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>> ix Foreword Ediberto Román’s Those Damned Immigrants is a classic in the growing literature on the vast right-wing conspiracy, including the many exploitative features of capitalism in the postmodern age that attract and depend upon contingent and undocumented immigrant labor, largely from third world nations, especially the proximate Mexico, with liminal workers so desperate that they will risk life and ruin to come to el norte, even knowing the illegality and structural economic violence they will encounter for scandalous wages (and all too often the criminal violence they will encounter in routine hate crimes). Then, instead of rewarding them with gratitude for doing the work we do not want to do and allowing our economy to restructure at their expense, we turn around and despise them and often harm them because they are not us. And in the cruel discourse that marginalizes them as bearing “anchor babies,” being “illegals,” and possessing other undesirable traits—or worse, coveting our daughters—we demonize and scapegoat them. Watching these stories in the public discourse can be a sobering and largely horrific train wreck, but one that happens with much more frequency. Even the New York Times, largely sympathetic to immigrants, contributes to this marginalizing discursive habit by requiring its reporters to employ the term “illegal immigrant,” its New York Times Manual of Style and Usage ensuring that the terminology is widely repeated and giving veiled support to nativists and restrictionists. Because there is so much anti-Mexican animus evident in the quotidian public polity, especially with the escalating drug violence along the border and interior, fuelled by this country’s prodigious drug appetite, it x > xi workers basic benefits, safety nets, or, in Arizona and Arizona-on-steroids -Alabama, to seek out their children for school inventories, and to make it impossible for them to work in safe conditions or to walk while looking Mexican. He has helped us all by charting how both God and the devil are in the various policy details. In his damning indictment of the actual rules of the game, Professor Román is today’s Edward R. Murrow, and Those Damned Immigrants is today’s Harvest of Shame. His stunning book is a crash course on this important subject, and it will become a crucial tool for the accommodationist good guys if we are ever to work our way to serious structural immigration reform. Michael A. Olivas William B. Bates Distinguished Chair in Law, University of Houston Law Center Author of No Undocumented Child Left Behind (New York University Press, 2012) This page intentionally left blank ...

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