Immigration and America's Golden Door

Abstract

In Guarding the Golden Door, historian Roger Daniels begins with an emphatic call for historians to pay attention to immigration and immigration policy. The migration of foreign peoples to the United States has been one of the most significant transformative processes in American history. Foreign immigration was to the successful establishment of the American colonies, and Daniels notes that every president from George Washington to John Tyler understood that continued immigration was vital for the health of the nation (p. 6). Between 1860 and 1920, about one in seven Americans was foreign-born. In 1890 and again in 1910, 14.7 percent of the total population in the United States was foreign-born, a rate that has still not been surpassed. The American response to immigration, including the contemporary ambivalent, dualistic attitudes that Americans have developed toward immigrationcelebrating the nation's immigrant heritage while rejecting much of its immigrant present-has been an equally significant force in American history (p. 8). American nativisms, what Daniels broadly defines as general opposition to immigration or the amount of immigration, have inspired the passage of new laws, contributed to the development of the American state, and have affected foreign and domestic relations. Despite the continuity of immigration in American history and its subsequent effects on every sector of American life, Daniels charges that the space allotted to the topics of immigration and immigration policy is both cursory and spasmodic in most textbooks (p. 6). Guarding the Golden Door is an introductory survey of immigration policy and a masterful assessment of the state of the field by one of its founders. Daniels notes that he has been engaged in the writing of this book for nearly two decades (p. ix). And indeed, any scholar writing on immigration law has owed a debt to Daniels for quite some time for his path-breaking and prodigious research and writing in immigration generally and in Asian American history more specifically. His first book, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion