Earth and Environmental Sciences (Geography), Graduate Center, CUNY

Jenna M. Loyd and Alison Mountz’s Boats, Borders and Bases and Alexandra Délano Alonso’s From Here and There are two of the most recently published works on the topic of U.S. immigration finished under the Trump administration. These works build on the now extensive interdisciplinary literature detailing the exclusion of immigration on one hand, and forms of political power and integration, on the other — two lines of investigation in the literature that remain largely segregated, but would greatly benefit if theorized together. Their respective questions, while centered on oppositional frameworks between the “exclusion” and “inclusion” of U.S. immigration, are timely and together they ask: how did the largest migrant detention system in the world come about? And now that we are here, what kinds of counter-strategies exist to support immigrants’ political and economic participation?