A Special Panel Event

Immigration in America

Sat., Oct. 9, 2021 • 4:00pm PT • Live • Online

Featuring César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, Jay Caspian Kang, Syed M. Masood, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Moderated by Paula Farmer

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR E-NEWSLETTER
This event will be broadcast live and does not require registration to attend. To view, please click the "Watch Here" button at the time of the event, or subscribe to our e-newsletter to receive a ten-minute reminder.

We have a new administration and seemingly a whole new set of issues regarding immigration. While the Biden administration is acting on a number of fronts to reverse Trump-era restrictions on immigration, they are also incurring other obstacles of their own. Among those items is the pressure to do more for asylum-seekers and migrants, increased hate crimes against Asian-Americans, and how to help Afghan refugees in the U.S. Delving into these and other issues will be a powerful panel of authors and agents of change. Book Passage invites you to listen to the discussion and be part of the solution.

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is a professor of law at the University of Denver who writes and teaches about the intersection of criminal and immigration law. He has published two books, Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants (2019), and Crimmigration Law (2015). His scholarly articles about the right to counsel for migrants in the criminal justice system, immigration imprisonment, and race-based immigration policing have appeared in the California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, BYU Law Review, Maryland Law Review, and Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, among others. César’s analyses of policies affecting migrants regularly appear in media in the United States and abroad. He has published opinion articles in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Time, and many other venues. 

Jay Caspian Kang is a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine. His other work has appeared in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, and on This American Life and Vice, where he worked as an Emmy-nominated correspondent. He is the author of the novel The Dead Do Not Improve, which The Boston Globe called “an extremely smart, funny debut, with moments of haunting beauty.” A riveting blend of family history and original reportage by a conversation-starting writer for The New York Times Magazine that explores—and reimagines—Asian American identity in a Black and white world. he Loneliest Americans is the unforgettable story of Kang and his family as they move from a housing project in Cambridge to an idyllic college town in the South and eventually to the West Coast. Their story unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding Asian America, as millions more immigrants, many of them working-class or undocumented, stream into the country.

Syed M. Masood grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, and currently lives in Sacramento, California. There have been plenty of stops in between though. He’s a first generation immigrant, twice over, a citizen of three different countries and lived in nine cities. Living among different people, in different countries at fascinating times, has shaped both his view of the world and his writing. The Bad Muslim Discount is an irreverent, poignant, and often hysterically funny debut novel by an amazing new voice. With deep insight, warmth, and an irreverent sense of humor, Syed M. Masood examines universal questions of identity, faith (or lack thereof), and belonging through the lens of Muslim Americans.
His debut novel, The Bad Muslim Discount, is an irreverent, poignant, and often hysterically funny story by an amazing new voice. With deep insight, warmth and an irreverent sense of humor, Syed M. Masood examines universal questions of identity, faith (or lack thereof), and belonging through the lens of Muslim Americans.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a historian, author, memoirist, and who researches Western Hemisphere history and international human rights. She grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer. She has been active in the international indigenous movement for more than four decades, and she is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her Ph.D. in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her latest book, “NOT A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS” debunks the pervasive and self-congratulatory myth that our country is proudly founded by and for immigrants, and urges readers to embrace a more complex and honest history of the United States.