This is a study of the politics and policies immigration has inspired, from the earliest efforts to shape American identity to today's revealing struggles over Third World immigration, noncitizen rights and undocumented aliens. Weaving a theoretical approach into a sweeping history, David Tichenor ties together previous studies' idiosyncratic explanations for particular, pivotal twists and turns of immigration policy. He tells the story of political battles between immigration defenders and doubters over time and of the transformative policy regimes they built. Tichenor takes the reader from 19th 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 decades that followed World War II, he argues, led to a surprizing expansion of immigration opportunites. In the 1990s, a surge of restrictionist fervour spurred the political mobilization of recent immigrants.
This work shows that a small number of interlocking temporal processes, not least changing insti