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Author: Orm Øverland
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 9780252025624
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Devised by individual ethnic leaders and spread through ethnic media, banquets, and rallies, these myths were a response to being marginalized by the dominant group and a way of laying claim to a legitimate home in America."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Deborah J. Schildkraut
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2010-11-15
Total Pages: 281
ISBN-13: 113949211X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book explores public opinion about being and becoming American, and its implications for contemporary immigration debates. It focuses on the causes and consequences of two aspects of American identity: how people define being American and whether people think of themselves primarily as American rather than as members of a panethnic or national origin group. Importantly, the book evaluates the claim – made by scholars and pundits alike – that all Americans should prioritize their American identity instead of an ethnic or national origin identity. It finds that national identity within American democracy can be a blessing or a curse. It can enhance participation, trust, and obligation. But it can be a curse when perceptions of deviation lead to threat and resentment. It can also be a curse for minorities who are attached to their American identity but also perceive discrimination.
Author: David M. Reimers
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 1998
Total Pages: 228
ISBN-13: 9780231109574
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Charting the history of US immigration policy from the Puritan colonists to World War II refugees, this text uncovers the arguments of the anti-immigration forces including: warnings against the consequences of overpopulation; and economic concerns that immigrants take jobs away from Americans.
Author: Ali Behdad
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2005-07-18
Total Pages: 233
ISBN-13: 0822387034
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In A Forgetful Nation, the renowned postcolonialism scholar Ali Behdad turns his attention to the United States. Offering a timely critique of immigration and nationalism, Behdad takes on an idea central to American national mythology: that the United States is “a nation of immigrants,” welcoming and generous to foreigners. He argues that Americans’ treatment of immigrants and foreigners has long fluctuated between hospitality and hostility, and that this deep-seated ambivalence is fundamental to the construction of national identity. Building on the insights of Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida, he develops a theory of the historical amnesia that enables the United States to disavow a past and present built on the exclusion of others. Behdad shows how political, cultural, and legal texts have articulated American anxiety about immigration from the Federalist period to the present day. He reads texts both well-known—J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—and lesser-known—such as the writings of nineteenth-century nativists and of public health officials at Ellis Island. In the process, he highlights what is obscured by narratives and texts celebrating the United States as an open-armed haven for everyone: the country’s violent beginnings, including its conquest of Native Americans, brutal exploitation of enslaved Africans, and colonialist annexation of French and Mexican territories; a recurring and fierce strand of nativism; the need for a docile labor force; and the harsh discipline meted out to immigrant “aliens” today, particularly along the Mexican border.
Author: Judy Dodge Cummings
Publisher: Inquire & Investigate
Published: 2019
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781619307636
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Cummings takes readers through the history of immigration in the United States through the perspective of immigrants, citizens, and policymakers. While examining the social challenges faced in the past, she includes critical-thinking activities and encourages readers to analyze the effects of open immigration, and of closing the borders to immigrants. -- adapted from back cover
Author: Tomás Roberto Jiménez
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 367
ISBN-13: 0520261410
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"Without a doubt, Tomas Jimenez has written the single most important contemporary academic study on Mexican American assimilation. Clear-headed, crisply written, and free of ideological bias, Replenished Ethnicity is an extraordinary breakthrough in our understanding of the largest immigrant group in the history of the United States. Bravo!"--Gregory Rodriguez, author of Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America "Tomas Jimenez's Replenished Ethnicity brilliantly navigates between the two opposing perils in the study of Mexican Americans--pessimistically overracializing them or optimistically overassimilating them. This much-needed and gracefully written book illuminates the on-the-ground situations of the later generations of this key American group, insightfully identifying and analyzing the unique factor operating in its case: more or less continuous immigration for more than a century. Jimenez's work provides a landmark for all future studies of Latin American incorporation into U.S. society."--Richard Alba, author of Remaking the American Mainstream "Tomas Jimenez's study adds a much-needed but long absent element to our understanding of how immigration contributes to the construction and reproduction of Mexican American ethnicity even as it continuously evolves. His work provides useful and needed detail that are absent even from the most reliable surveys."--Rodolfo de la Garza, Columbia University "In a masterful piece of social science, Tomas Jimenez debunks allegations about slow social and cultural assimilation of Mexican Americans through a richly textured ethnographic account of Mexican Americans' lived experiences in two communities with distinct immigration experiences. Population replenishment via immigration, he claims, maintains distinctiveness of established Mexican origin generations via infusion of cultural elixir-in varying doses over time and place. Ironically, it is the vast heterogeneity of Mexican Americans-generational depth, socioeconomic, national origin and legal-that both contributes to the population's ethnic uniqueness and yet defies singular theoretical frameworks. Jimenez's page-turner uses the Mexican American ethnic prism to re-interpret the U.S. ethnic tapestry and revise the canonical view of assimilation. Replenished Ethnicity sets a high bar for second generation scholarship about Mexican Americans."--Marta Tienda, The Office of Population Research at Princeton University
Author: Linda C. Noel
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Published: 2014-02-27
Total Pages: 262
ISBN-13: 0816598932
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the early 1900s, Teddy Roosevelt, New Mexico governors Miguel Antonio Otero and Octaviano Larrazolo, and Arizona legislator Carl Hayden—along with the voices of less well-known American women and men—promoted very different views on what being an American meant. Their writings and speeches contributed to definitions of American national identity during a tumultuous and dynamic era. At stake in these heated debates was the very meaning of what constituted an American, the political boundaries for the United States, and the legitimacy of cultural diversity in modern America. In Debating American Identity, Linda C. Noel examines several nation-defining events—the proposed statehood of Arizona and New Mexico, the creation of a temporary worker program during the First World War, immigration restriction in the 1920s, and the repatriation of immigrants in the early 1930s. Noel uncovers the differing ways in which Americans argued about how newcomers could fit within the nation-state, in terms of assimilation, pluralism, or marginalization, and the significance of class status, race, and culture in determining American identity. Noel shows not only how the definition of American was contested, but also how the economic and political power of people of Mexican descent, their desire to incorporate as Americans or not, and the demand for their territory or labor by other Americans played an important part in shaping decisions about statehood and national immigration policies. Debating American Identity skillfully shows how early twentieth century debates over statehood influenced later ones concerning immigration; in doing so, it resonates with current discussions, resulting in a well-timed look at twentieth century citizenship.
Author: Tamar Jacoby
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2009-04-28
Total Pages: 348
ISBN-13: 0786729732
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Nothing happening in America today will do more to affect our children's future than the wave of new immigrants flooding into the country, mostly from the developing world. Already, one in ten Americans is foreign-born, and if one counts their children, one-fifth of the population can be considered immigrants. Will these newcomers make it in the U.S? Or will today's realities -- from identity politics to cheap and easy international air travel -- mean that the age-old American tradition of absorption and assimilation no longer applies? Reinventing the Melting Pot is a conversation among two dozen of the thinkers who have looked longest and hardest at the issue of how immigrants assimilate: scholars, journalists, and fiction writers, on both the left and the right. The contributors consider virtually every aspect of the issue and conclude that, of course, assimilation can and must work again -- but for that to happen, we must find new ways to think and talk about it. Contributors to Reinventing the Melting Pot include Michael Barone, Stanley Crouch, Herbert Gans, Nathan Glazer, Michael Lind, Orlando Patterson, Gregory Rodriguez, and Stephan Thernstrom.
Author: Ronald H. Bayor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-06-01
Total Pages: 561
ISBN-13: 0190612886
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Scholarship on immigration to America is a coin with two sides: it asks both how America changed immigrants, and how they changed America. Were the immigrants uprooted from their ancestral homes, leaving everything behind, or were they transplanted, bringing many aspects of their culture with them? Although historians agree with the transplantation concept, the notion of the melting pot, which suggests a complete loss of the immigrant culture, persists in the public mind. The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity bridges this gap and offers a comprehensive and nuanced survey of American racial and ethnic development, assessing the current status of historical research and simultaneously setting the goals for future investigation. Early immigration historians focused on the European migration model, and the ethnic appeal of politicians such as Fiorello La Guardia and James Michael Curley in cities with strong ethno-political histories like New York and Boston. But the story of American ethnicity goes far beyond Ellis Island. Only after the 1965 Immigration Act and the increasing influx of non-Caucasian immigrants, scholars turned more fully to the study of African, Asian and Latino migrants to America. This Handbook brings together thirty eminent scholars to describe the themes, methodologies, and trends that characterize the history and current debates on American immigration. The Handbook's trenchant chapters provide compelling analyses of cutting-edge issues including identity, whiteness, borders and undocumented migration, immigration legislation, intermarriage, assimilation, bilingualism, new American religions, ethnicity-related crime, and pan-ethnic trends. They also explore the myth of "model minorities" and the contemporary resurgence of anti-immigrant feelings. A unique contribution to the field of immigration studies, this volume considers the full racial and ethnic unfolding of the United States in its historical context.
Author: Thomas Fleming
Publisher: Rockford Inst
Published: 1995-01-01
Total Pages: 232
ISBN-13: 9780961936471
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