Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882

I just finished reading "Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882" by Roger Daniels. It focus's most of it's attention on the expanding network of contradictory, unenforceable, political and often blatantly racist immigration laws passed in the United States since the first Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. It is the best book on the history of US immigration policy that I have read to date. By looking at the history of immigration chronologically by period and then at the effects on groups within each period it makes it possible for the reader to grasp the flow of policy and events. Two areas that aren't well treated in the book are the effects of the various policies on those excluded and other than statistically how immigrant groups melded into the mainstream. The book therefore reads more as a textbook than as a compelling story. But it presents the data well and puts it in one place. The footnotes and the bibliography are both very complete and useful. Daniels does have a few very interesting graphs. One on page 233 shows the changing attitude of Americans toward immigration over time. According to the Gallup Poll data negative attitudes toward immigration peaked in 1995 and attitudes have been improving since then. Of course the politicians and the bureaucrats have not yet adjusted their actions to this change of attitude.

Ask the average American where the words "the Golden Door" comes from and I suspect you'd be met with a blank state. It comes from the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to be free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden Door!" Roger Daniels' well researched and carefully nuance view of immigration to America since 1882 is a refreshingly even-handed assessment of America's immigration policies.For those that wish to shut and lock the "golden door" it would be well to remember this wonderful sentiment from George Washington: "The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions, whom we shall welcome to participate in all of our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment."The immigration issue is a divisive one in which more often than not we are faced with editorials stipulating that immigrant labor reduces the standard of living and opportunities of employment for all workers. But is this true? Are we not a nation of immigrants? If you want a better understanding of our policies and what this means to America please read this book.