Even while staying busy with my own research, I try to read as much of other people’s work as I can. Keeping up with the news is important, but I think that reading deeply invested work by academic and policy experts will give you a less sensational and less emotional understanding of the immigration enforcement system than the news cycle alone. These reports and articles take months or even years to produce. They draw on data that most people never see. And they tend to ask better questions than the ones that dominate cable news.
The problem is that a lot of this work is hard to find. Unlike books or journal articles, reports don’t have a central repository. They circulate online, and if you happen to be in the right networks you see them, and if you’re not, you don’t. So my effort here is to highlight a few pieces that you might have missed, all of which have come out recently and all of which I think represent really important work.
What I’ve tried to do is go back over my notes and marginalia from each of these and pull out three key observations. Most of the pieces below are policy reports. One, by Geoff Boyce, is a peer-reviewed academic article. If any of these interest you, I hope you’ll click through and read the full thing. The links are in the titles.
Thanks to everyone named and unnamed in these reports for the massive aggregation of intellectual labor that went into even just these five pieces. And if you know of a report that has come out recently that you think more people should see, link to it in the comments or send it to me so I can share it.