Immigration Realities: Challenging Common Misperceptions

Today’s book is: Immigration Realities: Challenging Common Misperceptions (Columbia UP, 2024), by Ernesto Castaneda and Carina Cione, which is a practical, evidence-based primer on immigrants and immigration. Each chapter debunks a frequently encountered claim and answers common questions. Presenting the latest findings and decades of interdisciplinary research in an accessible way, Dr. Castañeda and Carina Cione emphasize the expert consensus that immigration is vital to the United States and many other countries around the world. Featuring original insights from research conducted in El Paso, Texas, Immigration Realities considers a wide range of places, ethnic groups, and historical eras. It provides the key data and context to understand how immigration affects economies, crime rates, and social welfare systems, and it sheds light on contentious issues such as the safety of the U.S.-Mexico border and the consequences of Brexit. This book is an indispensable guide for all readers who want to counter false claims about immigration and are interested in what the research shows.

Our guest is: Dr. Ernesto Castañeda, who is the director of the Immigration Lab and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University. His books include A Place to Call Home: Immigrant Exclusion and Urban Belonging in New York, Paris, and Barcelona (2018); Building Walls: Excluding Latin People in the United States (2019); and Reunited: Family Separation and Central American Youth Migration (2024).

The Immigration Realities co-author is: Carina Cione, who is a sociologist and writer based out of Baltimore. Their work has been featured by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Trauma Care, El Paso News, and American University’s Center for Latin American & Latino Studies Working Paper Series.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

• We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States
• We Take Our Cities With Us
• Secret Harvests
• The Ungrateful Refugee
• The Translator's Daughter
• Where Is Home?
• Who Gets Believed: When the Truth Isn't Enough

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