Undesirable Immigrants

Undesirable Immigrants PDF Author: Andrew S. Rosenberg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691238758
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
How the racist legacy of colonialism shapes global migration The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 officially ended the explicit prejudice in American immigration policy that began with the 1790 restriction on naturalization to free White persons of “good character.” By the 1980s, the rest of the Anglo-European world had followed suit, purging discriminatory language from their immigration laws and achieving what many believe to be a colorblind international system. Undesirable Immigrants challenges this notion, revealing how racial inequality persists in global migration despite the end of formally racist laws. In this eye-opening book, Andrew Rosenberg argues that while today’s leaders claim that their policies are objective and seek only to restrict obviously dangerous migrants, these policies are still correlated with race. He traces how colonialism and White supremacy catalyzed violence and sabotaged institutions around the world, and how this historical legacy has produced migrants that the former imperial powers and their allies now deem unfit to enter. Rosenberg shows how postcolonial states remain embedded in a Western culture that requires them to continuously perform their statehood, and how the closing and policing of international borders has become an important symbol of sovereignty, one that imposes harsher restrictions on non-White migrants. Drawing on a wealth of original quantitative evidence, Undesirable Immigrants demonstrates that we cannot address the challenges of international migration without coming to terms with the brutal history of colonialism.

Undesirable Immigrants

Undesirable Immigrants PDF Author: Andrew S. Rosenberg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691238758
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book

Book Description
How the racist legacy of colonialism shapes global migration The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 officially ended the explicit prejudice in American immigration policy that began with the 1790 restriction on naturalization to free White persons of “good character.” By the 1980s, the rest of the Anglo-European world had followed suit, purging discriminatory language from their immigration laws and achieving what many believe to be a colorblind international system. Undesirable Immigrants challenges this notion, revealing how racial inequality persists in global migration despite the end of formally racist laws. In this eye-opening book, Andrew Rosenberg argues that while today’s leaders claim that their policies are objective and seek only to restrict obviously dangerous migrants, these policies are still correlated with race. He traces how colonialism and White supremacy catalyzed violence and sabotaged institutions around the world, and how this historical legacy has produced migrants that the former imperial powers and their allies now deem unfit to enter. Rosenberg shows how postcolonial states remain embedded in a Western culture that requires them to continuously perform their statehood, and how the closing and policing of international borders has become an important symbol of sovereignty, one that imposes harsher restrictions on non-White migrants. Drawing on a wealth of original quantitative evidence, Undesirable Immigrants demonstrates that we cannot address the challenges of international migration without coming to terms with the brutal history of colonialism.

Unwanted

Unwanted PDF Author: Maddalena Marinari
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469652943
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, Italians and Eastern European Jews joined millions of migrants around the globe who left their countries to take advantage of the demand for unskilled labor in rapidly industrializing nations, including the United States. Many Americans of northern and western European ancestry regarded these newcomers as biologically and culturally inferior--unassimilable--and by 1924, the United States had instituted national origins quotas to curtail immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Weaving together political, social, and transnational history, Maddalena Marinari examines how, from 1882 to 1965, Italian and Jewish reformers profoundly influenced the country's immigration policy as they mobilized against the immigration laws that marked them as undesirable. Strategic alliances among restrictionist legislators in Congress, a climate of anti-immigrant hysteria, and a fickle executive branch often left these immigrants with few options except to negotiate and accept political compromises. As they tested the limits of citizenship and citizen activism, however, the actors at the heart of Marinari's story shaped the terms of debate around immigration in the United States in ways we still reckon with today.

Model Immigrants and Undesirable Aliens

Model Immigrants and Undesirable Aliens PDF Author: Christina Gerken
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816686351
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
During 1995 and 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law three bills that altered the rights and responsibilities of immigrants: the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, the Personal Responsibility Act, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Model Immigrants and Undesirable Aliens examines the changing debates around immigration that preceded and followed the passage of landmark legislation by the U.S. Congress in the mid-1990s, arguing that it represented a new, neoliberal way of thinking and talking about immigration. Christina Gerken explores the content and the social implications of the deliberations that surrounded the development and passage of immigration reform, analyzing a wide array of writings from congressional debates and committee reports to articles and human-interest stories in mainstream newspapers. The process, she shows, disguised its underlying racism by creating discursive strategies that shaped and upheld an image of “desirable” immigrants—those who could demonstrate “personal responsibility” and an ability to contribute to the U.S. economy. Gerken finds that politicians linked immigration to complex issues: poverty, welfare reform, so-called family values, measures designed to combat terrorism, and the spiraling costs of social welfare programs. Although immigrants were often at the center of congressional debates, politicians constructed an elaborate, abstract terminology that appeared to be unrelated to race or gender. Instead, politicians promoted neoliberal policies as the avenue to a postracist, postsexist world of opportunity for every rational consumer with an entrepreneurial spirit. Still, Gerken concludes that the passage of pathbreaking legislation was characterized by a useful tension between neoliberal assumptions and hidden anxieties about race, class, gender, and sexuality.

The Shadow of the Wall

The Shadow of the Wall PDF Author: Jeremy Slack
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816535590
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Thanks to hundreds of interviews with Mexican deportees, this book puts a real face on discussions of immigration and border policies--Provided by publisher.

Impossible Subjects

Impossible Subjects PDF Author: Mae M. Ngai
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400850231
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy—a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s—its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Strangers No More

Strangers No More PDF Author: Richard Alba
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400865905
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
An up-to-date and comparative look at immigration in Europe, the United States, and Canada Strangers No More is the first book to compare immigrant integration across key Western countries. Focusing on low-status newcomers and their children, it examines how they are making their way in four critical European countries—France, Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands—and, across the Atlantic, in the United States and Canada. This systematic, data-rich comparison reveals their progress and the barriers they face in an array of institutions—from labor markets and neighborhoods to educational and political systems—and considers the controversial questions of religion, race, identity, and intermarriage. Richard Alba and Nancy Foner shed new light on questions at the heart of concerns about immigration. They analyze why immigrant religion is a more significant divide in Western Europe than in the United States, where race is a more severe obstacle. They look at why, despite fears in Europe about the rise of immigrant ghettoes, residential segregation is much less of a problem for immigrant minorities there than in the United States. They explore why everywhere, growing economic inequality and the proliferation of precarious, low-wage jobs pose dilemmas for the second generation. They also evaluate perspectives often proposed to explain the success of immigrant integration in certain countries, including nationally specific models, the political economy, and the histories of Canada and the United States as settler societies. Strangers No More delves into issues of pivotal importance for the present and future of Western societies, where immigrants and their children form ever-larger shares of the population.

Defectives in the Land

Defectives in the Land PDF Author: Douglas C. Baynton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022636433X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
“Baynton argues that screening out disability emerged as the primary objective of U.S. immigration policy during the late 19th and early 20th century.” —Journal of Social History Immigration history has largely focused on the restriction of immigrants by race and ethnicity, overlooking disability as a crucial factor in the crafting of the image of the “undesirable immigrant.” Defectives in the Land, Douglas C. Baynton’s groundbreaking new look at immigration and disability, aims to change this. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Baynton explains, immigration restriction in the United States was primarily intended to keep people with disabilities—known as “defectives”—out of the country. The list of those included is long: the deaf, blind, epileptic, and mobility impaired; people with curved spines, hernias, flat or club feet, missing limbs, and short limbs; those unusually short or tall; people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities; intersexuals; men of “poor physique” and men diagnosed with “feminism.” Not only were disabled individuals excluded, but particular races and nationalities were also identified as undesirable based on their supposed susceptibility to mental, moral, and physical defects. In this transformative book, Baynton argues that early immigration laws were a cohesive whole—a decades-long effort to find an effective method of excluding people considered to be defective. This effort was one aspect of a national culture that was increasingly fixated on competition and efficiency, anxious about physical appearance and difference, and haunted by a fear of hereditary defect and the degeneration of the American race.

Amendment of Immigration Laws

Amendment of Immigration Laws PDF Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Immigration
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Emigration and immigration law
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description


Black Identities

Black Identities PDF Author: Mary C. WATERS
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674044944
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
The story of West Indian immigrants to the United States is generally considered to be a great success. Mary Waters, however, tells a very different story. She finds that the values that gain first-generation immigrants initial success--a willingness to work hard, a lack of attention to racism, a desire for education, an incentive to save--are undermined by the realities of life and race relations in the United States. Contrary to long-held beliefs, Waters finds, those who resist Americanization are most likely to succeed economically, especially in the second generation.

An Educational Test for Immigrants

An Educational Test for Immigrants PDF Author: Edwin Du Bois Shurter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 70

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Book Description