Showing results for "Immigration" in Americas

The history of the United States has been shaped by immigration. Historians Carl J. Bon Tempo and Hasia R. Diner provide a sweeping historical narrative told through the lives and words of the quite ordinary people who did nothing less than make the nation.

THE CLASSIC NATIONAL BESTSELLER ""A wonderful, splendid book—a book that should be read by every American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country, its true history, and its hope for the future."" –Howard Fast Historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United...

“Ojito has done truth an invaluable service. Extraordinary.”—Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 2014 International Latino Awards Finalist A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist uncovers the true story of an immigrant's murder that turned a quaint village on the Long...

Who controls American immigration policy? The biggest immigration controversies of the last decade have all involved policies produced by the President - policies such as President Obama protecting Dreamers from deportation and President Trump banning immigrants from several majority-Muslim nations. While critics of these policies have been separated by a vast ideological chasm, their broadsides have embodied the same widely shared belief: that Congress, not the President, ought to dictate who may come to the United States and who will be forced to leave. This belief is a myth.

Today the United States considers immigration a federal matter. Yet, despite America's reputation as a "nation of immigrants," the Constitution is silent on the admission, exclusion, and expulsion of foreigners. Before the Civil War, the federal government played virtually no role in regulating immigration. Offering an original interpretation of nineteenth-century America, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic argues that the existence, abolition, and legacies of slavery were central to the emergence of a national immigration policy.

Dispatches from Arizona—the front line of a massive human migration—including the voices of migrants, Border Patrol, ranchers, activists, and others For the last decade, Margaret Regan has reported on the escalating chaos along the Arizona-Mexico border, ground zero for immigration since...

A longtime immigration activist explores what it means to be an undocumented American in this “impassioned and well-reported case for change” (New York Times). In this illuminating work, immigrant rights activist Aviva Chomsky shows how “illegality” and “undocumentedness” are...

The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe and outright banning those from nearly all of Asia. In a riveting narrative filled with a fascinating cast of characters, Jia Lynn Yang recounts how lawmakers, activists, and presidents from Truman through LBJ worked relentlessly to abolish the 1924 law.

With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of US immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants. At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out.

The Dispossessed tells the story of a twenty-four-year-old Salvadoran man, Arnovis, whose family's search for safety shows how the United States-in concert with other Western nations-has gutted asylum protections for the world's most vulnerable.

The Involuntary American demonstrates how even indi­viduals of humble circumstances were swept into the mael­strom of the First Global Age. It expands our understanding of immigration to the colonies, colonial servitude, the link­ages and tensions between Europe, Massachusetts Bay, and America's northeastern frontier, and of New England socie­ty in the early colonial period.

Winner of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize “Meticulous . . . Storytelling allows Minian to convey the physical and emotional toll of detention with potent specificity. The result is a book-length plea against...

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, two million Jewish immigrants poured into America, leaving places like Warsaw or the Russian shtetls to pass through Ellis Island and start over in the New World. Though some moved on to Philadelphia, Chicago, and other points west, many of these new citizens settled in New York City, especially in Manhattan's teeming tenements....

America’s top historians set the record straight on the most pernicious myths about our nation’s past The United States is in the grip of a crisis of bad history. Distortions of the past promoted in the conservative media have led large numbers of Americans to believe in fictions over...

“This powerful and meticulously argued book reveals that immigration crackdowns … [have] always been about saving and protecting the racist idea of a white America.” —Ibram X. Kendi, award-winning author of Four Hundred Souls and Stamped from the Beginning “A damning inquiry into the...

Award-winning author Lisandro Perez tells Cuba's story through the lens of a single family: his own. The House on G Street is a unique depiction of one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century, told through generations of ancestors whose lives were shaped by dramatic historical forces. Perez disentangles the complex history by following his family's thread, imbuing political events with personal meaning. Their story begins with emigration to Cuba and follows the waning years of the colony.

New York Public Library Best of 2022 A gripping, twisting account of a small town set on fire by hatred, xenophobia, and ecological disaster—a story that weaves together corporate malfeasance, a battle over shrinking natural resources, a turning point in the modern white supremacist movement...

A masterclass in the civil rights movement from one of the legendary activists who led it. Compiled from his original lecture notes, Julian Bond’s Time to Teach brings his invaluable teachings to a new generation of readers and provides a necessary toolkit for today’s activists in the era of...

Forever Prisoners offers the first broad history of immigrant detention in the United States. Elliott Young focuses on five stories, including Chinese detained off the coast of Washington in the late 1880s, an "insane" Russian-Brazilian Jew caught on a ship shuttling between New York and South America during World War I, Japanese Peruvians kidnapped and locked up in a Texas jail during World War II, a prison uprising by Mariel Cuban refugees in 1987, and a Salvadoran mother who grew up in the United States and has spent years incarcerated while fighting deportation.

Uncovers the key civil rights battle that immigrant children fought alongside the ACLU to ensure equal access to education within a xenophobic nation Journalist Jo Napolitano delves into the landmark case in which the School District of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was sued for refusing to admit...