Jerry Kammer - Losing Control: How a Left-Right Coalition Blocked Immigration Reform and Provoked the Backlash That Elected Trump

If, like me, you consider the current anti-immigrant fever a toxic assault on fundamental American values, then you must read Jerry Kammer's Losing Control. No one in the immigration restriction camp makes its case as clearly as Kammer does, and he does so without any taint of racial or ethnic bias. This book may not change your mind, but it will certainly open it.

Daniel Okrent, former public editor of the New York Times; author of The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America

... a masterful history of illegal immigration from the early 20th century to the present. As a long-time observer of immigration politics, I suggest that this is simply the best analysis of illegal immigration to date bar none.

John Fonte, Senior Fellow, the Hudson Institute

[Losing Control] shows how, for decades, business interests have relentlessly undercut effective worksite enforcement of the immigration laws. Their hiring of cheap unauthorized labor has transformed workforces, widened inequality in our society, and provoked backlash among working-class Americans... [It] deserves a careful and open-minded hearing on the left and the right.

David A. Martin, Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia; General Counsel, Immigration and Naturalization Service, 199598; Principal Deputy General Counsel, Dept of Homeland Security, 20092010

... an important book for anyone who wants to understand how we reached our current state of paralysis and what it will take to repair the system with sustainable reform.

Jeffrey Davidson, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, 19982002; author of The Bear and the Porcupine: The U.S. and Mexico; career Foreign Service officer

Want more equality and inclusion in the United States? A better deal for working people and a stronger social safety net? Kammer revives the progressive case for immigration enforcement. An original and important contribution to an urgent national debate.

David Frum, author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy

Losing Control is an important book for our polarized country. Jerry Kammer explains why a liberal restrictionist immigration policy is in the national interest... [He shows] how foundations, employers, activists on the left and right, and editorial writers pushed for the expansionist policy that now prevails in the Democratic Party. He also provides a perceptive account of the evolution of the backlash that found its hero in the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

Philip Martin, professor emeritus, University of California, Davis; editor, Rural Migration News

With vivid writing based on meticulous research and on-the-ground reporting, Jerry Kammer does a wonderful job telling the story of how immigration policy was rigged to make a mockery of the original goal of deactivating the jobs magnet.

Gregory Bednarz, former Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Immigration and Naturalization Service

President Trump surfed into office on a populist wave of anger over Americas long-standing migration problems. Drawing on decades of experience in these turbulent waters, Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist Jerry Kammer documents ideological shifts by progressive paladins on the left and reactionary intransigence on the right.

B. Lindsay Lowell, Adjunct Research Professor, Institute for the Study of International Migration, Georgetown University

Eschewing the noise and confusion that have characterized Americas recent debate on immigration policy, Losing Control neither panders to political interest nor peddles easy solutions. Instead, it presents a thoughtful examination of how we arrived at this point and how we can move forward. For those seeking respite from the echo chamber, this book is a must read.

Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, CEO of Peschard-Sverdrup International (PSI) and non-resident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies

[A] gem of a book... Informative and insightful...This book is informative, accessible, and dispassionate and perfect for Americans who are tired of stories about our immigrant grandmothers and just want to make sense of our confused and confusing immigration policies... While offering a highly engaging and readable account, Kammer eschews the romance of immigration and focuses on the critical bureaucratic and political dynamics that seldom get explored or explained in a way that allows interested citizens to inform themselves. And he does so in an honest, straightforward manner that refuses to engage in the polemics and recrimination that now pervade our political and civic life.

Professor Peter Skerry, Boston College, in The American Interest

The book isnt another unreadable policy tome. Its a colorful, rich narrative, meant for people like me, who thought they understood immigration, but in truth dont understand anything about it at all. Losing Control explains the origins of the immigration mess were now in and its consequences for American society and American workers... Kammer identifies the cause of our current immigration problems: decades of congressional failure to enforce the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1986... Amnesty was given, and a strangest-of-bedfellows coalition of activists, ethnic groups, business interests, and civil libertarians conspired to hamstring a credible system of enforcement.. despite overwhelming public sentiment, expressed in polls year after year, for reasonable immigration limits.

Emily Benedek, in Tablet magazine

The basic narrative of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 is simple and well-known: Conservatives and liberals compromised, trading an illegal-immigrant amnesty for better enforcement going forward. The amnesty happened; the enforcement did not. The experience has haunted the Right ever since, making further compromises in the same vein incredibly difficult. Often lost, though, is the story of exactly how the law failed and why it wasnt fixed... Losing Control fills that gap. It explains decades worth of developments in the politics and policy of illegal immigration, from the funding of think tanks to the coverage of major newspapers to polls of the general public to votes in Congress. Over all this, the botched 1986 law casts a dark shadow.

Robert Verbruggen, in National Review

Author Jerry Kammer is an old-fashioned liberal and shoe-leather reporter who favors a lawful, regulated immigration system. He is not a fan of conservatism or of President Trump, but he is scrupulously fair and thorough in detailing the history of illegal immigration from the Truman Administration to the present day... Kammer writes that the words of American Federation of Labor founder Samuel Gompers in 1918 ring true today: Those who favor unrestricted immigration care nothing for the people. They are simply desirous of flooding the country with unskilled as well as skilled labor of other lands for the purpose of breaking down American standards.

John Fonte, Hudson Institute, in American Greatness

As a liberal immigration restrictionist, Kammer cares deeply about the adverse effects of mass immigration on American workers of all races and ethnic groups. And he reveals the insidious manner by which powerful special interests on both the left and the right collaborated to produce political paralysis on immigration, to the detriment of rank-and-file Americans and to their rising frustration, which Candidate Trump exploited adroitly to his advantage in the 2016 election cycle.

Leon Kolankiewicz, wildlife biologist and environmental scientist, in the newsletter of the Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform