John Hayakawa Torok | Resource Extraction and Bad Bodies | Journal of American Ethnic History, 28.2

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John Hayakawa Torok | Resource Extraction and Bad Bodies | Journal of American Ethnic History, 28.2 | The History Cooperative

RESOURCE EXTRACTION AND BAD BODIES

Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882. By Roger Daniels. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. xii + 328 pp. Tables, graphs, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00 (cloth); $15.00 (paper). Probationary Americans: Contemporary Immigration Policies and the Shaping of Asian American Communities. By Edward J. W. Park and John S. Park. New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2005. xi + 138 pp. Tables, notes, and index. $24.95 (paper).
American immigration history is the story of bonded, free, and enslaved migrant labor. Immigration to a settler society advances resource extraction and economic development. Extracting agricultural products and natural resources from land can require forced labor. Some argue free markets and free trade advance freedom. The Atlantic world's slave trade and plantation slavery systems illustrate that this is not a necessary outcome.	1
How we in the United States racialized labor, invented race science and racial ideologies, and enacted the latter into law is a story we need not repeat here. We can state merely that lawmakers have deemed categories of bodies—African; Asian; southern and eastern European; and currently, one might argue, Latin American—to be unfit for benefits accruing to citizens of the lands now called the United States.	2
Roger Daniels's book builds upon his lifetime of work in American immigration and Asian American history. He notes that we have a dualistic attitude, "on the one hand reveling in the nation's immigrant past, and on the other rejecting much of its immigrant present" (p. 6). The book is a magisterial survey written in two parts and with considerable flair, providing an essentially chronological account of immigration policy, law, and politics in the American Century. Part 1, "The Golden Door Opens and Closes, 1882–1965," has seven chapters. Part 2, "Changing Patterns in a Changing World," has five chapters and deals with 1965–2000. An epilogue speculates on the direction of immigration policy after 2001.	3
Daniels's book deals primarily in immigration history and legislation; public policy; and, to a smaller extent, political and institutional history. It is a superior, readable introduction to the ground covered by Edward P. Hutchinson's Legislative History of American Immigration Policy (1981). I highly recommend this book for survey courses in American history, especially twentieth-century history, or as an overview text for U.S. immigration history or Asian American history courses. Additionally, as it puts legal change into political and historical context in a concise, balanced manner, it will be a good supplement for immigration law teachers using the traditional "cases-and-materials" approach.	4
A strength of Daniels's book is that it puts in proper perspective changes enacted to immigration law during the McCarthy era. Daniels critiques liberal historians for failing to recognize advances towards race neutrality in laws affecting migrants passed at that time. In particular, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 "helped lay the demographic basis for the multiculturalism that emerged in the United States at the end of the twentieth century" (p. 113).	5
Another strength is the way this work integrates the Asian American critique, including important work by several Asian American historians such as Mae Ngai, in its overall account of U.S. immigration history. Daniels is not shy about acknowledging the racism in American law and permeating administrative regulation of the kinds of bodies "whom we shall welcome" in different periods (pp. 122–23). Although focusing on the period after 1882, he acknowledges the earlier troubled history regarding the suppression of the African slave trade. He also addresses the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration's response to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and occupied Europe's death camps during World War II.	. . .

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