The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

This is one of the things on Obama's 2020 reading list that I would not have read if not for him. Or at least not this soon, because this is a voice that will be heard again, I have no doubt. It is chronicles of the author's own undocumented life and that of her parents, but also of scores more, who live in and around the margins. There is so much here that I did not know and need to hear. The first is something that I learned at a lecture I went to last week, which is that undocumented is the way to talk about this. They are Americans, but they lack documents. The other is that while I would have guess there were a lot of undocumented workers at Ground Zero, this is a good account of that. I did not know that there are a fair number of undocumented people living in places like Flint, failed communities that were abaondoned by the state as well as the federal government, and that their isolation and fear of deportation put them at a higher risk from the lead poisoning than others because they did not have the knowledge or the resources that even other poor citizens had. The bottom line is that there are a lot of people who are part of the fabirc of our everyday lives who are undocumented and yet necessary, and that until we get serious about solving the working poor issue, we will never make a dent in the immigration issue. It is sn issue as old as the country itself, and with no concensus on the path to take. This book humanizes the issues.