Books about Undesirable from Amazon.com

Jeffrey Lesser's invaluable book tells the poignant and puzzling story of how earlier this century, in spite of the power of anti-Semitic politicians and intellectuals, Jews made their exodus to Brazil, "the land of the future." What motivated the Brazilian government, he asks, to create a secret ban on Jewish entry in 1937 just as Jews desperately sought refuge from Nazism? And why, just one year later, did more Jews enter Brazil legally than ever before? The answers lie in the Brazilian elite's radically contradictory images of Jews and the profound effect of these images on Brazilian national identity and immigration policy.
Lesser's work reveals the convoluted workings of Brazil's wartime immigration policy as well as the attempts of desperate refugees to twist the prejudices on which it was based to their advantage. His subtle analysis and telling anecdotes shed light on such pressing issues as race, ethnicity, nativism, and nationalism in postcolonial societies at a time when "ethnic cleansing" in Europe is once again driving increasing numbers of refugees from their homelands..
Price: $4.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Few colonizing powers can have relied so heavily and consistently on the wholesale deportation of their prison population as did England through two-and-a-half centuries of imperial expansion. By the time America made her Declaration of Independence in 1776, the prisons of England had disgorged some 50,000 of their inmates to the colonies, most of them destined to survive and, with their descendants, to populate the land of their exile. In a story largely untold until now--certainly never told as well--Coldham's groundbreaking study demonstrates once and for all that the recruitment of labor for the American colonies was achieved in large measure through the emptying of English jails, workhouses, brothels, and houses of correction. Supported by a massive array of documentary evidence and first-hand testimony, the book focuses on the emergence and use of transportation as a means of dealing with an unwanted population, dwelling at length on the processes involved, the men charged with the administration of the system of transportation or engaged in transportation as a business, then proceeding with a fascinating look at the transportees themselves, their lives and hapless careers, and their reception in the colonies. The whole unhappy saga of enforced transportation is here recounted with such force and eloquence that it is bound to set some popular notions about the peopling of the American colonies on their head..
Price: $35.97 [Notify me when price goes down.]