Ithaca College

Assistant Professor Donathan Brown has co-authored a book with Syracuse University professor Armando Rodriguez, titled When Race and Policy Collide: Contemporary Immigration Debates (Praeger, 2014).

The book, examines how immigration policies belie conversations pertaining only to border control and instead include and influence domains like housing ordinances, official language laws, mass deportation, bilingual education and voter identification laws, amongst many other topics.

The focus of this book is public policy as opposed to mere headlines and "talking points," as it is policy and the debates they produce that inform the headlines we read and subsequently incite controversy and great debate. In order to clearly articulate how various political arguments and actions usurp fact with fiction, producing residual messages that equate "diversity" with destroying our social and political order, each chapter of the book addresses both the political and social/cultural dimensions therein.  

The book has received strong endorsement across disciplines including this comment from Kenneth J. Meier, Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University, "When Race and Policy Collide is a sweeping view of the current U.S. immigration debate that integrates contemporary work on identity, rhetoric, and public policy. It provides a sophisticated understanding of the current policy stalemates and the surrounding debates. Both well-researched and presented in an engaging way, the book is a must-read for all interested in the politics of immigration policy."