History is dramatic—and the renowned, award-winning authors Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier demonstrate this in a compelling series aimed at young readers. Covering American history from the founding of Jamestown through present day, these volumes explore far beyond the dates and events of a historical chronicle to present a moving illumination of the ideas, opinions, attitudes and tribulations that led to the birth of this great nation. A Century of Immigration reviews the century of 1820 through 1920, in which there were two waves of immigration to the United States. This book discusses the varied motivations and nationalities of these new Americans, as well as the effects of mass immigration on the country as a whole, and the rise of antiforeign sentiments among more recent immigrants.

To effectively debate immigration policy we need to be better informed. This book helps by presenting a group of prominent scholars who use data to help unravel the facts. They address immigration’s fiscal impacts, immigrants’ generational assimilation, enhanced U.S. enforcement, and alternatives for those seeking refugee status. Together, they help move us from the personal to the analytical, providing us a rational appraisal of immigration and the policies currently before us.

The Jewish migration at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries was one of the dramatic events that changed the Jewish people in modern times. Millions of Jews sought to escape the distressful conditions of their lives in Eastern Europe and find a better future for themselves and their families overseas. The vast majority of the Jewish migrants went to the United States, and others, in smaller numbers, reached Argentina, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. From the beginning of the twentieth century until the First World War, about 35,000 Jews reached Palestine. Because of this difference in scale and because of the place the land of Israel possesses in Jewish thought, historians and social scientists have tended to apply different criteria to immigration, stressing the uniqueness of Jewish immigration to Palestine and the importance of the Zionist ideology as a central factor in that immigration. This book questions this assumption, and presents a more complex picture both of the causes of immigration to Palestine and of the mass of immigrants who reached the port of Jaffa in the years 1904–1914.

Although the United States is in the midst of the largest immigration experience in its history, there is little recognition of the effects that immigration policy has on parallel policies to achieve national economic and social objectives. In his new edition, Vernon Briggs, Jr., describes and analyzes current national policy on mass immigration in terms of the economic and social impact it has had on the nation's labor force. Drawing on both historical and contemporary material, Briggs shows how immigration policy in the twentieth century has shifted from being primarily a social policy to become a political policy and why it needs to become an economic policy as the nation prepares to enter the twenty-first century.

Over 20 million people left their homes in Europe. They came to America between 1892 and 1924. Most of them had no jobs waiting for them. They brought little money and few possessions. They knew that once they arrived, they would probably never again see their homeland or the people they left behind. What would make people leave everything? What would make them travel far across an ocean? What would make them start a new life in a strange country? Lena Martini and her family were among those immigrants. Their story represents what most immigrants encountered on their journey. Book jacket.

From 1870 to 1900, over a half million Russian Jews came to the United States. Russian Jewish emigration had ceased by the 1920s due to the effects of the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Quota Acts, but a century later, Jews from the former Soviet Union began to emigrate in large numbers. This detailed account describes the motivations of Russian and Soviet Jews for leaving their homeland and their subsequent adjustments to life in the United States. Simon, a sociologist, provides insight into who these Jewish immigrants were and are, what they accomplished, and how they have been viewed.