Mae M. Ngai takes an in-depth look at the recent changes in immigration history, another field that has benefited from the transnational turn, which has pushed scholarship beyond the traditional study of white Europeans and placed new emphasis on ethnicity, worldwide patterns of migration, diaspora, and hybridity.

"What is the state of the field of immigration and ethnic history; what have scholars learned about previous immigration waves; and where is the field heading? These are the main questions as historians, linguists, sociologists, and political scientists in this book look at past and contemporary immigration and ethnicity"--Provided by publisher.

With a timely new chapter on immigration in the current age of globalization, a new Preface, and new appendixes with the most recent statistics, this revised edition is an engrossing study of immigration to the United States from the colonial era to the present.

With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of U.S. immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants. At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out. Erika Lee explores how Chinese exclusion laws not only transformed Chinese American lives, immigration patterns, identities, and families but also recast the United States into a "gatekeeping nation." Immigrant identification, border enforcement, surveillance, and deportation policies were extended far beyond any controls that had existed in the United States before. Drawing on a rich trove of historical sources--including recently released immigration records, oral histories, interviews, and letters--Lee brings alive the forgotten journeys, secrets, hardships, and triumphs of Chinese immigrants. Her timely book exposes the legacy of Chinese exclusion in current American immigration control and race relations.

In the early years of the Cold War, the United States mounted expansive public diplomacy programs in the Global South, including initiatives with the recently partitioned states of India and Pakistan. U.S. operations in these two countries became the second- and fourth-largest in the world, creating migration links that resulted in the emergence of American universities, such as the University of Houston, as immigration hubs for the highly selective, student-led South Asian migration stream starting in the 1950s. By the late twentieth century, Houston's South Asian community had become one of the most prosperous in the metropolitan area and one of the largest in the country. Mining archives and using new oral histories, Uzma Quraishi traces this pioneering community from its midcentury roots to the early twenty-first century, arguing that South Asian immigrants appealed to class conformity and endorsed the model minority myth to navigate the complexities of a shifting Sunbelt South. By examining Indian and Pakistani immigration to a major city transitioning out of Jim Crow, Quraishi reframes our understanding of twentieth-century migration, the changing character of the South, and the tangled politics of race, class, and ethnicity in the United States.

This unique volume explores such themes as the political and economic forces that cause immigration; the alienation and uprootedness that often follow relocation; and the difficult questions of citizenship and assimilation.

Race and Immigration in the United States is a collection of the very best of the new generation of scholarship in the field of immigration history. The traditional Ellis Island model of immigrant assimilation is no longer adequate to understand American history. A more subtle model is needed - one which does not exclude peoples of color from view, nor treat the experiences of European immigrants as a template for the experiences of non-white migrants. In this important collection, Paul Spickard draws together essays that illuminate the crucial differences that race makes in the study of American history. Bringing the insight of ethnic studies scholarship into the history of immigration, Race and Immigration in the United States is an essential collection for anyone studying ethnicity and immigration in American history.