| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David M. Reimers. Unwelcome Strangers; American Identity and the Turn Against Immigration. New York: Columbia University Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 199. $27.50.

Balanced treatments can reveal as well as hide. This is both a strength and weakness of David M. Reimers's synoptic account of the current debates around U.S. immigration. Reimers's claim to allow his subjects to "speak for themselves" (pp. 1, 2) brings clarity to the positions of both supporters and opponents of immigration, but it also conceals the author's voice that just as surely informs the writing of this text. 1

Reimers argues that U.S. immigration policy, both past and present, has been made in "an ad hoc and uninformed way" (p. 3), and a failure to deal with immigration and its attendant problems could lead to a backlash against immigrants. This book steps into the breach of a contentious and heated divide over immigration and American identity itself. Reimers traces U.S. immigration history from its unregulated beginning to its present, regulated though generous version. Immigrants were not counted until 1820, and states, he observes, regulated immigration until 1875, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that immigration was a matter of federal concern. Prostitutes and Chinese women, the latter commonly equated with the former by immigration officials, were denied entry in 1875, and the Chinese were the first racialized group excluded by Congress in 1882. Exclusions were extended to other Asians, and xenophobia and racism restricted the entry of Catholics, Southern and Eastern Europeans, and Mexicans up to World War II. . . .

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