ACS Ph.D Christina Gerken (2007) is the author of Model Immigrants and Undesirable Aliens: The Cost of Immigration Reform in the 1990s, just released by the University of Minnesota Press.
The book examines the changing debates around immigration that surrounded the passage of landmark legislation by Congress in the mid-1990s, arguing that it represented a new neoliberal way of thinking and talking about immigration. Gerken concludes that the passage of pathbreaking legislation was characterized by a useful tension between neoliberal assumptions and hidden anxieties about race, class, gender, and sexuality.