Nativism Is Alive and Thriving in America

Abstract

THE CALIFORNIA Journal of Politics & Policy Book Review Not Fit for Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America, Peter Schrag, University of California Press, Nativism Is Alive and Thriving in America Mark Paul* The New America Foundation In an era when cash-strapped publishers have cut back on marketing, Peter Schrag, author of this lively history of American nativism, has had a stroke of good luck. The state of Arizona has undertaken to do the marketing for him. www.bepress.com/cjpp Volume 2, Issue 1, 2010 Just as his book reached the store shelves, Arizona en- acted Senate Bill 1070, a law requiring police to check the immigration status of anyone “where reasonable suspicion exists” that the person is an illegal alien—but not use race or ethnicity as grounds for that suspicion (good luck with that). Immigration is back—maybe on the national agenda but certainly on cable TV and the blogs, and perhaps even on reading lists. For those who prefer light to heat on the immigration question, Not Fit for Our Society is the perfect place to start. Drawing on his decades of reporting and reading of primary sources and the latest scholarship, Schrag traces the strange career of American nativism and America’s en- during ambivalence about immigration from the Puritan saints to the Tea Partiers. He delivers a story rich in irony, *Mark Paul, senior scholar and deputy director of the California program at the New America Foundation, is co- author, with Joe Mathews, of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How It Can Be Fixed (University of California Press).