American Immigration Policy Research Articles

Culturally responsive leadership: best practice in integrating immigrant students

Immigration to the US has fluctuated with economic conditions and with American immigration policies (Vernez and Abrahamse 1996). Historically, most immigrants settled in urban areas, while suburba...

(Extraordinary) Bodies of Knowledge: Recent Scholarship in American Disability History

general content and value of disability history, there are two especially useful essays. In the American Historical Review, Catherine Kudlick maps out intellectual and theoretical arguments in her essay, Why We Need Another 'Other.' A solid combination of theory and application, Doug Baynton's essay in The New History (2001), Disability as a Justification for Inequality, draws on three dominant themes in American history slavery, female suffrage, and immigration policy to reveal the many ways that disability intersects, underscores, and infiltrates our nation's past. In the process, he articulates a common experience for many who enter into this scholarly pursuit: Disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it. Teachers can mine the Encyclopedia of American History (2009) for readings that would give students a general overview of disability history. The encyclopedia interprets disability widely, presenting solid and innovative historical approaches to the meanings and lived experiences of disability in American history. Edited by Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky, The New (2001) showcases recent scholarship by leading scholars in the field. Most works focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and cover broad themes, such as labor, policy, agency, citizenship, and representation, while they also offer more focused analyses of disability groups, including blind and deaf communities, disabled veterans, and individuals with chronic illnesses.

Tales of Two Countries: Recent North American Immigration Policies and Experiences

Tales of Two Countries: Recent North American Immigration Policies and Experiences

Defining the Circle of We: American Identity and Immigration Policy

This article analyzes survey data that establishes a connection between how ordinary citizens conceive of American identity and their preferences for immigration policy. The distinction between ethnocultural and liberal images of America matters for public preferences about how many and what kind of immigrants should enter the United States.

“Travelling with Ballin”: The Impact of American Immigration Policies on Jewish Transmigration within Central Europe, 1880–1914

The restrictive immigration policies enacted in 1921 and 1924 by the United States Congress had strong roots in the period before World War I. This is not a new thesis. But this article transcends the confines of American history and looks at the impact of increasingly restrictive American immigration policies in central Europe since the early 1880s. It describes in detail how German state authorities and private steamship lines constructed an increasingly hermetic transit corridor through Germany, making sure that only persons who would not be rejected by the American immigration inspectors could enter. The well-organized and profitable transit migration system broke down in 1914. The repercussions of the closing American doors forced the Weimar Republic to take a less restrictive line towards foreign aliens than its imperial predecessor, as large numbers of migrants were stranded in permanent transit.

Guarding the gates: immigration and national security

National security has always been an integral consideration in immigration policy, never more so than in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. This is the first history of American immigration policy written in the post-9/11 environment to focus specifically on the role of national security considerations in determining that policy. As LeMay makes clear, this is not the first time America has worried about letting foreigners through our gates. By the time readers reach the final chapter, in which current policies regarding the interplay between immigration and national security are discussed, they have the historical perspective necessary to assess the pros and cons of what is happening today. They are able to more clearly answer questions such as: Does putting the Immigration and Naturalization Service under the Department of Homeland Security make the country more secure? Do vigilantes improve border security? How are we handling the balance between national security and civil liberties compared to the ways in which we handled it during World Wars I and II and the Cold War? LeMay does not advocate a specific policy; rather, he gives citizens and students the tools to make up their own minds about this enduringly controversial issue.

Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-1882 (review)

Reviewed by: Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–1882 Arnoldo De León Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848– 1882. By Najia Aarim-Heriot. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. 312. Foreword, acknowledgments, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 0252073517. $25.00, paper.) Until very recently, historians treated Chinese immigration to the United States as an experience distinct from that of European groups. Similarly, they attributed attitudes toward the Chinese as rooted in forces unique to the western United States, namely labor competition. Najia Aarim-Heriot takes such older understandings to task, exploring instead the links between racism toward African Americans and the Chinese, and noting similarities between Asian and European immigration. Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–1882, has many purposes. It seeks to integrate the Chinese experience into the scholarship of U.S. immigration; determine the causes behind efforts to ban immigration from China; rebut the standard interpretation that attributes Chinese exclusion to labor competition; place apprehensions about the Chinese presence in the West within the context of Reconstruction politics and other national currents; and to show proof that labor, politicians, the courts, and U.S. presidents all account for the anti-Chinese movement that culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. With such purposes in mind, Aarim-Heriot focuses on post–Civil War movements that deprived blacks of rights, finding a similar campaign unfolding against the Chinese living in the American West. Numerous debates occurred during Reconstruction, according to the author, regarding the place of African Americans and the Chinese within the American political and social milieu. Then, when Radical Republicans moved away from their commitment to insure African American rights, the lot of the Chinese suffered concurrently. Anti-Chinese attitudes nationally became increasingly hostile after Redemption occurred in the South during 1870s, Aarim-Heriot observes, and such attitudes culminated in the contentious debates of the era that produced the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The book is persuasive in its thesis that the Chinese became victims of "Negroization" and that American immigration policy toward the Chinese rested on racist ideology grounded in antiblack attitudes. It is equally convincing in arguing that it was a national movementand not solely the reaction of labor groups in the Westthat accounts for the virulent treatment of the Chinese in the West and the prohibition placed on their immigration to U.S. shores. It is obvious, furthermore, that the later immigration policies adopted by the United States toward European immigrants had their origins in the Chinese exclusion campaigns. Many of the earlier explanations regarding Chinese American history consequently lose credibility under the weight of Aarim-Heriot's research. So falters the understanding that Chinese immigration policy was disconnected from the one applied to Europeans. Arnoldo De León Angelo State University Copyright © 2007 The Texas State Historical Association

Immigration as industrial strategy in American meatpacking

This paper examines the connections linking recent changes in Latino migration, the American meatpacking industry, and American immigration policy. As the meatpacking industry has vertically integrated and shifted to rural non-union areas throughout the South, it has grown increasingly dependent on short-term low-skilled employees. This process can be understood as the industrialization of meatpacking, where profitability depends on continuous high-throughput production. To succeed, the industrialization of meatpacking requires a large pool of easily replaceable labor that has no control over the pace work on of the shop floor. At the same time, as immigrants have been drawn to these new company towns, American immigration policy has turned increasingly towards border enforcement. We argue that the presence of illegal immigrants within the factories reduces the bargaining power of shop workers and increases employer control. Most studies of immigration have focused on the supply of migrant labor, the immigrants attracted to higher paying jobs. We argue that valuable insight is gained by looking at the manufacturers' demand for cheap labor and the implementation of an industrial strategy that requires it.

The Ties that Bind: Transnational Migrant Networks at the Canadian-U.S. Borderland

Introduction Transnationalism ... is not simply a theoretical perspective, hut a nexus of social and material relationships which blur the centrality of borders (Hyndman and Walton-Roberts, 2000, 24) Perhaps no moment in history has been as critical for research on cross-border issues related to immigration. With more than 25 million displaced people in the world today, studies of the migration pathways, settlement patterns, national and ethnic identities, and transnational relationships of migrant flows have become salient topics for scholars in a variety of disciplines. This article examines these interrelated themes as expressed through a regional case study of two closely related groups of immigrants and refugees in the Pacific Northwest. (1) The border separating Canada and the United States is a porous site rich in transnational connectivity and relationships. The borderland is also a potentially valuable site for studying the ways these regular interconnections relate to the shifting terrain of ethnic, religious, and national identities of recent migrants from Russia and the former Soviet Union. Since the late 1980s there has been dramatic change in the homeland of Russians and Ukrainians who relocated to North America during and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Perhaps nowhere in the U.S. has the large-scale arrival of these two groups had a more dramatic impact than in the Pacific Northwest (see Figure 1). According to the 2000 census, Washington and Oregon ranked as the top two states in the country for arrivals of post-Soviet migrants born in Russian and Ukraine, with Portland, Seattle, and Washington's Puget Sound area having the largest and most concentrated populations in the region. (2) Unlike earlier migration flows into British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon from Russia and the Soviet Union that were dominated by Jewish, Orthodox, Old Believer, and Doukhobor groups, the majority of today's arrivals are largely believers in fundamentalist Protestant religions. Thus, these ethno-religious newcomers are defined as much by their religious beliefs as by their place of origin. Their experiences have also been affected by differences in the politics of place in the United States and Canada. In the U.S., for example, the government continues to classify incoming Protestant and Jewish migrants from Russia and Ukraine as refugees defined by the Geneva Convention as: (3) any person, who ... owing to their well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable to, or unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country, or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unwilling or unable, owing to such fear, to return to it. American immigration policies continue to define post-Soviet Russian and Ukrainian migrants as refugees due to a holdover from the Cold War per an agreement between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. Other Russian and Ukrainian migrants who have relocated to Canada were likewise classified as refugees, but only during the years during and immediately after the demise of the Soviet Union. Now most gain entrance to B.C. and other parts of Canada under the skilled worker category of immigrants. Some also enter Canada with entrepreneurial or business class status. (4) These post-Soviet non-refugee arrivals to B.C. primarily have settled in the Vancouver area, and are usually more educated and economically secure than those who enter the United States as refugees. In addition, close relatives of those who already live in B.C., Washington, and Oregon also may gain admission under the family reunification policies of both governments further expanding the total population of both groups in both Canada and the U. …

Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882. By Roger Daniels. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. Pp. xi, 328. $30.00, cloth; $15.00, paper.

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Defectives in the Land: Disability and American Immigration Policy, 1882-1924

Research Article| April 01 2005 Defectives in the Land: Disability and American Immigration Policy, 1882-1924 Douglas C. Baynton Douglas C. Baynton Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2005) 24 (3): 31–44. https://doi.org/10.2307/27501596 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Douglas C. Baynton; Defectives in the Land: Disability and American Immigration Policy, 1882-1924. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2005; 24 (3): 31–44. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/27501596 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2004 Immigration and Ethnic History Society2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Muslims in America

To date, most of the literature on Muslims in the United States has discussedthe formation and growth of this population from a national perspective.Few studies, however, examine the dynamics of specific Muslim communitiesfrom a local, city-specific context. Mbaye Lo attempts to fill this gapthrough his research on the history of Muslims in Cleveland, Ohio, in hisbook Muslims in America: Race, Politics, and Community Building. Thisbook aims to present a “comprehensive historical assessment of Muslimcommunities in Cleveland” by providing a detailed examination of “theirhistory, their faith and the challenges they face as they establish mosques,develop Islamic centers, and create a multiethnic community” (p. 2). Using various sources of data, such as oral histories of influential figures in theCleveland area and local and national surveys conducted on Muslims in theUnited States, Lo discovers that “the history of Islam in Cleveland is a localphenomenon with both national and global derivations” (p. 3).American immigration policies, the civil rights movement, and newinterpretations of Islam are some of the factors that affected the growth ofMuslim populations throughout the nation and in Cleveland. Lo traces thegenesis of the Muslim community to Ahmadi missionaries who arrived inthe city from India in the early 1900s. Shortly after their arrival, Ahmadisfound great success in inviting African Americans to convert to Islam, creatingthe foundation for what was to become a burgeoning Muslim community.In the latter half of the twentieth century, the arrival of immigrantMuslims and members of the Nation of Islam to Cleveland helped the communityexpand, while also introducing new versions of Islam to the city’sresident Muslims. Ironically, this influx of Muslim outsiders to Clevelandresulted in both the growth and the division of its Muslim population ...

Guarding the Golden Door: American immigration policy and immigrants since 1882

Guarding the Golden Door: American immigration policy and immigrants since 1882

Evaluating American Immigration Policy

Book Review| July 01 2004 Evaluating American Immigration Policy Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882, Roger Daniels.Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, Mae M. Ngai.Straddling the Border: Immigration Policy and the INS, Lisa Magaña. Dorothee Schneider Dorothee Schneider Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2004) 23 (4): 142–146. https://doi.org/10.2307/27501493 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Dorothee Schneider; Evaluating American Immigration Policy. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2004; 23 (4): 142–146. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/27501493 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2004 Immigration and Ethnic History Society2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Policies of inclusion: immigrants, disease, dependency, and American immigration policy at the dawn and dusk of the 20th century.

The racial politics of immigration have punctuated national discussions about immigration at different periods in US history, particularly when concerns about losing an American way of life or American population have coincided with concerns about infectious diseases. Nevertheless, the main theme running through American immigration policy is one of inclusion. The United States has historically been a nation reliant on immigrant labor and, accordingly, the most consequential public policies regarding immigration have responded to disease and its economic burdens by seeking to control the behavior of immigrants within our borders rather than excluding immigrants at our borders.

Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882

Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882

Prelude to the plague: public health and politics at America's Pacific gateway, 1899.

San Francisco played a crucial in the formulation of American immigration policy vis-à-vis Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period, it was often difficult to differentiate political struggles over the exclusion of Asians from other conflicts. This article examines one such arena: an acrimonious, well-documented argument in 1899 between Federal and various State and local authorities over the arrival of a Japanese passenger liner that may--or may not--have been carrying bubonic plague. Six months later, the plague unquestionably arrived, resulting in the well-known San Francisco plague epidemic of 1900 in which more that 110 people died. Reviewing the 1899 prelude, the public attitudes of the various health authorities, and the way the press reported health issues, collectively give some sense of that historical space where the regulation of public health, politics, and the immigration industry intersected and were fiercely contested.

Transatlantic Connections and the Sharp Edge of the Great Depression

IRISH transatlantic migration has inspired a number of impressive works in a variety of fields, from humanities to social sciences. Yet vast majority of these accounts end early in twentieth century, often immediately after World War I. Although some works mention sharp drop in traffic in late 1920S and early 1930s, most simply attribute this trend to changes in American immigration policy. According to Kerby Miller, one of foremost scholars of Irish transatlantic migration, Easter rising and Anglo-Irish war occurred just before well of Irish-American memories, duty, and guilt ran dry, as if seventy-year-old transatlantic diasporic links abruptly unraveled in years immediately following World War I. (1) Patrick J. Blessing, another major contributor to field, also sees 1920 as point at which the story of Irish in America had become story of Americans of Irish descent. (2) The reliance on immigration restriction legislation as a monocausal explanation of drop in Irish migration to United States stems from an underestimation of multifaceted and persistent nature of this transatlantic connection. Rooted in decades of postfamine movement, transatlantic migration network continued to involve not only those Irish-born crossing Atlantic themselves but also Irish at home and Americans of Irish descent in United States. The wide array of transatlantic links built up in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries functioned as far more than mere conduits of immigration. The network served as a two-way connection, with Irish-born labor moving predominantly westward while information and remittance money flowed in opposite direction. These connections remained central to lives of Irish men and women both at home and abroad and continued to function after Immigration Restriction Acts of 1920S. Even after stock market crash of 1929, thousands of Irish men and women continued to arrive in United States. Nonetheless, interwar period brought a momentous change in Irish migration history. The various and diverse bonds between Ireland and United States emerged relatively unscathed from restrictionist legislation of 1920S, only to unravel from ensuing social tensions of assimilation and economic strains of Great Depression. In sharp contrast to temporary ebbs and flows of late-nineteenth century, depression permanently disrupted westward flow of postfamine migrants. By time American economy began to recover, outflow from Ireland had been diverted eastward, setting pattern for almost a half-century. TRANSATLANTIC NETWORKS AND IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION Postfamine transatlantic migration was dominated by one-way westward movement in seventy years after mid-nineteenth-century famine, with departure of an estimated 3.7 million Irish-born men and women to United States between 1851 and 1921. (3) Despite improvements in Irish conditions in seventy years after famine, return rate for Irish transatlantic migrants was second lowest for all immigrant groups in United States between 1908 and 1923. (4) The westward flow of Irish men and women across Atlantic created a reciprocal eastward traffic in correspondence and remittances. Letters from Irish in America carried usually reliable information about current economic conditions back to Ireland, providing potential migrants with latest news and advice about employment prospects in United States. This responsiveness of transatlantic links became especially important during times of economic distress in United States, reacting with stop-and-go fluctuations in volume and even in direction during instabilities in early 1860s, middle 1870s, and late 1890s. (5) The counterflow of remittances and information from United States to Ireland played a vital role in lives of Irish at home and abroad. …

Unwelcome strangers: American identity and the turn against immigration

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Toward Exclusion: American Immigration Policy Before World War II2. The New Movement to Restrict Immigration3. Overpopulation, Immigration, the Environment, and the New Restrictionism4. A Broken Immigration System5. Old Wine in New Bottles: The Economics Debate6. Why Can't They Be Like Us? The Asimilationist Issue7. A New Immigration Policy, 1994-1997?ConclusionsNotesSome Special Reading ListsIndex

Bibliography

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