Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants

Join us for an evening with David Bacon, author of the new book Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. In Illegal People, Bacon explores the human side of globalization, exposing the many ways it uproots people in Latin America and Asia, driving them to migrate. At the same time, U.S. immigration policy makes the labor of those displaced people a crime in the United States. Through interviews and on-the-spot reporting from both impoverished communities abroad and American immigrant workplaces and neighborhoods, Bacon shows how the United States' trade and economic policies abroad, in seeking to create a favorable investment climate for large corporations, create conditions to displace communities and set migration into motion. In the U.S. and other developed countries, immigration raids and guest worker programs reinforce inequality, low wages and lack of rights for migrants.

David Bacon is an award-winning labor journalist, photographer, immigrant-rights activist and former labor organizer.

Sponsored by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, Oakland Institute, UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies and the Worker Immigrant Rights Coalition.