of the three branches of government in the US. And army and police personnel too. Maybe every American should...

I give the author credit for one position he takes: NAFTA was an absolute disaster for both the U.S. and Mexico. Notwithstanding, I can't endorse this book. It is intellectually dishonest. Like many open-border advocates he uses dishonest language--such as saying (repeatedly) that conservative politicians are "anti-immigrant." No, they're anti-illegal immigration, which isn't at all the same thing. He uses, as open-borders advocates always do, the very misleading term "undocumented immigrant." Many illegal aliens, in fact, have many false documents in their possesion. This dishonest word obfuscates the issue.

It is also untrue that a hard line against illegal immigration cost the Republicans a number of seats in the 2006 election--a lie the open-borders Wall Street Journal made repeatedly. My own Congressman, Brian Bilbray of San Diego, was easily reelected on a stance of tough border security. J.D. Hayworth, a strong opponent of illegal immigrantion, lost his reelection because of ties to Jack Abramoff, not his position on border security. Every opinion poll done nationwide shows support for immigration restrictions. A well-known poll by the Chicago Council of Foreign Relation--not a right-wing organization-- showed 70% of the Americans polled wanted strict limitations on immigration.

There was another disturbing part in the book, namely the invocation of the Ku Klux Klan to smear anyone who does not support open borders. This is the argument: the Klan opposes illegal immigration, the Klan is racist, and therefore all opponents of illegal immigration are racists. QED. I cannot recommend Illegal People as a legitimate study of the contentious issue of immigration, legal and otherwise. I suggest Carol Swain's balanced and fair look at the issue in Debating Immigration.