Download or read book Not A Nation of Immigrants written by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debunks the pervasive and self-congratulatory myth that our country is proudly founded by and for immigrants, and urges readers to embrace a more complex and honest history of the United States Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In this bold new book, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US’s history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple with today. She explains that the idea that we are living in a land of opportunity—founded and built by immigrants—was a convenient response by the ruling class and its brain trust to the 1960s demands for decolonialization, justice, reparations, and social equality. Moreover, Dunbar-Ortiz charges that this feel good—but inaccurate—story promotes a benign narrative of progress, obscuring that the country was founded in violence as a settler state, and imperialist since its inception. While some of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, others are descendants of white settlers who arrived as colonizers to displace those who were here since time immemorial, and still others are descendants of those who were kidnapped and forced here against their will. This paradigm shifting new book from the highly acclaimed author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States charges that we need to stop believing and perpetuating this simplistic and a historical idea and embrace the real (and often horrific) history of the United States.

Download or read book Black Identities written by Mary C. WATERS and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of West Indian immigrants to the United States is generally considered to be a great success. Mary Waters, however, tells a very different story. She finds that the values that gain first-generation immigrants initial success--a willingness to work hard, a lack of attention to racism, a desire for education, an incentive to save--are undermined by the realities of life and race relations in the United States. Contrary to long-held beliefs, Waters finds, those who resist Americanization are most likely to succeed economically, especially in the second generation.

Download or read book Island written by H. Mark Lai and published by San Francisco Study Center. This book was released on 1980 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Nation of Immigrants written by John F. Kennedy and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In this timeless book, President Kennedy shows how the United States has always been enriched by the steady flow of men, women, and families to our shores. It is a reminder that America’s best leaders have embraced, not feared, the diversity which makes America great.” —Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright Throughout his presidency, John F. Kennedy was passionate about the issue of immigration reform. He believed that America is a nation of people who value both tradition and the exploration of new frontiers, deserving the freedom to build better lives for themselves in their adopted homeland. This 60th anniversary edition of his posthumously published, timeless work—with a foreword by Jonathan Greenblatt, the National Director and CEO of the ADL, formerly known as the Anti-Defamation League, and an introduction from Congressman Joe Kennedy III—offers President Kennedy’s inspiring words and observations on the diversity of America’s origins and the influence of immigrants on the foundation of the United States. The debate on immigration persists. Complete with updated resources on current policy, this new edition of A Nation of Immigrants emphasizes the importance of the collective thought and contributions to the prominence and success of the country.

Download or read book My Underground American Dream written by Julissa Arce and published by Center Street. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A National Bestseller! What does an undocumented immigrant look like? What kind of family must she come from? How could she get into this country? What is the true price she must pay to remain in the United States? JULISSA ARCE knows firsthand that the most common, preconceived answers to those questions are sometimes far too simple-and often just plain wrong. On the surface, Arce's story reads like a how-to manual for achieving the American dream: growing up in an apartment on the outskirts of San Antonio, she worked tirelessly, achieved academic excellence, and landed a coveted job on Wall Street, complete with a six-figure salary. The level of professional and financial success that she achieved was the very definition of the American dream. But in this brave new memoir, Arce digs deep to reveal the physical, financial, and emotional costs of the stunning secret that she, like many other high-achieving, successful individuals in the United States, had been forced to keep not only from her bosses, but even from her closest friends. From the time she was brought to this country by her hardworking parents as a child, Arce-the scholarship winner, the honors college graduate, the young woman who climbed the ladder to become a vice president at Goldman Sachs-had secretly lived as an undocumented immigrant. In this surprising, at times heart-wrenching, but always inspirational personal story of struggle, grief, and ultimate redemption, Arce takes readers deep into the little-understood world of a generation of undocumented immigrants in the United States today- people who live next door, sit in your classrooms, work in the same office, and may very well be your boss. By opening up about the story of her successes, her heartbreaks, and her long-fought journey to emerge from the shadows and become an American citizen, Arce shows us the true cost of achieving the American dream-from the perspective of a woman who had to scale unseen and unimaginable walls to get there.

Download or read book One Quarter of the Nation written by Nancy Foner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-17 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth look at the many ways immigration has redefined modern America The impact of immigrants over the past half century has become so much a part of everyday life in the United States that we sometimes fail to see it. This deeply researched book by one of America’s leading immigration scholars tells the story of how immigrants are fundamentally changing this country. An astonishing number of immigrants and their children—nearly eighty-six million people—now live in the United States. Together, they have transformed the American experience in profound and far-reaching ways that go to the heart of the country’s identity and institutions. Unprecedented in scope, One Quarter of the Nation traces how immigration has reconfigured America’s racial order—and, importantly, how Americans perceive race—and played a pivotal role in reshaping electoral politics and party alignments. It discusses how immigrants have rejuvenated our urban centers as well as some far-flung rural communities, and examines how they have strengthened the economy, fueling the growth of old industries and spurring the formation of new ones. This wide-ranging book demonstrates how immigration has touched virtually every facet of American culture, from the music we dance to and the food we eat to the films we watch and books we read. One Quarter of the Nation opens a new chapter in our understanding of immigration. While many books look at how America changed immigrants, this one examines how they changed America. It reminds us that immigration has long been a part of American society, and shows how immigrants and their families continue to redefine who we are as a nation.

Download or read book Not Like Us written by Roger Daniels and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the thirty-five years after 1890, more than 20 million immigrants came to the United States—a greater number than in any comparable period, before or since. They were often greeted in hostile fashion, a reflection of American nativism that by the 1890s was already well developed. In this analytical narrative, Roger Daniels examines the condition of immigrants, Native Americans, and African Americans during a period of supposed progress for American minorities. He shows that they experienced as much repression as advance. Not Like Us opens by considering the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the hinge on which U.S. immigration policy turned and a symbol of the unfriendly climate toward minorities that would prevail for decades. Mr. Daniels continues the story through the 1890s, the so-called Progressive Era, the opportunities and conflicts arising out of World War I, and the “tribal twenties,” when nativism and xenophobia dominated American society. An epilogue points out gains and losses since the 1924 National Origins Act. Throughout Mr. Daniels’s focus is on legislation, judicial decisions, mob violence, and the responses of minority groups. The record is scarcely one of unalloyed progress.

Download or read book From Ellis Island to JFK written by Nancy Foner and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the history, the very personality, of New York City, few events loom larger than the wave of immigration at the turn of the last century. Today a similar influx of new immigrants is transforming the city again. Better than one in three New Yorkers is now an immigrant. From Ellis Island to JFK is the first in-depth study that compares these two huge social changes. A key contribution of this book is Nancy Foner’s reassessment of the myths that have grown up around the earlier Jewish and Italian immigration—and that deeply color how today’s Asian, Latin American, and Caribbean arrivals are seen. Topic by topic, she reveals the often surprising realities of both immigrations. For example: • Education: Most Jews, despite the myth, were not exceptional students at first, while many immigrant children today do remarkably well. • Jobs: Immigrants of both eras came with more skills than is popularly supposed. Some today come off the plane with advanced degrees and capital to start new businesses. • Neighborhoods: Ethnic enclaves are still with us but they’re no longer always slums—today’s new immigrants are reviving many neighborhoods and some are moving to middle-class suburbs. • Gender: For married women a century ago, immigration often, surprisingly, meant less opportunity to work outside the home. Today, it’s just the opposite. • Race: We see Jews and Italians as whites today, but to turn-of-the-century scholars they were members of different, alien races. Immigrants today appear more racially diverse—but some (particularly Asians) may be changing the boundaries of current racial categories. Drawing on a wealth of historical and contemporary research and written in a lively and entertaining style, the book opens a new chapter in the study of immigration—and the story of the nation’s gateway city.

Download or read book We re Here Because You Were There written by Ian Patel and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the origins of the hostile environment for immigrants in Britain? Chosen as a BBC History Magazine Book of the Year 2021 and shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2022 In the wedded stories of migration and the end of empire, Ian Sanjay Patel uncovers a forgotten history of post-war Britain. After the Second World War, what did it mean to be a citizen of the British empire and the post-war Commonwealth of Nations? Post-war migrants coming to Britain were soon renamed immigrants in laws that prevented their entry despite their British nationality. The experiences of migrants and the archival testimony of officials and politicians at home and abroad, retold here, define Britain’s role in the global age of decolonization.

Download or read book Behold America written by Sarah Churchwell and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Smithsonian Magazine Best History Book of 2018 The unknown history of two ideas crucial to the struggle over what America stands for In Behold, America, Sarah Churchwell offers a surprising account of twentieth-century Americans' fierce battle for the nation's soul. It follows the stories of two phrases--the "American dream" and "America First"--that once embodied opposing visions for America. Starting as a Republican motto before becoming a hugely influential isolationist slogan during World War I, America First was always closely linked with authoritarianism and white supremacy. The American dream, meanwhile, initially represented a broad vision of democratic and economic equality. Churchwell traces these notions through the 1920s boom, the Depression, and the rise of fascism at home and abroad, laying bare the persistent appeal of demagoguery in America and showing us how it was resisted. At a time when many ask what America's future holds, Behold, America is a revelatory, unvarnished portrait of where we have been.

Download or read book Trade in Strangers written by Marianne S. Wokeck and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American historians have long been fascinated by the "peopling" of North America in the seventeenth century. Who were the immigrants, and how and why did they make their way across the ocean? Most of the attention, however, has been devoted to British immigrants who came as free people or as indentured servants (primarily to New England and the Chesapeake) and to Africans who were forced to come as slaves. Trade in Strangers focuses on the eighteenth century, when new immigrants began to flood the colonies at an unprecedented rate. Most of these immigrants were German and Irish, and they were coming primarily to the middle colonies via an increasingly sophisticated form of transport. Wokeck shows how first the German system of immigration, and then the Irish system, evolved from earlier, haphazard forms into modern mass transoceanic migration. At the center of this development were merchants on both sides of the Atlantic who organized a business that enabled them to make profitable use of underutilized cargo space on ships bound from Europe to the British North American colonies. This trade offered German and Irish immigrants transatlantic passage on terms that allowed even people of little and modest means to pursue opportunities that beckoned in the New World. Trade in Strangers fills an important gap in our knowledge of America's immigration history. The eighteenth-century changes established a model for the better-known mass migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which drew wave after wave of Europeans to the New World in the hope of making a better life than the one they left behind—a story that is familiar to most modern Americans.

Download or read book Immigration as a Social Determinant of Health written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2019-01-28 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1965 the foreign-born population of the United States has swelled from 9.6 million or 5 percent of the population to 45 million or 14 percent in 2015. Today, about one-quarter of the U.S. population consists of immigrants or the children of immigrants. Given the sizable representation of immigrants in the U.S. population, their health is a major influence on the health of the population as a whole. On average, immigrants are healthier than native-born Americans. Yet, immigrants also are subject to the systematic marginalization and discrimination that often lead to the creation of health disparities. To explore the link between immigration and health disparities, the Roundtable on the Promotion of Health Equity held a workshop in Oakland, California, on November 28, 2017. This summary of that workshop highlights the presentations and discussions of the workshop.

Download or read book They Were Immigrants written by Samuel J. Davis and published by Bookbaby. This book was released on 2018-05-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoire of a Syrian immigrant at the beginning of 20th century in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

Download or read book The Making of a Dream written by Laura Wides-Muñoz and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A journalist chronicles the next chapter in civil rights—the story of a movement and a nation, witnessed through the poignant and inspiring experiences of five young undocumented activists who are transforming society’s attitudes toward one of the most contentious political matters roiling America today: immigration. They are called the DREAMers: young people who were brought, or sent, to the United States as children and who have lived for years in America without legal status. Growing up, they often worked hard in school, planned for college, only to learn they were, in the eyes of the United States government and many citizens, "illegal aliens." Determined to take fate into their own hands, a group of these young undocumented immigrants risked their safety to "come out" about their status—sparking a transformative movement, engineering a seismic shift in public opinion on immigration, and inspiring other social movements across the country. Their quest for permanent legal protection under the so-called "Dream Act," stalled. But in 2012, the Obama administration issued a landmark, new immigration policy: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which has since protected more than half a million young immigrants from deportation even as efforts to install more expansive protections remain elusive. The Making of a Dream begins at the turn of the millennium, with the first of a series of "Dream Act" proposals; follows the efforts of policy makers, activists, and undocumented immigrants themselves, and concludes with the 2016 presidential election and the first months of the Trump presidency. The immigrants’ coming of age stories intersect with the watershed political and economic events of the last two decades: 9/11, the recession, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama presidency, and the rebirth of the anti-immigrant right. In telling their story, Laura Wides-Muñoz forces us to rethink our definition of what it means to be American.

Download or read book Immigration and Immigrants written by Michael Fix and published by Urban Institute Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Dark Side written by Young Park and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2012-11-17 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of the United States is the history of people who migrated to America from all parts of the world. As a result American society is composed of many unique cultures and races. Unfortunately, the uniqueness of these cultures is one of the underlying causes of tension and conflict in America, resulting in racism, religious intolerance, and class warfare. In spite of this, the multi-racial nature of American society is an integral part of Americas strength as a nation. Thousands of immigrants from unique cultures who speak totally different languages came to find a better life in America. But they were never accepted by the dominate white Christians. The immigrants had to fight for the right to be in America. Racism, race riots, and genocide are integral parts of the lives of immigrants. The racial complexion of America is changing in the twenty-first century. In a short time the non-white population will be the majority. Social, economic, and political changes are already taking place. Unfortunately, the dominate power holders and white middle classes have not adjusted to these changes. The unique system of government and economics developed over the years has reached a point that many believe will end the American Empire. There is a certain bias in this presentation and criticism is aimed at the extreme beliefs and actions of a large segment of Americans, particularly white Christians. They have been the dominant political, social, and economic forces in the country. Any assessment of the American system becomes a criticism of that segment of Americans. Their beliefs and actions represent the Dark Side of America.

Download or read book Not Like Us written by Roger Daniels and published by American Ways. This book was released on 1997 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the thirty-five years after 1890, more than 20 million immigrants came to the United States--a greater number than in any comparable period, before or since. They were often greeted in hostile fashion, a reflection of American nativism that by the 1890s was already well developed. In this analytical narrative, Roger Daniels examines the condition of immigrants, Native Americans, and African Americans during a period of supposed progress for American minorities. He shows that they experienced as much repression as advance. Not Like Us opens by considering the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the hinge on which U.S. immigration policy turned and a symbol of the unfriendly climate toward minorities that would prevail for decades. Mr. Daniels continues the story through the 1890s, the so-called Progressive Era, the opportunities and conflicts arising out of World War I, and the "tribal twenties," when nativism and xenophobia dominated American society. An epilogue points out gains and losses since the 1924 National Origins Act. Throughout Mr. Daniels's focus is on legislation, judicial decisions, mob violence, and the responses of minority groups. The record is scarcely one of unalloyed progress.