I first read this book last year when a friend was reading it with his team involved in local refugee ministry. I found it to be such a fascinating history of American immigration that I read it in only a few days. It tells the absorbing back story and political drama over laws that have regulated who can and cannot enter the USA. I just reread it for this review.
The author, Jia Lynn Yang, gives plenty of historical detail and documentation beginning with the enactment of the 1924 Immigration Act, which dramatically reduced the number of immigrants allowed into the USA. The book culminates with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 at a ceremony in front of the Statue of Liberty. The book’s title comes from his speech that day. “Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers. From a hundred different places or more, they have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide.” (263)
Yang is herself the daughter of immigrants from Taiwan and Shanghai and who were direct beneficiaries of the 1965 law, which prioritized specific categories of people and reasons for immigration into the U.S.: family unification, individuals with specialized skills, and refugees. The 1965 law effectively abolished the discriminatory, decades-long “national origins quota” system and replaced it with numeric limitations according to hemisphere and country.
The author provides rich and colorful details and quotations from the key politicians and other influential persons in this epic human and political drama between anti-immigration and pro-immigration forces over the course of four decades. Some of the antagonists came as a surprise. Charles Lindberg used his national hero status to influence America to stay out of WWII and to blame Jews as part of the problem instead of victims. In the 1920’s automaker Henry Ford “began a virulent anti-Jewish campaign,” blaming the nation’s problems at the time on an “international conspiracy of Jewish bankers” (22). It is interesting that much of the support for race-based immigration was based on the widely-held acceptance of the junk science of eugenics (38).
The 1924 Immigration Act strongly favored immigration from Northern Europe, people of predominantly white, protestant background, with strict ethnic quotas on Southern and Eastern Europe, including a controversial total exclusion of Asians. There is some evidence that this Asian exclusion policy was so offensive to the Japanese that it was one of the factors leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
But this law was catastrophic for European Jews, and Hitler’s Nazi Germany sought to eliminate all Jews from Europe. Before, during, and after WWII, European Jews were desperate to escape certain death in any country controlled by Hitler’s armies. Unfortunately, much of the world, including the USA, was closed to them. Yet many fought for them, including war presidents Roosevelt and Truman. After the war, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson all fought pitched battles to reform immigration and do away with the blatantly racist quota system.
I recommend this well-written book as essential for understanding an obscure slice of American history as well as current immigration issues and what it still means to be an immigrant pursuing a better life in America, the land of opportunity.
Yang concludes that the 1965 law brought about unexpected demographic changes that will eventually result in a non-White majority in the U.S. by 2045. But it also has resulted in over 60,000 immigrant churches in the U.S. It is hard not to see the “mighty and irresistible” hand of God at work growing his kingdom as a multicultural foretaste of heaven.