Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right [Hardcover]

Michele Wucker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 8, 2006

We are essentially a nation of people who once belonged elsewhere, yet have long been deeply ambivalent about this part of our history. After World War I, the fear of the stranger overwhelmed America's confidence in our ability to create one nation out of many peoples. We slammed the door shut, only to realize our error and re-open it four decades later. Today, a record-high foreign-born population, global instability, and economic uncertainty have once again pushed America to a tipping point in our attitudes not only toward immigration but toward our role in the world—and the stakes have risen dramatically. Our economy depends more than ever on immigrants, not only for stereotypical low-skilled jobs, but much more so for maintaining our technological edge and promoting American products and services abroad. So far, America has reaped the lion's share of the gains of globalization. Yet for the first time ever, the world's best and brightest no longer see this country as the only destination of choice. In Lock Out, Michele Wucker documents the mistakes that led to our predicament today, and clarifies why it would be a catastrophic error of judgment, as well as a demonstration of a colossal lack of self-knowledge, if America attempted to turn its back on rest of the world and in so doing on the best of itself.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Wucker makes an impassioned case for immigration as an almost unalloyed boon. She pays homage to America as the land of freedom and opportunity—while surveying its many failures to safeguard these blessings for immigrants—but her main argument is economic. Bringing in "the world's best and brightest" is critical to the economy, she contends, providing the high-skilled workers—scientists, engineers, doctors, nurses—and links to foreign markets that America needs to grow and maintain its global competitiveness. Wucker's business-oriented perspective is cogent if one-sided, and sometimes unconvincing; she considers the restrictive immigration regimen from the 1920s through the 1960s a disaster, for example, but after the Great Depression, much of this era was a golden age for the American economy. Wucker (Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola) floats a grab bag of mainly useful reforms, from rationalizing policies implemented to prevent terrorism to opening legitimate channels for immigrants to come here and work legally while cracking down on businesses that employ and exploit the undocumented. But her emphasis on the immigrant as cosmopolitan technology whiz and avatar of global competitiveness doesn't quite address, and may inflame, the gnawing economic insecurities behind American isolationism. (May)
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Review

"..a welcome contribution at a critical time" -- New York Post, 7/9/2006

"..persuasively refutes some of the core concerns behind the current backlash against low-skilled and undocumented immigrants" -- Christian Science Monitor, 8/1/2006

"A forcefully argued and informative book...both correct and important" -- Washington Post Book World, 5/28/06

"Wucker adds...historical perspective to the sound and fury of the current debate over immigration." -- Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, senior editor at Foreign Affairs

"Wucker's impressive book could not be more timely." -- Miami Herald, 5/21/06

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs (May 8, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586483560
• ISBN-13: 978-1586483562
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,944,898 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

So very much of what I write about goes back to the summer I spent with my great-aunt and -uncle in Belgium the year I was 16. Our family spoke French but lived in a Flemish suburb of Brussels, where the simplest purchase at a store involved a moment of hesitation over what language to speak. Since then, I have been fascinated by the ways that differences in culture and language affect how people get along. My French studies led me to Haiti, which shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, and thus to a study of the politics of language and culture. Immigration --from Haiti to the Dominican Republic and from both countries to the United States-- was central to these questions, which are explored in my first book, WHY THE COCKS FIGHT. In turn, Dominican and Haitian immigrants' stories led me to investigate my own family's immigrant past. Expecting to write about the differences between a hundred years ago and today, I was stunned to find far more similarities than I would have thought based on everything I learned. My new book, LOCKOUT, is the result of my surprising findings and an account of the price that we are paying for the wrong lessons we have been taught.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eloquent Advocacy of a Sensible Immigration Policy for the United States, June 17, 2006

By 

John Kwok (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right (Hardcover)

My favorite camera store in Tucson, AZ had two wonderful Mexican-American women employees who became close confidants and surrogate mothers of mine. We spent hours discussing not only photography, but also politics and immigration, noting with much dismay, the porous border existing between southern Arizona and the adjoining Mexican state of Sonora (For example I can recall at least two instances where young pregnant Sonoran women had moved into my apartment complex, staying long enough to deliver their babies in a Tucson hospital, before returning, almost immediately, to Sonora.). Both were proud to be American citizens, recognized the necessity of speaking in English in public, and were strongly opposed to government funding of bilingual education in public schools (But in private, amongst themselves, their families, and close friends, they enjoyed speaking the Mexican Spanish they had known since their youth.). If theirs were views widely held by Tucson's Mexican-American community - and I have much reason to believe that they were - then I'm not surprised that eight years after I had moved back to New York City, the citizens of Arizona voted in favor of Proposition 120 by a 56% to 44% margin, requiring public officials to verify the legal status of those seeking public assistance or the right to vote, and to deny them to those unable to offer such proof. I have no doubt that my Tucson friends would greet Michele Wucker's "Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Out Prosperity Depends On Getting It Right" with ample interest, but also harbor some reservations about her positive, somewhat practical, view of immigration to the United States, both now and in the future. These may be reservations that I too might share, but I would also add that Wucker's latest book is one deserving of wide readership, regardless of how one perceives this issue.

Journalist Michele Wucker, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute of The New School, has written eloquently on the dismal histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti in her first book, "Why the Cocks Fight", in which she contends that the disastrous immigration policies of successive Dominican Republic regimes towards Haitian immigrants are reminiscent of our own complex, often conflicted, immigration history. So, in a sense, which Wucker herself admits, "Lockout" can be regarded as a sequel to her previous book, but here, she treats the topic of immigration on a much broader canvass devoted solely to the United States's history. However, her book is most certainly not the last word, nor should it be, with respect to immigration to the United States, even though she makes a persuasive, often compelling, case in favor of a sensible United States immigration policy. Regrettably "Lockout" provides too brief a historical perspective on this issue, which, I might add, has been covered far more extensively by Stanford University economist Thomas Sowell, most notably in his book "Ethnic America: A History" (I strongly recommend this early book of his to every potential buyer of "Lockout", since Sowell has the audacity, conviction and facts to discuss eloquently the relative successes of different ethnic groups in their assimilation into American society; he is also a distinguished alumnus of Stuyvesant High School, my high school alma mater.).

Wucker believes that the United States too often has been guilty of restricting immigration due to hysteria by native Americans against emigrants based upon ill-conceived perceptions due to religious, ethnic and racial prejudice. Indeed, notable examples include virulent hostility shown by white Americans towards East Asian immigrants, subsequently legislated into law as a series of notorious Exclusion Acts passed by the U. S. Congress in the 1880s and 1890s, and to a much lesser extent, towards Eastern and Southern European emigrants arriving during the "Great Wave" of immigration from the last two decades of the 19th Century through the early 20th Century. Regrettably, as Wucker demonstrates in the early chapters entitled "Patriots" and "The Eagle and the Ostrich", the worst instances of hostility occurred against immigrants from countries which were at war with the United States during both of the 20th Century's world wars. I was especially stunned, and moved, by her eloquent passages describing anti-German hysteria shown by native Americans towards German-born American citizens and legal immigrants during World War I. However, I strongly disagree with her view of the internment of West Coast Japanese-Americans and Japanese aliens during World War II as a shameful episode in American history; it was regrettable, but necessary, given prior knowledge of the existence of substantial Japanese espionage networks spanning the Pacific rim in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and the enthusiastic support rendered by resident Japanese in Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, to invading Imperial Japanese military forces during the early phases of World War II in the Pacific (December, 1941 to May, 1942), which Michelle Malkin notes in her book "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror" (Malkin has made a very compelling, persuasive case in her book for internment during wartime, which I support even though an aunt spent her early youth in a Japanese-American internment camp and another relative is former U. S. Army Chaplain James Yee, who was subjected to a Pentagon witch hunt and fishing expedition because he sought humane treatment for Muslim terrorists imprisoned at Camp Gitmo.). I also have to question Wucker's implication that stiff American import tariffs enacted in the late 1920s were somehow responsible for the rise of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy; a more likely explanation is the Versailles Treaty, which ended World War I, yet sowed the seeds of a more cataclysmic conflict two decades later, by imposing harsh financial reparations on a nascent democratic German republic unable to pay them.

Wucker uses facts and figures succinctly to demonstrate how immigration has not had an adverse impact on employment of native Americans, but oddly enough, she doesn't consider the recent importance of overseas outsourcing of high tech computer programming jobs, most notably to India. She is more successful in demonstrating how immigration attracts "The Best and the Brightest" to America. In this chapter, she eloquently recounts the recognition earned by 2005 Intel Science Talent Search finalists, offering triumphant anecdotes which reaffirm New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof's astute praise of Asian-American success in higher education in his May 14, 2006 New York Times Week in Review column. Wucker truly believes that America's emergence as an economic superpower is due in no small measure to attracting the world's best and brightest, and allowing a free exchange of information, noting that many of the world's most important political and economic leaders were educated at many of the United States's elite private and public colleges and universities, returning to their home countries with a solid understanding of and appreciation for American civic ideals and culture. Elsewhere, she notes how immigrants have influenced American culture, especially the arts, most notably, in literature, including for example, both Frank McCourt (Most people may have forgotten that he was born in Brooklyn, New York, left when he was three years old, returned to the United States at the age of nineteen, and began teaching at Stuyvesant High School in his early forties.) and Gary Shteyngart (Another distinguished Stuyvesant alumnus whom I regard as one of our high school's most talented literary alumni.).

The free flow of ideas and information between the United States and the rest of the world has been under assault since the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks, having an adverse impact on immigration too. Wucker offers some poignant, quite compelling, anecdotes of resident aliens caught inexplicably in bureaucratic red tape and other unexpected restrictions on immigration, resisting the notion that these restrictions may have validity now during the War on Terror (Again, I must respectfully disagree, noting that these measures may be necessary to curb the dissemination of ideas and technology to potential adversaries, most notably the People's Republic of China, which still refuses to respect not only the basic human rights of individuals as proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence, but also those of intellectual property too.). I also believe Wucker acts too much like a latter day Cassandra when she expresses grave concerns about future American supremacy in the sciences and technology. I am far more optimistic, noting that English has been the lingua franca of the sciences and technology since the end of World War II, and that American science still enjoys considerable admiration and respect, even if, for example, some of the most innovative research in high energy particle physics is conducted now by American and European physicists at the CERN facility in Switzerland (I recommend reading Harvard University physicist Lisa Randall's "Warped Passages" on her ongoing research at CERN; for this work, she may yet become the next Nobel Prize-winning Stuyvesant alumnus.).

Wucker concludes "Lockout" on an optimistic note, offering a concise framework for a sensible United States immigration policy. It's one that I think most Americans would agree with, including a Caribbean-American friend who believes that illegal immigrants should pay fines to pay for their English language education; a view shared too by Michele Wucker. But unlike Wucker, I would prefer seeing an immigration policy which would emphasize attracting mainly the world's "Best and Brightest", not a policy which would also encourage immigration by... Read more ›

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Get immigration straight, January 3, 2007

By 

James A. Gialamas (NYC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right (Hardcover)

Many of the reviews posted here -from professional reviewers as well as
readers- clearly are not based on what actually is in Lockout but instead on pre-existing notions of what the author might have written.

For example, how did the Library Journal reviewer conclude that Lockout does not address homeland security or the impact on U.S. low-wage jobs? There are full chapters devoted to homeland security and to jobs.

Also, just because you don't agree with a book's conclusion doesn't mean that it's biased. In fact, from my reading, Lockout is balanced almost to a fault: delivering both sides of many of the arguments about immigration - the Borjas/Card debate about the impact on low-wage U.S. workers comes to mind.

No doubt, Lockout makes a case in favor or immigration's net effect benefits to the United States, but it doesn't ignore the costs-- and suggests ways to achieve a more moderate and sustainable flow of people across borders.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Balanced Look at Immigration, September 15, 2006

By 

Simon Burrow "Persuader" (Pasadena CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right (Hardcover)

If you only read one book about immigration this year read Lockout. It does have a bias towards allowing immigration but both sides of the argument are explored. She quotes John F. Kennedy saying: "Immigration policy should be generous; it should be fair; it should be flexible." Lockout is filled with very good historical data about how we got into the immigration mess that we are in today. It is not primarily about the low skilled Mexican illegal immigrants. It is focused much more on the difficulties encountered by skilled, highly educated people who would like to work in the United States. Michelle Wucker makes a very good argument that the labyrinth of immigration law that we have created is hurting our competitiveness in the world.
Her argument that encouraging "Americanization" of immigrants during the first half of the 20th century set the stage for the immigrant battle of this era is interesting and definitely worth considering.
With regard to undocumented immigrants she argues that we must "Accept responsibility for the wink-wink-nod-nod policies that created a large, marginalized population." "The only fair thing to do" she concludes "is to provide a way for them to apply for legal status" with some sort of penalty.
Although I didn't agree with all of Wucker's arguments or policy proposals I felt that she supported them with good data and reason. People on both sides of this debate will disagree with her but they should all read her book.