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.
Winter 2024
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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.
DREAMers at Work: Immigrants and Unions Are Putting Movement Back into the Labor Movement
Last month, tens of thousands of undocumented young people from around the country inaugurated the Obama administration’s deferred action policy by applying en masse to live and work in the United States for a renewable two-year term. Among the applicants …
Immigrants and the Road to Power 
The once conventional wisdom that immigrants, especially the unauthorized, are unlikely candidates for labor organizing has turned out to be not so much wrong as incomplete. It overlooked several factors that make low-wage immigrants more “organizable” in the workplace than …
Birthright Journeys: Connecting Dots from the Diaspora
Birthright programs that send ethnic youth back to their “motherland” are never simply about roots or where their ancestors came from. Rather, the programs are about giving birth, both in the metaphorical and literal senses, to feelings of connectedness with …
The Court Leaves Arizonans in the Lurch
Adam Goodman: The Court Leaves Arizonans in the Lurch
The Unstoppable DREAMers
Mark Engler: The Unstoppable DREAMers
