Immigration is perhaps the most enduring and elemental leitmotif
of America. This book is the most powerful study to date of the
politics and policies it has inspired, from the founders' earliest
efforts to shape American identity to today's revealing struggles
over Third World immigration, noncitizen rights, and illegal
aliens. Weaving a robust new theoretical approach into a sweeping
history, Daniel Tichenor ties together previous studies'
idiosyncratic explanations for particular, pivotal twists and turns
of immigration policy. He tells the story of lively political
battles between immigration defenders and doubters over time and of
the transformative policy regimes they built.
Tichenor takes us from vibrant nineteenth-century politics that
propelled expansive European admissions and Chinese exclusion to
the draconian restrictions that had taken hold by the 1920s,
including racist quotas that later hampered the rescue of Jews from
the Holocaust. American global leadership and interest group
politics in the decades after World War II, he argues, led to a
surprising expansion of immigration opportunities. In the 1990s, a
surge of restrictionist fervor spurred the political mobilization
of recent immigrants. Richly documented, this pathbreaking work
shows that a small number of interlocking temporal processes, not
least changing institutional opportunities and constraints,
underlie the turning tides of immigration sentiments and policy
regimes. Complementing a dynamic narrative with a host of helpful
tables and timelines, Dividing Lines is the definitive treatment of
a phenomenon that has profoundly shaped the character of American
nationhood.
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