A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America

A Nation By Design is a must read for anyone wants to understand immigration, past and present. I read this before visiting Ellis Island and it added immensely to my trip.

Excellent!

Zolberg's comprehensive history of immigration policy was a new addition to the syllabus in my graduate migration seminar. I think the class as a whole found it useful, if a bit overwhelming. In the humanities and the social sciences there is a lot of talk about "socially constructed" race categories, ethnic political interests, national identities, etc. All of this work contends there is nothing inherently "inside" of people that makes them distinct, but rather it's the way that debates play out in the political arena that groups and separates people. Of course much of the "social constructivism" literature forgets to analyze the construction. That's where Zolberg comes in. "A Nation by Design" is useful because it is a 500 page account of how policy makers in the United States constructed an immigration policy, and along the way, cemented many ideas of race, ethnicity, and American identity.My only quibbles: there are graphs and charts in the back but they are never referenced in the text; the book is full of names of obscure intellectuals and bureaucrats and it gets confusing; Zolberg often buries important theoretical claims in the middle of sub-sections.Maybe it's not a good beach read, but definitely worth having on your shelf.

From colonial times to the present, the compromises that emerged over American immigration policy created a state of limbo for groups who were, as Aristide Zolberg puts it in this wide-ranging and erudite book, "wanted but not welcome." In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Asian immigration and naturalization were restricted, but southern and eastern Europeans were allowed in at record levels. In the early 1920s, the nativist camp eventually prevailed over business interests as strict national-origins quotas were imposed, severely limiting immigration for the next four decades.The historical rhetoric resembles today's. Zolberg quotes inventor Samuel Morse invoking the imagery of an invading army of immigrants when he penned a series of articles and books blaming immigration for undermining the American character.Debates in the 1950s invoked the "invasion" image that would lay the groundwork for today's tiered-entry system with front, side, and back doors. After World War II, Americans became uncomfortable with race-based immigration. Discontent had been rising over the controversial bracero guest-worker program, begun in 1942 to ease a wartime shortage of farmworkers. Amid discussions of easing immigration policy in the 1950s, Nevada's U.S. Sen. Pat McCarran and Pennsylvania's U.S. Rep. Francis E. "Tad" Walter, both Democrats, commissioned a review that concluded that it was impossible to seal the border. Their response was a back-door solution: an expanded guest-worker program, but with a ban on allowing guests to become permanent residents. "Albeit well-nigh useless with regard to border control, the system was highly effective as a deterrent to the incorporation of Mexicans, in particular, by way of naturalization," Zolberg writes, pinpointing an issue at the heart of today's immigration conundrum."Borders are necessary to establish and preserve distinctive communities, notably self-governing democracies," Zolberg writes. In addition, given economic disparities among nations, open borders would attract a flood of immigration from poorer to more affluent nations. Yet he also views nativist attacks on immigrants as a far bigger threat to democracy than migration itself. He advocates neither allowing unlimited immigration nor a moratorium on immigration. He argues for giving admissions priority to those in most need--unskilled workers and those fleeing violence. Zolberg contends that to eliminate unauthorized immigration would require creating a police state. Instead, he sensibly advocates improved border security, combined with protection of the rights of minority groups upon whom the populist right has unleashed its wrath.--Michele WuckerAuthor of Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right (PublicAffairs Press, 2006; paperback August 2007)