American Orientalism
From the late nineteenth century to our post-9/11 era, Americans have imagined South Asians simultaneously as exotic and barbaric, magical and menacing—to the detriment of those immigrants who are already most vulnerable.
Winter 2025
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From the Margins: Introducing Our Spring Issue
Featuring essays by Vivek Bald, Michelle Chen, Anjali Kamat, Mae Ngai, and more, our Spring issue examines the power of borders—real and imagined—and what they look like from the perspective of those they seek to exclude.
Updating Debs’s Dream
Nearly every morning, hundreds of immigrants from Latin America come to my affluent town in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. to work. They build or clean million-dollar houses, cook and wash dishes at fast-food and fancy restaurants, care for the …
New Haven Rising
As “eds and meds” reshape working-class New Haven, labor and community groups are joining forces to transform the service economy and build a more democratic city.
Executive Justice?
Both law and history are on Obama’s side when it comes to executive action on immigration.
How Immigrant Activists Changed L.A.
Since the 1990s, immigrant and labor activists in Los Angeles have worked together to build a powerful progressive movement.
Introduction: The Promises and Limits of Progressive Cities
To dwell solely on the grim events in Washington is to neglect the more complicated and, potentially, more hopeful reality taking shape in American cities today.
Introducing our Winter issue.
Passports for Sale
Until recently, becoming a citizen of a country has largely been regarded as priceless—a rare intangible privilege that can’t be bought or sold. This perception is starting to fade.
Will the Rise of the Far Right Mean More Human Trafficking in Europe?
By depriving immigrants of rights, governments help foster the demand for illegal trade in human lives.
[AUDIO] Left Forum Panels 2014
Last month, Dissent hosted two panels at Left Forum in New York City, moderated by Belabored co-hosts Michelle Chen and Sarah Jaffe. Listen to both panels below. We apologize for any glitches in audio quality. Cloud Labor: Working in the …
Migrants at Risk: How U.S. Policies Facilitate Human Trafficking
Fewer than 4,000 men and women have been formally designated as trafficked to the United States. This number obscures not only the tens of thousands of forced labor victims whose cases go unreported, but the millions of migrants who face comparable abuse—just not enough to fit the legal definition of trafficking. It’s impossible to tell the story of trafficking without telling their story, too.
Citizens, Denaturalization, and Assassination
To be stripped of one’s citizenship rights is to be consigned to a ghetto of one. But it’s not just fascists and dictators who engage in such practices. As historian Patrick Weil notes, the United States has frequently revoked the citizenship of Americans, too.
Guest Workers As Bellwether
Guest workers are too often invisible in popular discussions of work; when they appear, it’s as outliers. But Saket Soni, who founded the National Guestworker Alliance amid the New Orleans’s post-Katrina guest worker influx, says they’re better understood as a bellwether.
Borders and Bootstraps
Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal by Cybelle Fox Princeton University Press, 2012, 393 pp. Crossing Borders: Migration and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century United States by Dorothee …
Who Gets to Define Immigrants as “Illegal”?
News organizations must be held accountable for the impact their use of “illegal” has not only on individual readers, but also on communities and on any chance of future congressional action.
