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.

Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal

Literature & Fiction

Chomsky, Aviva

Short Stories & Anthologies

Beacon Press

Why social, racial, and economic justice are just as crucial as science in determining how humans can reverse climate catastrophe\nWe are facing a climate catastrophe. A plethora of studies describe the damage we’ve already done, the droughts, the wildfires, the super-storms, the melting glaciers, the heat waves, and the displaced people fleeing lands that are becoming uninhabitable. Many people understand that we are facing a climate emergency, but may be fuzzy on technical, policy, and social justice aspects. In Is Science Enough?, Aviva Chomsky breaks down the concepts, terminology, and debates for activists, students, and anyone concerned about climate change. She argues that science is not enough to change course: we need put social, racial, and economic justice front and center and overhaul the global growth economy.\nChomsky’s accessible primer focuses on 5 key issues:\n1.) Technical questions: What exactly are “clean,” “renewable,” and “zero-emission” energy sources? How much do different sectors (power generation, transportation, agriculture, industry, etc.) contribute to climate change? Can forests serve as a carbon sink?\n2.) Policy questions: What is the Green New Deal? How does a cap-and-trade system work? How does the United States subsidize the fossil fuel industry?\n3.) What can I do as an individual?: Do we need to consume less? What kinds of individual actions can make the most difference? Should we all be vegetarians?\n4.) Social, racial, and economic justice: What’s the relationship of inequality to climate change? What do race and racism have to do with climate change? How are pandemics related to climate change?\n5.) Broadening the lens: What is economic growth? How important is it, and how does it affect the environment? What is degrowth?

Is Science Enough?: Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice (Myths Made in America)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Claims that immigrants take Americans' jobs, are a drain on the American economy, contribute to poverty and inequality, destroy the social fabric, challenge American identity, and contribute to a host of social ills by their very existence are openly discussed and debated at all levels of society. Chomsky dismantles twenty of the most common assumptions and beliefs underlying statements like "I'm not against immigration, only illegal immigration" and challenges the misinformation in clear, straightforward prose. In exposing the myths that underlie today's debate, Chomsky illustrates how the parameters and presumptions of the debate distort how we think—and have been thinking—about immigration. She observes that race, ethnicity, and gender were historically used as reasons to exclude portions of the population from access to rights. Today, Chomsky argues, the dividing line is citizenship. Although resentment against immigrants and attempts to further marginalize them are still apparent today, the notion that non-citizens, too, are created equal is virtually absent from the public sphere. Engaging and fresh, this book will challenge common assumptions about immigrants, immigration, and U.S. history.

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths about Immigration (Myths Made in America)

Central America's Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration

Restores the region's fraught history of repression and resistance to popular consciousness and connects the United States' interventions and influence to the influx of refugees seeking asylum today. At the center of the current immigration debate are migrants from Central America fleeing poverty, corruption, and violence in search of refuge in the United States. In Central America's Forgotten History, Aviva Chomsky answers the urgent question "How did we get here?" Centering the centuries-long intertwined histories of US expansion and Indigenous and Central American struggles against inequality and oppression, Chomsky highlights the pernicious cycle of colonial and neocolonial development policies that promote cultures of violence and forgetting without any accountability or restorative reparations. Focusing on the valiant struggles for social and economic justice in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, Chomsky restores these vivid and gripping events to popular consciousness. Tracing the roots of displacement and migration in Central America to the Spanish conquest and bringing us to the present day, she concludes that the more immediate roots of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras lie in the wars and in the US interventions of the 1980s and the peace accords of the 1990s that set the stage for neoliberalism in Central America. Chomsky also examines how and why histories and memories are suppressed, and the impact of losing historical memory. Only by erasing history can we claim that Central American countries created their own poverty and violence, while the United States' enjoyment and profit from their bananas, coffee, mining, clothing, and export of arms are simply unrelated curiosities.

History

Americas

Restores the region's fraught history of repression and resistance to popular consciousness and connects the United States' interventions and influence to the influx of refugees seeking asylum today. Restores the region's fraught history of repression and resistance to popular consciousness and connects the United States' interventions and influence to the influx of refugees seeking asylum today. At the center of the current immigration debate are migrants from Central America fleeing poverty, corruption, and violence in search of refuge in the United States. In Central America's Forgotten History, Aviva Chomsky answers the urgent question "How did we get here?" Centering the centuries-long intertwined histories of US expansion and Indigenous and Central American struggles against inequality and oppression, Chomsky highlights the pernicious cycle of colonial and neocolonial development policies that promote cultures of violence and forgetting without any accountability or restorative reparations. Focusing on the valiant struggles for social and economic justice in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, Chomsky restores these vivid and gripping events to popular consciousness. Tracing the roots of displacement and migration in Central America to the Spanish conquest and bringing us to the present day, she concludes that the more immediate roots of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras lie in the wars and in the US interventions of the 1980s and the peace accords of the 1990s that set the stage for neoliberalism in Central America. Chomsky also examines how and why histories and memories are suppressed, and the impact of losing historical memory. Only by erasing history can we claim that Central American countries created their own poverty and violence, while the United States' enjoyment and profit from their bananas, coffee, mining, clothing, and export of arms are simply unrelated curiosities.

Revised and expanded edition of the groundbreaking book which demystifies twenty-one of the most widespread myths and beliefs about immigrants and immigrations. Aviva Chomsky dismantles twenty-one of the most widespread and pernicious myths and beliefs about immigrants and immigration in this incisive book. "They Take Our Jobs!" challenges the underlying assumptions that fuel misinformed claims about immigrants, radically altering our notions of citizenship, discrimination, and US history. With fresh material including a new introduction, revised timeline, and updated terminology section, this expanded edition is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how these myths are used to promote aggressive anti-immigrant policies.

In the late nineteenth century, several U.S.-based companies, which merged into the United Fruit Company in 1899, began to build railroads and cultivate bananas in Costa Rica's Atlantic Coast province of Limon, recruiting mainly Jamaican workers. The society that developed in Limon was an English-speaking enclave of white North American managers and black West Indian workers, with a culture and history distinct from that of the rest of Costa Rica. This detailed and informative study of the banana industry on Costa Rica's Atlantic Coast, focusing on the lives of the industry's workers, explains why the United Fruit Company was never able to maintain the kind of social and economic control it sought over its workers and how the workers managed to create a vibrant alternative social and economic system around the plantation. West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940 is among the first studies of the social history of multinational corporations and makes a significant contribution to current scholarship on plantation societies and labor systems, the history of medicine, the social and labor history of Central America, and Afro-Caribbean history.

West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica 1870-1940

Business & Money

Economics

Louisiana State Univ Pr

Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class (American Encounters/Global Interactions)

Exploring globalization from a labor history perspective, Aviva Chomsky provides historically grounded analyses of migration, labor-management collaboration, and the mobility of capital. She illuminates the dynamics of these movements through case studies set mostly in New England and Colombia. Taken together, the case studies offer an intricate portrait of two regions, their industries and workers, and the myriad links between them over the long twentieth century, as well as a new way to conceptualize globalization as a long-term process.
Chomsky examines labor and management at two early-twentieth-century Massachusetts factories: one that transformed the global textile industry by exporting looms around the world, and another that was the site of a model program of labor-management collaboration in the 1920s. She follows the path of the textile industry from New England, first to the U.S. South, and then to Puerto Rico, Japan, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and Colombia. She considers how towns in Rhode Island and Massachusetts began to import Colombian workers as they struggled to keep their remaining textile factories going. Most of the workers eventually landed in service jobs: cleaning houses, caring for elders, washing dishes. 
Focusing on Colombia between the 1960s and the present, Chomsky looks at the Urabá banana export region, where violence against organized labor has been particularly acute, and, through a discussion of the AFL-CIO’s activities in Colombia, she explores the thorny question of U.S. union involvement in foreign policy. In the 1980s, two U.S. coal mining companies began to shift their operations to Colombia, where they opened two of the largest open-pit coal mines in the world. Chomsky assesses how different groups, especially labor unions in both countries, were affected. Linked Labor Histories suggests that economic integration among regions often exacerbates regional inequalities rather than ameliorating them.

Duke University Press Books

A fully-revised and updated new edition of a concise and insightful socio-historical analysis of the Cuban revolution, and the course it took over five and a half decades. <ul>
<li>Now available in a fully-revised second edition, including new material to add to the book’s coverage of Cuba over the past decade under Raul Castro</li> <li>All of the existing chapters have been updated to reflect recent scholarship</li> <li>Balances social and historical insight into the revolution with economic and political analysis extending into the twenty-first century</li> <li>Juxtaposes U.S. and Cuban perspectives on the historical impact of the revolution, engaging and debunking the myths and preconceptions surrounding one of the most formative political events of the twentieth century</li> <li>Incorporates more student-friendly features such as a timeline and glossary</li> </ul>

A History of the Cuban Revolution (Viewpoints / Puntos de Vista)

Wiley/Blackwell

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Chomsky, Aviva. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Chomsky, Aviva

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Chomsky, Aviva. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal

Is Science Enough?: Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice (Myths Made in America)

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths about Immigration (Myths Made in America)

Central America's Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration

Central America's Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths about Immigration (Myths Made in America)

West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica 1870-1940

Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class (American Encounters/Global Interactions)

Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class (American Encounters/Global Interactions)

A History of the Cuban Revolution (Viewpoints / Puntos de Vista)