Nativist Nation Lucy E. Salyer (bio) Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2019. 432 pp. Images, Notes, and index. $32.00. Amanda Frost, You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers. Boston: Beacon Press, 2021. 248 pp. Images, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.95. Julia Rose Kraut, Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. 352 pp. Notes and index. $37.00. The 2016 presidential election brought Donald Trump and his shrill, anti-immigrant rhetoric to the White House, providing a bully pulpit and a megaphone for nativist forces that had been clamoring for more draconian policies. Trump unleashed vitriolic attacks on immigrants and foreign-born Americans of all statuses and nationalities but reserved special antipathy for Black and Brown immigrants. Trump promised to “take the shackles off” immigration agents and to “build the wall”—both physical and legal barriers—to stem what he called an “invasion” by “bad” people. Deeds followed words. Moving remarkably swiftly, Trump issued the controversial travel ban (a.k.a. “Muslim Ban”) within a week of his inauguration and adopted an aggressive deportation campaign to expel undocumented immigrants. Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy led to record-high detention rates and the separation of migrant children from their parents, some of whom have still not been reunited. By the time Trump left the White House in 2021, his administration had enacted an astounding 472 administrative changes “that dismantled and reconstructed many elements of the U.S. immigration system.”1 The 2016 election sparked diverse reactions: many onlookers were startled and appalled by the nastiness and the outright racism of Trump’s attacks while his supporters thronged to his message, as he dared say boldly and loudly what many conservatives felt. Erika Lee, in her new book America for Americans, expresses her own “constant astonishment and dark humor” as well as her “righteous anger and helplessness” in response to Trump’s campaign (p. 5). [End Page 368] Many critics believed that Trump’s anti-immigrant sentiment broke with the United States’ cherished image as a “nation of immigrants,” reviving outdated and disreputable views that had fallen out of favor decades ago. But as these three books—Lee’s America for Americans, Amanda Frost’s You Are Not American, and Julia Rose Kraut’s Threat of Dissent—reveal, Trump’s “Make America Safe Again” and “America First” slogans echoed a long line of cries throughout the nation’s history, demanding “America for Americans.”2 In sum, we’ve been here before. Lee, Frost, and Kraut all construct their studies around the same fundamental paradox: Is the United States a “nation of immigrants” or a nation against immigrants? On the one hand, Lee notes that the U.S. has received more than 80 million immigrants over the past 200 years and “historically led the world in resettling refugees.” It remains the “world’s largest immigrant-receiving country in the world.” Lawful permanent residents, observes Frost, benefit from liberal naturalization laws allowing them to become citizens 5 years after their arrival. Frost also remarks that the Constitution raises a broad umbrella over a diverse society, the First Amendment “protecting the rights of ethnic, religious, ideological, and racial minorities to live as they prefer.”3 On the other hand, the United States has continually defined itself in opposition to “foreigners,” employing a variety of methods to cull and separate those deemed a threat to “real Americans.” In one of the great opening lines of a book, Aristide Zollberg, in A Nation by Design (2006), observed that the United States has been “a nation of immigrants, to be sure, but not just any immigrants.”4 That observation, in itself, is not new. There is a rich literature on the history of anti-immigrant movements, with John Higham’s Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (1988) providing the classic account. Higham and other scholars tended to view nativist movements as episodic, arising in times of national crisis. Writing a new epilogue for the 2002 edition of his classic work, Higham conceded that...

A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered is a terrific anthology of thirteen essays, excavating the fertile history of immigration between 1924 and 1965. Sandwiched between the Quota Act of 1924 and the Immigration Act of 1965, the era has been typically dismissed as “an unremarkable interlude” in immigration history (p. 2). Joining other path-breaking studies, by the editors and especially by Mae Ngai in Impossible Subjects (Princeton, 2004), this volume reveals that a lot was happening in the world of immigration between 1924 and 1965 as “policies were far from fixed” and fiercely contested (p. 2).The anthology highlights several central themes threaded throughout its three parts: “Policy and Law,” “Labor,” and “Who is a Citizen? Who Belongs?” First, all of the essays attest to the persistence of immigration, despite the draconian 1924 Quota Act that dramatically curtailed immigration to the United States by setting annual numerical caps on admissions, banning practically all Asian immigrants and instituting national origins quotas that vastly limited immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. Barred from entrance, immigrants sought alternative routes, using Cuba and other neighboring countries as “stepping stones” to the United States, as Kathleen López argues, or, in the case of Chinese sailors escaping to the United States from British ships in World War II, by drawing on vibrant transnational immigrant networks, the topic of Heather Lee's fascinating study. While López and Lee highlight the “limits of law and policy” in restraining immigration, other authors point out that the 1924 Act never intended to ban all immigrants. But just who should be admitted and on what terms? Answering those questions divided policymakers as well as diverse organizations and individuals who sought to shape immigration policy from “below.” The policy choices made between 1924 and 1965 laid the groundwork for the Immigration Act of 1965, as the authors repeatedly reveal in a second major theme.The Immigration Act of 1965 ostensibly placed immigration on a more equal basis by substituting preference systems (family reunification and skills) for national origins as the basis for admission and rejecting discrimination based on race, sex, or nationality in the issuance of visas. The roots of the skilled employment preferences and the HB temporary work visas in the 1965 act are traced in essays by Ronald L. Mize, Eiichiro Azuma, and Monique Laney. They build on previous histories of the Bracero Program and “Project Paperclip” (the recruitment of German scientists at the end of World War II) to reveal the growth of the two-tiered immigration system, one that prioritized “knowledge” workers, deemed as essential to US national security and economic growth, while relegating unskilled immigrant workers to a temporary and insecure status. Important precursors for family reunification as a priority can be found in the Japanese war bride program, a policy which Arissa Oh argues “normalized” family reunification, “regardless of race” (p. 232). The 1965 act's incorporation of a permanent refugee system owed a lot to wrangling by religious organizations in the wake of World War II, notes Laura Madokoro. The rejection of race in the 1965 act as the organizing principle of US immigration policy also had deep roots in the previous era. Ruth Ellen Wassem notes significant political shifts as naturalization rates of immigrants soared between 1920 and 1950, while Lorrin Thomas analyzes the political awakening of Puerto Rican youth, stereotyped as foreign and dangerous despite their American citizenship, as illustrative of new constituencies that demanded an end to discriminatory policies.David FitzGerald and David Cook-Martin argue, however, that the anti-racist stance of the 1965 act grew out of global politics stemming from decolonization and the Cold War. Their analysis highlights a third theme of the volume: immigration and foreign policy are closely intertwined. The restrictionist regime prompted the United States to expand its power and enforcement mechanisms into other countries, as detailed by Elliott Young's analysis of “remote control,” and to enlist the cooperation of other countries to comply with American policies. But international developments also gave reformers new compelling arguments in prompting the United States to relax its draconian policies, especially during the Cold War when the United States’ racist immigration policies tarnished its reputation as a champion of liberal democracy.Still, the overarching and final theme of the anthology stresses the persistence of race and inequality in immigration law and in the shaping of identities. The long history of anti-Asian sentiment colored relations between Japanese American farmers and Japanese farmworkers entering the United States through a special Cold War guestworker program, Eiichiro Azuma contends, as Nisei worked to position themselves as “real” Americans. Arissa Oh stresses that Japanese war brides bridged the racial divide only insofar as they conformed to cultural stereotypes as docile and assimilating housewives. Ana Elizabeth Rosas highlights the tremendous emotional costs imposed on Mexican farmworkers and their loved ones in Mexico, separated by the Bracero Program that barred the entry of workers’ families. The racial dimensions of immigration between 1924 and 1965 demand further investigation, Violet Showers Johnson suggests, noting the paucity of scholarship on Black immigrants in the era. If more work remains to be done, the contributors to this volume have succeeded in the effort “to reclaim the period from 1924 to 1965 as a critical watershed in US history” (p. 4).

The Republican Congress in 1870 joined an international effort to redefine laws of citizenship, resulting in the Naturalization Act. While previous histories of the act focus on the domestic origins of the law, this article places the Naturalization Act in a global context, seeing it as a response to international and domestic disputes sparked by global migration. The success of US-backed treaties guaranteeing freedom of movement and the right to change one's citizenship (i.e., the right of expatriation) triggered new concern about the allegiances of immigrants and fueled Republican calls for greater federal control over the naturalization process. The bills that ultimately resulted in the Naturalization Act of 1870 sparked bitter debate as policymakers, diplomats, and foreign-born Americans negotiated the racial, ethnic, and political boundaries of American citizenship. Targeted by Republican naturalization reforms, European immigrants and their allies sherd legislators' attention to Chinese immigrants to reinforce the racial borders of citizenship and deflect Republican attacks on their own loyalty.

Since 1892, the United States has deported a whopping fifty million immigrants. The vast majority of deportations—95 percent—occurred after 1970, but Torrie Hester turns our attention to the early formation of U.S. deportation policy, arguing that the fundamental logic and practices developed between 1882 and 1924 created the deportation regime we live under today. Hester’s careful reconstruction of early policymaking, scrutinizing both landmark court cases and the often hidden work of administrative officials, yields a rich study. Deportation joins an expanding literature on gatekeeping as a fundamental aspect of the modern American state. Hester begins with the Chinese Exclusion Acts, and the well-known court cases that grew out of them, as establishing the fundamental doctrines that guided deportation policy for the future. The Supreme Court in Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893) upheld the sweeping power of Congress to expel any noncitizen it wished, by any means it thought proper, tying deportation to the absolute sovereign power of the state to police its jurisdictional borders and protect against national security threats. The court’s impassioned dissenters denounced the expulsion of resident immigrants as punitive and a flagrant denial of due process, arguments that failed to prevail but revealed fractures in the emerging deportation regime. Deportation expanded, but not without challenges.

“MOVING TARGETS: CHINESE MIGRANTS IN THE AMERICAS” - Elliott Young. Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era Through World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 384 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-1296-6. - Volume 15 Issue 2

Patrick Weil, The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pp. 296. $34.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8122-2212-8). - Volume 32 Issue 3

Book Review| March 01 2008 The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870-1965 The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870-1965 Martha Gardner Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005 271 pp., $37.95 (cloth) Lucy E. Salyer Lucy E. Salyer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2008) 5 (1): 116–118. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2007-063 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Lucy E. Salyer; The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870-1965. Labor 1 March 2008; 5 (1): 116–118. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2007-063 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Labor and Working-Class History Association2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

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Journal Article Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Series A: Subject Correspondence Files, Part I, Asian Immigration and Exclusion, 1906–1913. 30 reels with printed guide. 35mm microfilm. $3,145. (Bethesda, Md.: University Publications of America, 1992.) Get access Lucy E. Salyer Lucy E. Salyer University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 81, Issue 1, June 1994, Pages 361–362, https://doi.org/10.2307/2081159 Published: 01 June 1994