Robin Derricourt's "Five Innovations That Changed Human History"

Robin Derricourt is an honorary professor of history at the University of New South Wales and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His books in archaeology and history include Inventing Africa, Antiquity Imagined, Creating God: The Birth and Growth of Major Religions, and Unearthing Childhood: Young Lives in Prehistory, which won the 2019 PROSE Award in Ancient History and Archaeology.

Derricourt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Five Innovations That Changed Human History: Transitions and Impacts, and reported the following:

The reader of page 99 will encounter there a key stage of a major development in human history. That is the point at which, five millennia ago in the urban civilisation of ancient Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), symbols used to show objects were developed into symbols to represent sounds – the invention of writing!

So page 99 gives us an image of revolutionary innovation, an excellent example of what I engage with in this book. My goal there was to examine some major transitions in human culture, drawing on archaeology and history to consider what were their impacts, and exploring how many changes can be brought about by one single discovery or invention.

Writing developed from geometric patterns to mark ownership or show numbers in a traded agreement, to pictographic symbols which represented sounds to those trained in reading them. An origin in economic arrangements would lead to writing used for administrative, legal and military roles, religious rituals, political propaganda, and the transition of literature from an oral to a written form, used in the training of a literate elite.

Writing is one of five major introductions in human history I examine in the book: the taming and control of fire, the domestication of the horse (and its later association with the wheeled vehicle), the invention of writing in early civilisations, the creation of the printing press and the printed book, and the revolution of wireless communication with the harnessing of radio waves.

I also use these to raise some broader questions of what we mean by progress and innovation. Until the 18th or 19th century in much of the world innovation was regarded with suspicion by religious and political authorities. Are we now confident that change always beings us benefits? Are we dominated by a “presentist” perspective than biases our understanding of the past and our expectations of the future? Studying the deep past can illuminate our present – and our future.

Visit Robin Derricourt's website.

The Page 99 Test: Creating God.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel J. Mallinson and A. Lee Hannah's "Green Rush"

Daniel J. Mallinson is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Administration at Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg. A. Lee Hannah is Professor of Political Science at Wright State University. Their research on the politics and policy of state medical cannabis programs has been published in a several scholarly journals, including Public Administration Review.

Mallinson and Hannah applied the “Page 99 Test” to their latest book, Green Rush: The Rise of Medical Marijuana in the United States, and reported the following:

Browsers who open our book to page 99 will see an overview of what constitutes a comprehensive state medical marijuana program. The concept “comprehensive” is critical to our work in many ways. Fundamentally, it means that a state has decriminalized the sale and possession of medical cannabis by licensed business and patients, respectively. There is a method for patients to obtain access to state-legal medical cannabis and it is broadly available. Additionally, comprehensive programs have oversight on production and dispensing, as well as providers and patients.

The figure on this page provides a 30,000-foot view of the complexity of medical marijuana programs. Due to federal prohibition of marijuana, each state must stand up a distribution system that can go from “seed” to “sale.” Thus, each aspect of marijuana production from cultivation, to processing, to retail must be developed within each state. The Page 99 Test captures a critical argument in our book that you cannot understand the expansion of legitimization of medical marijuana without focusing on the states.

Green Rush tells this story and puts forward the states as the primary drivers of cannabis liberalization and broader drug policy reform in the U.S. It is structured around four stages of the policy process: agenda setting, adoption, implementation, and feedback. This gives the readers a thorough understanding of how and why medical cannabis policy emerged and spread across 38 American states and the effects it has had on governments and patients.

Learn more about Green Rush at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicholas D. Anderson's "Inadvertent Expansion"

Nicholas D. Anderson is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at The George Washington University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Inadvertent Expansion: How Peripheral Agents Shape World Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Inadvertent Expansion: How Peripheral Agents Shape World Politics brings the reader to the middle of one of the book’s ten historical case studies—in this case, of France’s failed inadvertent expansion into the Vietnamese kingdom of Tonkin in 1873. A French naval officer by the name of François Garnier had, without authorization from Paris, conquered the kingdom by force. While Garnier would be captured and decapitated by Chinese river pirates over the course of this invasion, he had hoped that his fait accompli would be accepted by his superiors in the capital. This page presents key pieces of evidence for why Paris would turn him down: because of France’s weak position in Europe (in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War) and the geopolitical threat it faced from the great powers there. Thus, Tonkin was returned to local authorities, and the French cabinet ordered the immediate withdrawal of all its forces. While another French naval officer would follow almost exactly in Garnier’s footsteps less than a decade later, and would succeed (covered later in the chapter), for now Tonkin was to remain independent.

The Page 99 Test is only moderately successful in the case of my book. On the one hand, it does serve to highlight one of the two key factors explaining when and why inadvertent expansion occurs: variation in geopolitical risk. It also takes the reader into one of the book’s detailed historical case studies and highlights the kind of primary, documentary evidence that is in abundance throughout the book. On the other hand, simply reading this page in isolation wouldn’t tell you much about the book as a whole—about the puzzling nature of inadvertent territorial expansion, about the details of the theory explaining it, about the nature of the quantitative and qualitative evidence presented in it, or about its relevance to contemporary issues and concerns.

Learn more about Inadvertent Expansion at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

N. Katherine Hayles's "Bacteria to AI"

N. Katherine Hayles is distinguished research professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles and James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of literature at Duke University. She is the author of many books, most recently Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational.

Hayles applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Bacteria to AI, readers will encounter speculations about how future interactions with humans and machines will evolve. The main interlocutors on this page are biologist Lynn Margulis (and her son Dorion Sagan) and environmentalist James Lovelock. Margulis and Sagan write that “the future of our machines . . . is less bleak than that of ourselves,” whereas Lovelock envisions a utopian future when intelligent machines, having become “entirely free of human commands because they will have evolved from code written by themselves,” nevertheless will be eager to enlist humans in a grand effort to keep the Earth cool. These are two different versions of what I call “technosymbiosis,” the idea that the evolutionary trajectories of humans and intelligent machines will be from now on inextricably entangled with one another. I call Lovelock’s rosy prediction “wistful,” because it seems highly unlikely, given the anthropogenic global warming that we have already seen, that intelligent machines will suddenly decide they want humans as cooperative partners. It is far more likely, I say, that they will try to exterminate humans as soon as possible.

Turning from the risky game of prediction to what we already know, I point out that technosymbiosis, the symbiotic relationship between humans and intelligent machines, implies each is interdependent with the other. This means that human decisions are already penetrated at multiple levels with algorithmic calculations, that human agency, far from being “free,” is now entwined with AI in multiple arenas, and human practices are joined together with both nonhuman organisms and intelligent machines in what I call “cognitive assemblages,” collectivities through which information, interpretations, and meanings circulate. I end the page by alluding to the different forms of embodiment that participants in cognitive assemblages possess: enfleshed bodies for humans, nonhuman bodies with different cognitive capacities than humans, and sensors, actuators and computational media for intelligent machines.

The Page 99 Test works well for Bacteria to AI. It articulates one of the book’s major themes, the emergence of technosymbiosis; the chapter of which it is a part expands on these ideas, showing where technosymbiosis overlaps with previous theories as well as where it departs from them.

The book’s main purpose is to criticize the belief that humans are the dominant species on the planet because of our superior cognition. It draws connections between this belief and our present multiple environmental crises; regarding ourselves as superior, we humans conclude we are entitled to exploit earth’s resources for ourselves, regardless of the cost to the environment and our future prospects for survival. It draws on my previous work to distinguish sharply between cognition and consciousness, noting that conscious creatures are a tiny minority of living beings on earth; most organisms are nonconscious. This does not prevent them, however, from having cognitive capacities. Indeed, I argue that all living creatures possess some cognitive abilities, even plants and microorganisms such as bacteria. Re-imagining our cognition in relation both to nonhumans and to AI is thus an urgent necessity.

The alternative I offer is the Integrated Cognitive Framework, or ICF. ICF contextualizes different kinds of cognition according to the umwelten from which they arise. “Umwelt,” roughly translated as “world surround,” is German biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s term to describe the different worlds that species construct for themselves. No entity, including humans, can see reality “objectively”; each species builds its world through its specific cognitive, sensory and physical abilities, including the worlds that computational media construct through their affordances. Learning about and respecting the umwelten of other biological species and AI—our nonhuman symbionts-- will be crucially important to our human futures.

Learn more about Bacteria to AI at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Keith Richotte Jr.'s "The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told"

Keith Richotte Jr. is the Director of the Indigenous Peoples and Policy Program, Professor of Law at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona, and Chief Justice of the Spirit Lake Appellate Court; and he never thought he would ever have this many jobs at once.

Richotte applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told: Native America, the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Constitution, and reported the following:

From page 99:

As we have seen, the Supreme Court has been, shall we say, less than rigorous in identifying a specific constitutional source of federal authority over Native America. To that end, on a number of occasions the Supreme Court has simply asserted that the U.S. Constitution as a whole is the source of federal authority with little if any reference to specific provisions within the document. … It might be tempting to dismiss McLean’s opinion as an outlier, especially as it was not really in keeping with how we understand the law either then or now. But it is nonetheless helpful because it is evidence of a pattern: on a number of occasions the Supreme Court has asserted that the authority being claimed over Native America is authorized under the U.S. Constitution as a self-evident truism.

If I happened to overhear the Page 99 Test telling a friend about my book using its methodology, I would not be compelled to jump in and correct the Test. Rather, I would be amused at how quickly and simply the Test both cuts to the bone of the argument and hints at the relaxed, familiar, and even humorous way the book makes that argument.

What authority does the federal government hold over Native America? More importantly, how does it justify the authority that it claims? Does this justification comport with its claims over its citizenry more generally? What consequences do the answers to these questions hold for Native America?

These questions fuel The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told. The Page 99 Test reveals much of the heart of the book: the answers to these questions provided by the Supreme Court are not particularly satisfactory. By examining the justifications for federal authority through an Indigenous perspective, it becomes clear that the Supreme Court is trying to tell what amounts to a trickster story – but it is the worst one ever told.

Why is it the worst trickster story ever told and what can we do about it?

Please read the book to find out.

Learn more about The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brittany Friedman's "Carceral Apartheid"

Brittany Friedman is recognized as an innovative thinker on how people and institutions hide harmful truths. Her current work examines this in the realm of social control, and the underside of government such as prisons, courts, and treasuries. Friedman is considered a pathbreaking scholar producing big ideas that blow the whistle on bad behavior within society, and author of Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to Carceral Apartheid and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons takes us on the journey of the second Great Migration, where generations of Black families have fled white supremacist violence in the U.S. South, hoping to find refuge in California. Yet, upon arrival they continued to experience more racism, which in some cases radicalized the liberatory politics of West Coast Black communities. I write on page 99:

Black families who had fled the South were left feeling disillusioned. Their hopes and dreams for a better life elsewhere were revealed to be simply unattainable due to the same racialized violence they had endured for generations.

Particularly for the younger cohort, joining Black revolutionary struggles in California became a way to fight back against new versions of the same carceral apartheid that their families fled in the Southern states. During the time that I first met Anthony, I also began to connect with several members of Black political organizations who joined in the 1960s.

Through this network I met Avery, a high-ranking leader in the original Black Panther Party who explained to me in an interview this sentiment in the context of Oakland, California:

Oakland is probably very much the ideal place because Oakland had been an all White city up until the forties, 1940s, when, during the second Great Migration, Blacks came to Oakland, as they did to Chicago, whatever, from the south…So, Oakland went from being a white city to an almost half Black City, in like one generation. In the south, where you had the main part of the movement; where the majority of Black people had been living, the Whites were so violent and vicious…Now, why is that important?

Because, who joins the Black Panther Party are the people who are living in the North because they are already disconnected from the Klan, so they don’t have that fear; they don’t have that fear of the Klan. But, now they have a consciousness; who is going to let somebody…

Surprisingly, page 99 captures deeply a key takeaway from my book that explains why the Black Freedom Movement holds a significant place in California history. This page also showcases the power of life history interviews and how Carceral Apartheid weaves lived experiences with clear theorizing throughout the book’s storytelling, a writing style often found in creative non-fiction.

Overall, the test works for my book in so much that page 99 displays a key takeaway from Carceral Apartheid. The generation of the 1960s and 1970s that fought for liberation and organized major social movement groups against carceral apartheid were a unique generation in terms of many being the children of Black people fleeing the Ku Klux Klan dominated South, with the promise of a new life. When they instead encountered a similar pattern of alliances between emerging white supremacist groups and the police in California, both in society and within prisons, they fought back every step of the way.

So even though the Page 99 Test only captures a portion of my book’s main argument, it does reveal several of my book’s strengths. Notably, my use of original interviews with people who catalyzed organized resistance to the system of oppression that I term “carceral apartheid,” the system I trace as a violent through-line of colonial and postcolonial governance designed to decimate, destroy, and divide political opposition.

Visit Brittany Friedman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew C. Halteman's "Hungry Beautiful Animals"

Matthew C. Halteman is professor of philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics in the UK. He is the author of Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation and co-editor of Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments about the Ethics of Eating.

His new book, Hungry Beautiful Animals: The Joyful Case for Going Vegan, is a heartfelt, humane, and humorous exploration of how going vegan can bring abundance into our lives.

Halteman applied the “Page 99 Test” to Hungry Beautiful Animals and reported the following:

Page 99:

[Or parrying writer’s block] with a furious elliptical run to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin.’” Or bracing for a workday that might otherwise elicit one-finger salutes to all comers by lingering in a hug from a loved one. Ah, the calming effects of oxytocin!

Managing our inner ecologies can be mighty difficult too. Like when your heart blissfully ignores both your gut and your head as a toxic relationship sends you careening toward implosion. Or when a month of poorly managed work travel transports you predictably from Lonely Valley throughout Booze Gulch onto the floor of the dingiest room at the Motel Dicey Choices. Or when your gut wants a burger, your heart wants to nuzzle a cow, and your head bobbles about between defending old habits and exploring new ones as your friends look on befuddled.

To fully express our capabilities for well-being—to “flourish,” as Aristotle would say—we need relative harmony across the provinces of our territory. When we are unwell, chances are that two or more of the provinces are at war. If we want to bring peace among them, it pays to know each of them intimately—their points of strength, their weaknesses, their insecurities, which ones naturally collaborate well and which ones are temperamentally at odds. Perhaps most importantly, we must know who to approach first to start building the requisite alliances.

Here’s where the genius of Bryant’s advice to “start with the visceral” really comes home. It’s hard to imagine the beauty of a vegan world while your stomach churns at the thought of endless turnip porridge and your heart sinks into dread of the social death sentence sure to follow. Disgust and anxiety are imagination killers. If you want to open a window from our inner ecology into the beauty of a vegan world, go first and with gusto for [the gut, preferably with a superabundance of delicious food and comforting company.]

Page 99 of Hungry Beautiful Animals is as serendipitous a harbinger of what to expect from the book as I imagine any single page could be.

The first five lines offer an accurate sampling of authorial voice: we read a quippy and self-deprecating yet authoritative Gen-Xer wielding the edginess of a rude gesture and the camp of a Journey anthem to balance the glow of a sudden flood of love.

The book’s essence peers out from the first full paragraph: an opportunity to envision and enact transformational changes of our eating habits in ways that embrace and celebrate the complexity of human desire in its oft-conflicted physical, social, emotional, intellectual, and moral aspects. We see that we don’t need to judge ourselves for struggling to unify our “inner ecology”—that we can fail, learn from our foibles, even laugh about them, and then aspire to go again (always imperfectly) in the direction of the beautiful vegan world that has captured our imagination.

A window into the book’s method opens in the second paragraph: to draw on philosophical traditions, East and West, ancient and contemporary, to help us align our desires with our best interests. Achieving the flourishing lives and the gorgeous world we all desire is a matter of knowing ourselves intimately enough to meet all the inner parts of ourselves where they are and invite them into joy: to make peace outside, we must first make peace inside.

The final paragraph anchors page 99 like Bryant Terry’s inspiration to “start with the visceral, move to the cerebral, and end at the political” anchors Hungry Beautiful Animals. To get our inner families into accord, we must put feelings before facts and assure the gut and the heart that delicious food and abiding fellowship are possible in a vegan world. Then and only then can we pivot with joy to the headwork of figuring out our unique contributions to this world-transforming work and the politics of being the change we wish to see.

As a bonus, this deference to Bryant Terry’s work at the foot of the page previews the grounding energy of Black vegan work throughout the book, which draws inspiration from Terry’s Vegan Soul Kitchen, A. Breeze Harper’s Sistah Vegan, Aph Ko and Syl Ko’s Aphro-ism, and Christopher Carter’s The Spirit of Soul Food in those pivotal moments where everything is at stake.

Visit Matthew C. Halteman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Surekha Davies's "Humans: A Monstrous History"

Surekha Davies spent her childhood watching Star Trek and planning to become an astronaut. By the end of her freshman year there was no warp drive, never mind comfy starships. She became a historian of science instead, specializing in the histories of exploration, cartography, cross-cultural encounters, and monsters in the era from Columbus to Captain Cook.

Davies has a BA and an M.Phil. in history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. from the University of London. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters.

After working as a curator and as a history professor, Davies became a full-time author and speaker.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Humans: A Monstrous History, and reported the following:

Page 99 opens with Trevor Noah, the South African comedian. The title of his autobiography, Born a Crime, encapsulates an act of administrative erasure. During the apartheid era, mixed-race relationships were illegal in South Africa, and Noah, the child of such a relationship, spent his early childhood hidden at home. The legal regime of apartheid invented monsters of invisibility: people defined in law as nonpersons, a process that made them legally excludable from society. Defining people as illegal effectively defines them as monsters: as something beyond regular categories, a threat to be suppressed. Such laws show how ideas about race and nation can operate in the same way. They fix the idea of innate differences into a system of hierarchy that justifies an unequal distribution of rights and protections.

The page then outlines a pervasive myth: that before the twentieth century, people in different countries and continents were totally separate and distinct. Myths about medieval European nations (before the sixteenth century, before European colonialism across oceans) being white, Christian, and ethnically one-dimensional fuel white supremacist conspiracy theories today. At times, European Christians in the Middle Ages (between around the seventh and the fourteenth centuries) defined Jews, Muslims, and people from different parts of Europe as monstrous. Such monstrifying stories lie at the roots of today’s debates about nationhood and citizenship.

The page’s closing alludes to less demonizing ways of defining “nation”: as community relationships, not necessarily blood relationships. Native American nations define tribal belonging in ways that differ from nation to nation. Today’s notion of citizenship as a legal category that can be fulfilled in various ways contains something of that flexible way of understanding belonging. But as we reach the end of page 99 and turn over, we’re reminded that this is not how citizenship is typically experienced in practice.

Humans: A Monstrous History ranges from antiquity to the present and roams around the world. Page 99 offers a glimpse of this: apartheid-era South Africa, eleventh-century Europe, contemporary North America. It reveals the book’s core argument: that monster-making is a process of storytelling. People often invent monsters to disappear people who show that seemingly separate categories sit on a continuum.

But page 99 doesn’t reflect the book’s breadth: science, history, politics, pop culture. And it doesn’t reflect the overall feel of the book. The page suggests that the book makes grim reading, but other pages contain comedy and wonder. Humans ranges from light-hearted material like Monsters, Inc. to harrowing stories like that of Charles Byrne, the “Irish giant” whose skeleton was displayed after his death against his wishes, to manifesto-speak about Big Tech. Some sections are utopian, like discussions of the Muppets. Some explore historical events and people; others analyze novels and movies. The test doesn’t capture the full experience of the book although it reveals a key takeaway.

The book as a whole shows how people define humans, monsters, norms, and other beings in relation to one another. Humans is structured thematically in chapters that move from earth to outer space. People invent monsters in order to define three boundaries. One lies between the human and “other stuff” – animals, gods, machines, Martians. Another is the boundary between social groups: this is how societies define and police categories of race, nation, sex, and gender. The third is the boundary of “normal”: by defining monsters, people define norms. And in order to claim that there are discrete categories, people define anyone that doesn’t fit them as an exception, a threat to be suppressed or punished, or as a monster that breaks categories. To build a better future, we might remember instead that each one of us is unique: if we are each monstrous in the sense of being wondrous, then no one is a monster.

Page 99 appears as part of a longer excerpt and author interview in The Ink.

Visit Surekha Davies's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joshua K. Leon's "World Cities in History"

Joshua K. Leon is a writer, and Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Iona University. He was awarded the 2022-23 Robert David Lion Gardiner Fellow at New York Historical to research his next book, New York 1860.

His latest book, World Cities in History: Urban Networks From Ancient Mesopotamia to the Dutch Empire, has been called “the definitive worldwide analysis of pre-industrial cities.”

Leon applied the “Page 99 Test” to World Cities in History and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book, World Cities in History, can tell us a lot about the savage inequalities of a point in time: the early Roman Empire and the cities that linked it together. It does not do what the rest of the book does, which is broadly explain how power worked in historic urban networks, so-called golden ages when cities expanded in scope, size, and reach.

But the page is representative of the book. We learn that this was a high period for urbanization. The urban network linking the Roman Empire consisted of 1,800 cities housing perhaps ten million people. Still, they were a minority, dominating the imperial hinterlands that fed them with, for example, grain from Egypt. We learn that local democracy had deteriorated, with a few rich people controlling urban planning through direct financing (in the form of liturgies) rather than deliberation and taxes.

On this page, a new section starts that begins discussing how the Roman Empire reached this point through force, diplomacy and myth. Augustus reconstructed the state on the national narrative written by the poet Virgil. None of it was really true, but it spoke to Augustus's revolution in urban life that he framed as a restoration to times past, down to the city's mythological founding by Trojan refugees.

In the myth, women pay dearly for the construction of their new city-state. They are abducted from rival tribes and married off in order to populate the city—because in ancient times, population was power. They were pawns in Rome’s expansion, dealt like currency in city mergers that enlarged the state. Constant wars of course reflected the recent past of the Late Republic, until the newfound stability of Augustan rule.

That was the myth. The bottom of page 99 hints at the reality of Augustus the city builder. He does not come off well. He sought to Make Rome Great Again with very real legal codes intended to restore the supposed female chastity and piety from those simpler agrarian times. Clearly, he was legislating based on myth, rather than reality, yet the human consequences of Augustus's crusading to reshape the city would have been palpable. For the vital details, you'll have to turn to page 100.

Visit Joshua K. Leon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hiroshi Motomura's "Borders and Belonging"

Hiroshi Motomura is the Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law. He is the author of Immigration Outside the Law (2014), Americans in Waiting (2006), many influential articles on immigration and citizenship, and he is a co-author of the law school casebook, Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy. He has testified in Congress and served on the ABA Commission on Immigration. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Migration Review and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018.

Motomura applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Borders and Belonging is part of Chapter Six, which addresses a key question in immigration debates: what about people without lawful status? The focus is the United States, but the discussion offers lessons for analogous debates worldwide. Chapter 6 as a whole explains why the best approach is legalization – that is, offering lawful status based on some conditions. Page 99 digs into a specific problem with legalization – that one-time legalization will do nothing to prevent the emergence of a new population of people without lawful status. Page 99 explains that one way to anticipate and address this problem is to have some sort of periodic legalization, but then I turn to the limits of this approach.

A reader who looks at page 99 will get a good glimpse of the book, but just a glimpse. Let me first explain what makes the glimpse a good one. Page 99 shows that the book is about immigration policy, and that it grapples with one of the topic’s most contentious issues, legalization (or amnesty). Page 99 also shows that the book takes on some of the conventional wisdoms shared by legalization’s proponents. In particular, page 99 expresses skepticism about the potential of legalization as a durable solution. So page 99 is like many pages in all chapters in two ways. First, page 99 delves deeper than the usual arguments. Second, it emphasizes how responsible approaches to immigration require broadening the time horizon to include both a long-term view and mustering the patience to put farsightedness into practice.

Why, then, would readers get only a limited view of Borders and Belonging by reading page 99? I wrote the book because I’ve learned, over several decades in this field, that almost all writing and thinking about immigration policy is too narrow. People with views or research on immigration often don’t see refugees as their topic. Lawyers don’t consider the work of international development economists. Immigrants’ rights activists may dismiss the concerns of Americans who feel displaced by immigration and immigrants. Borders and Belonging adopts a much broader perspective that includes issues that are rarely addressed together and yet are interwoven in reality.

So chapter 6 is about people without lawful status, but chapter 1 asks a very different question: “why national borders, and why not?” Chapter 9 examines a topic often raised but less often examined: “what does it mean to address migration’s root causes”? Chapter 10 discusses the relevance of history to the making of immigration policy today. In short, page 99 may give the impression that the book is about people without lawful status, when in fact the book weaves that topic into a complex set of interlocking questions. The answers try to be faithful to the book’s subtitle. And so the book is: Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy.

Learn more about Borders and Belonging at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue