A Nation of Strangers: Prejudice, Politics, and the Populating of America - Hardcover

Cose, Ellis

9780688093372: A Nation of Strangers: Prejudice, Politics, and the Populating of America

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 068809337X ISBN 13: 9780688093372

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1992

Analyzes the complicated political and social forces that have shaped U.S. immigration policies and examines how the American melting pot philosophy coexists with tendencies toward xenophobia, prejudice, and paranoia. 25,000 first printing. $22,500 ad/promo.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

Melting pot or salad? Whichever metaphor one prefers for American society, Cose (The Press, 1989) shows in this sobering, well-researched account that racial prejudice, fear, and xenophobia have been constants in America's more than 200 years of receiving immigrants from foreign lands. Cose points out that racism, though incompatible with the promise of the Declaration of Independence, lay explicitly at the core of America's immigration policy from its inception. The first US naturalization law (1790) reserved citizenship for those ``aliens being free white persons.'' Naturalization statues continued to express preferences for European immigrants until the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952, and necessitated formal adjudications of racial identity. Already settled Americans, Cose says, came to regard many European immigrants, who came in hordes from Ireland, Germany, and Italy during the 19th century, as inferior breeds that could not be easily assimilated and that threatened American society. Cose describes in detail the paranoid and often violent reactions through the years to waves of Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, and Latin American immigration, and shows that the unease many Americans feel today with our nation's increasingly multicultural society is nothing new. Nonetheless, after devoting nearly half his account to tracing the tortuous legislative histories of Congress's bewildered responses to the massive Asian, Haitian, and Latin American immigrations of recent years--LBJ's immigration bill, Simpson-Mazzoli, and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986--Cose concludes that ``America is in the process of assembling an array of ethnicities and races unlike anything previously assembled.'' He argues that racial animosity, while not displayed as nakedly today as in earlier periods, is a pervasive part of American life, and pleads ``for confronting America's racial sickness with candor, determination, and intelligence.'' A first-rate history. -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal:

More than ever, America is a nation of immigrants. Beginning with Western Europeans and Africans in the 17th and 18th centuries, the nation has been flooded with Asians, Eastern Europeans, and Hispanics in mind-boggling numbers. At the moment, Asians clearly dominate immigration statistically, but, as New York Daily News editor Cose proposes, immigration has always been a political as well as social phenomena. In an engrossing book, Cose provides the setting for how politics shapes immigration policy. The impact of immigration leaves many impressions, none of which is more telling than the comments of San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros, who concludes taxpayers not only oppose paying for schools after their children have finished but also oppose paying for educating people who do not even look the same. This thoughtful treatise on American immigration is recommended for all libraries.
-Boyd Childress, Auburn Univ. Lib., Ala.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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