Off the Bookshelves: Almost All Aliens Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity

I just ran across “Almost All Aliens Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity” by Paul Spickard (History, UCSB) (Routledge 2007).  It is my next book to read.  Here is a description from the publisher:

Almost All Aliens challenges what we thought we knew about America’s history as an immigrant nation. Written by one of America’s foremost authorities on immigration history, it is a complete revision of the field. Almost All Aliens is destined to become the book on immigration history.

There is no hotter topic in American politics today than the future of US immigration policy. This book does not specify a policy, but it provides the essential historical background for understanding what is true about immigration and what is not. For generations, Americans have understood immigration through the story that Ellis Island has come to symbolize. According to this story, people came from all the countries of the world to seek freedom or prosperity, and they found those things in the United States. There was a sharp break between the old world and the new. Over a few generations, they gradually put off their old language, habits, viewpoints, and allegiances, and they took on American ways. They ceased to be foreigners and became simply Americans. That version of the immigrant story has more or less been true for European immigrants, except that they did not just become Americans—they became White Americans. The Ellis Island story has not been true the experiences of migrants from Asia, Africa, or Latin America. They have gone through processes of cultural change, but they have never been admitted to American society on anything like an equal basis. The difference is race. What is more, the Ellis Island assimilation paradigm leaves out some basic truths. It treats English people as if they were not immigrants at all, but rather as if they were the first Americans, when in fact most of them migrated here during the 19th and 20th centuries. It misses the immigrant nature of the experiences of Africans and treats them simply as slaves, as tragic exceptions to a triumphal narrative of American assimilation. And it fails utterly to consider the consequences of immigration for those people who already lived on this continent—Native Americans. Almost All Aliens is the first complete revision of the immigrant paradigm to be written in more than half a century. It traces the immigrant story across the whole of US history, from before European colonization to the 21st century. It is filled with stories and lavishly illustrated. Based on thirty-five years of research and written by one of our most prolific historians of race and immigration, Almost All Aliens will remake our understanding of the meaning of immigration in American history.”

Paul Spickard is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author or editor of thirteen other books.

I will post a review of the book, which sounds fascinating, as soon as I finish the book.

KJ