SOC 320G: Race and Minority Relations

Americans have come from every corner of the globe, and they have been brought together by a variety of historical processes—conquest, colonialism, the slave trade, territorial acquisition, and voluntary immigration. A thoughtful look at immigration, anti-immigration sentiments, and the motivations and experiences of the migrants themselves, this book offers a compact but wide-ranging look at one of America's persistent hot-button issues.

A sweeping history of the legislative battle to reform American immigration laws that set the stage for the immigration debates roiling America today.

This book reflects trends in immigration to the United States through the turn of the twenty-first century. New chapters include a selection of letters from Irish immigrants fleeing the famine of the 1840s, writings from an immigrant who escaped the civil war in Liberia during the 1980s, and letters that crossed the U.S.-Mexico border during the late 1980s and early '90s. With each addition editor Thomas Dublin has kept to his original goals, which was to show the commonalities of the U.S. immigrant experience across lines of gender, nation of origin, race, and even time.

Aspiring immigrants to the United States make many separate border crossings in their quest to become Americans—in their home towns, ports of departure, U.S. border stations, and in American neighborhoods, courthouses, and schools. In a book of remarkable breadth, Dorothee Schneider covers both the immigrants' experience of their passage from an old society to a new one and American policymakers' debates over admission to the United States and citizenship.

How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican Americans—from 1924, when American law drastically reduced immigration into the United States, to 1965, when many quotas were abolished—to understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are constructed.

The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In America for Americans, Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era.

This is the untold history of the United States Border Patrol from its beginnings in 1924 as a small peripheral outfit to its emergence as a large professional police force that continuously draws intense scrutiny and denunciations from political activism groups....Migra! reveals how the U.S. Border Patrol translated the mandate for comprehensive migration control into a project of policing immigrants and undocumented "aliens" in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Ethnic associations were once vibrant features of societies, such as the United States and Canada, which attracted large numbers of immigrants. While the transplanted cultural lives of the Irish, Scots and continental Europeans have received much attention, the English are far less widely explored. It is assumed the English were not an ethnic community, that they lacked the alienating experiences associated with immigration and thus possessed few elements of diasporas. This deeply researched new book questions this assumption.

In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest-growing group in the United States. But much of their long history has been forgotten. The Making of Asian America shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life.

Borderlands migration has been the subject of considerable study, but the authorship has usually reflected a north-of-the-border perspective only. Gathering a transnational group of prominent researchers, including leading Mexican scholars whose work is not readily available in the United States and academics from US universities, this book brings together an array of often-overlooked viewpoints, reflecting the interconnectedness of immigration policy.

In the past two decades, changes in the Mexican government's policies toward the 30 million Mexican migrants living in the US highlight the importance of the Mexican diaspora in both countries given its size, its economic power and its growing political participation across borders. This work examines how the Mexican government's assessment of the possibilities and consequences of implementing certain emigration policies from 1848 to 2010 has been tied to changes in the bilateral relationship, which remains a key factor in Mexico's current development of strategies and policies in relation to migrants in the United States.

This books looks at issues of settlement and adjustment of Nigerians in the United States. The literature is scanty about this group of immigrants and little is known about their motivations for moving to the United States and the issues that they face. The book therefore seeks to contribute to the immigration literature and knowledge base as well as document the African narrative showing the flight of Nigerians to the United States.

In five meticulously researched essays, Yasuo Sakata examines Japanese migration to the United States from an international and deeply historical perspective. Sakata argues the importance of using resources from both sides of the Pacific and taking a holistic view that incorporates US-Japanese diplomatic relationships, the mass media, the American view of Asian populations, and Japan's self-image as a modern, westernized nation.

This book draws on private letters, songs, and oral testimony to recreate the experience of circular migration, which reshaped communities in the United States and Mexico. While migrants could earn for themselves and their families in the U.S., they needed to return to Mexico to reconnect with their homes periodically. Despite crossing the border many times, they managed to belong to communities on both sides of it. Ironically, the U.S. immigration crackdown of the mid-1980s disrupted these flows, forcing many migrants to remain north of the border permanently for fear of not being able to return to work. Undocumented Lives tells the story of Mexicans who have been used and abused by the broader economic and political policies of Mexico and the United States.

Most Americans are unaware that the United States is a major terminus for the people of Tonga, an island nation in the South Pacific. Small examines Tongan migration to the United States in a transnational perspective, stressing that many of the new migrant populations seem to successfully manage dual lives, in both the old country and the new. To that end, she describes life in contemporary Tongan communities and in U.S. settings.