Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal

Explores what it means to be undocumented in a legal, social, economic and historical context
 
In this illuminating work, immigrant rights activist Aviva Chomsky shows how “illegality” and “undocumentedness” are concepts that were created to exclude and exploit. With a focus on US policy, she probes how people, especially Mexican and Central Americans, have been assigned this status—and to what ends. Blending history with human drama, Chomsky explores what it means to be undocumented in a legal, social, economic, and historical context. The result is a powerful testament of the complex, contradictory, and ever-shifting nature of status in America.

• "They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths about Immigration
• Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past
• An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (The Lamar Series in Western History)
• American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction
• Strangers at Our Door
• When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
• Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
• A Nation of Nations: A Great American Immigration Story
• "They Take Our Jobs!": and 20 Other Myths about Immigration, Expanded Edition