This talk explores the close and constitutive relationship between Asian immigration and struggles for migrant justice. How can we understand the continuing impacts of the seminal role that Chinese and later Asian exclusion played in creating the infrastructure of immigration in the United States? What was the relationship between the emergence of an Asian American “model minority” and the growth of mass criminalization and incarceration during the post-civil rights Cold War period? How do these histories help us understand the convergence between immigration and criminalization, or what we can call contemporary “crimmigration”? And how can we highlight the positions of Asian migrants and refugees in contemporary debates about immigration reform, immigration enforcement, and migrant justice?
Asian Americans and Immigrant Rights: Keep on DREAMing?
Author Bio
Sujani K. Reddy
Sujani K. Reddy is the 2017-2018 Thomas Tam Visiting Professor of Asian American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Dr. Reddy’s work focuses on histories of U.S. imperialism, immigration, and South Asian diaspora, as well as mass criminalization, immigrant rights, transnational feminism, and struggles for liberation. She is the author of Nursing & Empire: Gendered Labor and Migration from India to the United States (UNC Press, 2015) and co-editor of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). Both books are also published in South Asia by Orient BlackSwan.