Defining America Through Immigration Policy

by Hing, Bill Ong; Romero, Anthony D.

• ISBN13: 9781592132331
• ISBN10: 1592132332
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-02-01
• Publisher: Temple Univ Pr

Summary

From the earliest days of nationhood, the United States has determined who might enter the country and who might be naturalized. In this sweeping review of US immigration policies, Bill Ong Hing points to the racial, ethnic, and social struggles over who should be welcomed into the community of citizens. He shows how shifting visions of America have shaped policies governing asylum, exclusion, amnesty, and border policing. Written for a broad audience, Defining America Through Immigration Policy sets the continuing debates about immigration in the context of what value we as a people have assigned to cultural pluralism in various eras.Hing examines the competing visions of America reflected in immigration debates over the last 225 years. For instance, he compares the rationales and regulations that limited immigration of southern and eastern Europeans to those that excluded Asians in the nineteenth century. He offers a detailed history of the policies and enforcement procedures put in place to limit migration from Mexico, and indicts current border control measures as immoral. He probes into little discussed issues such as the exclusion of gays and lesbians and the impact of political considerations on the availability of amnesty and asylum to various groups of migrants. Hing's spirited discussion and sophisticated analysis will appeal to readers in a wide spectrum of academic disciplines as well as those general readers interested in America's on-going attempts to make one of many. Author note: Bill Ong Hing is Professor of Law and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. His previous books include To Be an American: Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation and Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
Introduction	1	(10)
Part I: Defining America
The Western European New World and the New Americans	11	(17)
The Undesirable Asian	28	(23)
``Translate This'': The 1917 Literacy Law	51	(11)
The Xenophobic 1920s	62	(11)
Part II: Redefining America
The 1952 Act: Excluding Communists, Homosexuals, and Other Undesirables	73	(20)
1965 to 1990: from Discriminatory Quotas to Discriminatory Diversity Visas	93	(22)
Part III: Defining Mexicans as Non-Americans
Politicizing the Southwest Border	115	(19)
Patrolling the Border and Sweeping for Mexicans	134	(21)
Irca: Penalizing Employers, as Amnesty Barely Survives	155	(29)
The Dark Side of Modern-Day Enforcement: Operation Gatekeeper	184	(25)
Part IV: Deporting and Barring Non-Americans
Removal	209	(24)
The Politics of Asylum	233	(26)
Epilogue: Two Americas	259	(18)
Appendix	277	(8)
Notes	285	(32)
Index	317