A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered

Maddalena Marinari, Madeline Hsu, Maria Cristina Garcia

"This anthology brings together leading scholars of migration, ethnicity, race, and labor in a broadly comparative reconsideration of how immigration policy became a site for reconfiguring international relations, realigning labor priorities, and reimagining the attributes of citizenship. The decades following the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act are usually viewed as a lull in the long history of immigration to the United States. Through a discriminatory system of national origins quotas, the immigration laws of the 1920s greatly reduced or barred altogether immigration from Asia, southern and eastern Europe, and other parts of the world in order to maintain the dominance of western and northern European stock. Four decades later, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act (also known as the Hart-Celler Act) was credited with reopening America's gates, enabling much greater...