Articles by Travis Franks

Travis Franks is a postdoctoral fellow in the Kilachand Honors College at Boston University. A McNair and Fulbright alum, his writing appears in MELUS, AIQ, and Western American Literature, and he is currently at work on a book project titled Settler Nativism: Indigeneity and Diaspora in Contemporary Narratives of Belonging.

Review of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century by A. Naomi Paik (University of California Press)

Long Row (2016). Courtesy of Judy (CC BY-NC 2.0)
By Travis Franks

A. Naomi Paik’s Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary responds to a trio of executive orders on immigration policy issued in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency. Those orders sought to make good on campaign promises to further restrict immigration by banning citizens from Muslim-majority countries, allocating funds to expand a border wall between the US and Mexico, and ramping up home and workplace deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Paik delineates how these legal barriers came to be by locating them in relation to the nation’s formative immigration policies, backlash to the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the global repercussions of neoliberalism. Highlighting the work of Indigenous activists, Paik eventually calls not only for the dramatic restructuring of the nation’s immigration system but also for the creation of a more just society based on relationships that reject the politics of inclusion and exclusion.