We Need To Talk : Immigration: Facts vs Fear

Contested Americans is a timely book, filled with vivid storytelling, that reveals the impossible choices and downright terror mixed-status families often face for their loved ones. Living in a mixed-status immigrant family might mean that your grandmother could be deported at any moment, your son could be arrested at work, or your mother's deportation hearing is postponed--again. Such uncertainty and fear are the reality of life for mixed-status families--those that include both undocumented immigrants and US citizens.

Immigration in American History is a concise examination of the experiences of immigrants from the founding of the British colonies through the present day. The most recent scholarship on immigration is integrated into an accessible narrative that embraces the multicultural nature of U.S. immigration history, keeping issues of race and power at the center of the book. Organized chronologically, this book highlights how the migration experience evolved over time and examines the interactions that occurred between different groups of migrants and the native-born. From the first interactions between the Native Americans and English colonizers at Jamestown, to the present-day debates over unauthorized immigration, the book helps students chart the evolution of American attitudes towards immigration and immigration policies and better contextualize present-day debates over immigration.

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, from the indefatigable congressman Emanuel Celler and senator Herbert Lehman to the bull-headed Nevada senator Pat McCarran, Jia Lynn Yang recounts how lawmakers, activists, and presidents from Truman through LBJ worked relentlessly to abolish the 1924 law through a World War, a refugee crisis after the Holocaust, and a McCarthyist fever, a coalition of lawmakers and activists descended from Jewish, Irish, and Japanese immigrants fought to establish a new principle of equality in the American immigration system with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which proved to be one of the most transformative laws in the country's history.

Scholarship on immigration to America is a coin with two sides: how did America change immigrants, and how did they change America? The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity explores how Americans think of themselves and how science, religion, period of migration, gender, education, politics, and occupational mobility shape both this image and American life. This handbook brings together thirty leading scholars in the field to examine a wide-range of topics, including pan-ethnicity, whiteness, intermarriage, bilingualism, religion, museum ethnic displays, naturalization, regional mobility, census categorization, immigration legislation and its reception, ethnicity-related crime and gang formation.