The Dark Side of Immigration

We hear a lot about immigration issues in the news these days, but these are not necessarily new problems. Ann Bausum in her book Denied, Detained, Deported; Stories from the Dark Side of American Immigration tells some of the cases where the freedom promised by the Statue of Liberty didn't happen. The book begins with two poems -- one by Emma Lazarus from 1883 which proclaimed "Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" and a 2008 poem by Naomi Shihab Nye telling the story of what it really is like to be an immigrant in our country. The rest of the books tells individual stories of people who were denied the right to freedom in the United States. At the end of each story Bausum relates the problems of that story to our immigration issues of today. So while this is an historical view, there is relevance to today. Also there is an extensive timeline at the end of the book which chronicles immigration trends and legislation beginning in 1788. Denied, Detained, Deported is one of the Anderson's Book Stores Mock Siebert (for nonfiction) 2010 list.