Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America
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Book Overview
Immigration is perhaps the most enduring and elemental leitmotif of America. This book is the most powerful study to date of the politics and policies it has inspired, from the founders' earliest efforts to shape American identity to today's revealing struggles over Third World immigration, noncitizen rights, and illegal aliens. Weaving a robust new theoretical approach into a sweeping history, Daniel Tichenor ties together previous studies' idiosyncratic explanations for particular, pivotal twists and turns of immigration policy. He tells the story of lively political battles between immigration defenders and doubters over time and of the transformative policy regimes they built.
Tichenor takes us from vibrant nineteenth-century politics that propelled expansive European admissions and Chinese exclusion to the draconian restrictions that had taken hold by the 1920s, including racist quotas that later hampered the rescue of Jews from the Holocaust. American global leadership and interest group politics in the decades after World War II, he argues, led to a surprising expansion of immigration opportunities. In the 1990s, a surge of restrictionist fervor spurred the political mobilization of recent immigrants. Richly documented, this pathbreaking work shows that a small number of interlocking temporal processes, not least changing institutional opportunities and constraints, underlie the turning tides of immigration sentiments and policy regimes. Complementing a dynamic narrative with a host of helpful tables and timelines, Dividing Lines is the definitive treatment of a phenomenon that has profoundly shaped the character of American nationhood.Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:0691088055
ISBN13:9780691088051
Release Date:May 2002
Publisher:Princeton University Press
Length:400 Pages
Weight:1.28 lbs.
Dimensions:1.0" x 6.1" x 9.2"
Customer Reviews
2 ratings
The Shifting Sand of Immigration politics
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 17 years ago
My friends at CHIRLA gave me this book and at 300 pages of small print it looked intimidating so I put off reading it for a few weeks. When I finally picked it up I found it to be well organized, informative and a compelling read. Tichenor tells the history of immigration politics in the America by showing the shifting alliances of groups and their interest in the level of immigration and the rights that should be given to immigrants. He uses a simple two by two grid throughout the book to illustrate this changing alliance. For instance the labor movement went from pro-immigrant around 1890 to anti-immigrant for most of the 20th century and became pro-immigrant again in the 1980's. Dividing Lines also shows difference in the politics of legislation versus enforcement and between what the public says they want and what the politicians actually enact. For instance the book shows why we have laws mandating employer sanctions and yet we have almost no enforcement of those laws by the executive branch. This book is an excellent read about the politics of immigration and should be considered by everyone who wants to understand the current state of immigration politics.
Well-written and engaging
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 19 years ago
This book will be useful to students of immigration, history, and political science. Tichenor shows us the complex set of connections between political institutions, interest groups, and political actors that combined to produce policy outcomes. One of his most interesting findings regards the unusual fact that while most Americans favor tighter restrictions on immigration, politicians nowadays rarely enact such laws. Instead they usually increase immigration levels despite broad public opposition. Tichenor argues that this is because a "policy regime" has been structured over time, encompassing the immigration committees in both houses of Congress, and including the preferences of strong pro-immigration interest groups, that pushes for liberalization of immigration laws. Only rarely in American history do restrictionists succeed in limiting immigration, most notably from the 1920's until the landmark 1964 law that set off the wave of immigrants from Latin America and Asia we still experience today. Tichenor's work is easily accessible, well-written, and thought provoking.
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