Suchergebnisse

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.

The Lucky Ones uncovers the story of the Tape family in post-gold rush, racially explosive San Francisco. Mae Ngai paints a fascinating picture of how the role of immigration broker allowed patriarch Jeu Dip (Joseph Tape) to both protest and profit from discrimination, and of the Tapes as the first of a new social type-middle-class Chinese Americans. Tape family history illuminates American history. Seven-year-old Mamie attempts to integrate California schools, resulting in the landmark 1885 case Tape v. Hurley. The family's intimate involvement in the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair reveals how Chinese American brokers essentially invented Chinatown, and so Chinese culture, for American audiences. Finally, The Lucky Ones reveals aspects--timely, haunting, and hopeful--of the lasting legacy of the immigrant experience for all Americans. This expanded edition features a new preface and a selection of historical documents from the Chinese exclusion era that forms the backdrop to the Tape family's story.

The importation of more than 60,000 Chinese laborers to work in the Witwatersrand gold mines in South Africa between 1904 and 1910 remains an obscure episode in the history of Asian indentured labor in European colonies. Yet the experience of the coolies on the Rand reverberated throughout the Anglo-American world and had lasting consequences for global politics of race and labor. At one level, the Chinese laborers themselves resisted their conditions of work to such a degree that the program became untenable and was canceled after a few years. Not only did the South African project fail: Its failure signaled more broadly that at the turn of the twentieth century it had become increasingly difficult to impose upon Chinese workers the coercive and violent exploitation that had marked the global coolie trade in the era of slave emancipation. At another level, the Chinese labor program on the Rand provoked a political crisis in the Transvaal and in metropolitan Britain over the "Chinese Question"—that is, whether Chinese, indentured or free, should be altogether excluded from the settler colonies. Following the passage of laws limiting or excluding Chinese immigration to the United States (1882), Canada (1885), New Zealand (1881), and Australia (1901), Transvaal Colony and then the Union of South Africa, formed in 1910, likewise barred all Chinese from immigration—making Chinese and Asian exclusion, along with white rule, native dispossession, and racial segregation the defining features of the Anglo-American settlerism.

AbstractThe present immigration system is based on a core paradox. The method of allocating visas for the admission of permanent residents is based on principles of equality and fairness because all countries have the same quota. Yet visa demand varies widely. The principle of formal equality has disparate effects, being inclusionary for some and exclusionary for others. Four countries persistently max out on their caps—China, India, Mexico, and the Philippines—leading to long waits, easily ten to twenty years or more, and hence pressures for unlawful entry. The system generates an ever-larger caste-population of unauthorized immigrants.

In January 2008, at the meeting of the American Historical Association, I had coffee with two colleagues, Gary Gerstle and George Sánchez, with whom I share an abiding interest in labor and immigration history, as well as current politics. We hatched an idea to hold a conference on immigration policy reform, which we believed would potentially be back on Congress's agenda after the new administration—we did not know at the time who would be the next president—took office. Ours certainly would not be the first conference on immigration policy. But we wanted to bring two perspectives that are not commonly aired in policy debates today: the historical perspective and the international perspective. We decided to bring together historians, social scientists, advocates, policy analysts, and journalists for a gathering in Washington, D.C., where we hoped to get the attention of those on Capitol Hill. We were fortunate that the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies agreed to host and cosponsor the event and that we were able to work with historian Sonya Michel, the center's new director for United States studies. Additional cosponsors included Columbia University, the University of Southern California, and Vanderbilt University.

A set of politics that uses rhetoric, imagery, music, and performance to promote interests that are distinctively and explicitly identified with the working class, Burgmann productively suggests, might revitalize the labor movement. Yet the effort to apply lessons from "identity politics" to "class politics" reproduces two problems in contemporary radicalism. First, by reducing the movements of ethno-racial minorities, women, and gays and lesbians to "identity politics" Burgmann underestimates those movements' claims to civil rights, human rights, socioeconomic improvement, and their general democratic nature. Second, the use of "class" to explain the antiglobalization movement is anachronistic and inadequate to the task of understanding radical politics today.