Review

Immigration Issues is a collection of primary documents on the history of U.S. immigration, from the early national period to the year 2000. As part of Greenwood's Major Issues in American History series, the book approaches immigration with a "problem-solving framework" (xiii). The primary documents are organized around twelve controversial debates pertaining to the desirability, treatment, and impact of immigrants in the United States, such as whether immigrants have been an economic asset or liability for the country and whether immigration poses a threat to national security. These debates have occurred with fair consistency throughout the nation's history and across the three "waves" of immigration: 1840–1880, 1880–1930, and 1946–2000. Each chapter, then, covers one such debate with a historical overview, an annotated selected bibliography, and a set of between five and eleven relevant primary documents—either excerpted or in their entirety—that span the entire history of American immigration. The materials presented in each chapter easily allow for the exploration of contrasting viewpoints by students and teachers in the classroom.	1
The three chapters in Part II: Immigration and National Identity—on the impact of immigration on national identity, English-only versus bilingual education, and whether assimilation or ethnic cultural retention should be the aim of immigrants—will facilitate debate over whether civic or ethnic nationalism has been the dominant ideology in the United States. Classic documents such as J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis' "True Americanism" (1915), and President Lyndon B. Johnson's remarks on signing the Immigration Act of 1965 show how Americans have embraced civic nationalism, envisioning the nation as a community based upon shared political institutions and values open to all who reside within its territory. At the same time, selections from the 1845 convention proceedings of the anti-immigrant Native American Party, or Know-Nothings, and from Richard D. Lamm's (former governor of the state of Colorado) and Gary Imhoff's The Immigration Time Bomb (1985) reveal the prominence of ethnic nationalism in the United States, which holds that a shared ethnic, cultural, and linguistic heritage forms the ideal basis for a national community. Reading and analyzing documents such as these will enable students to see that throughout U.S. history national identity has been a highly contested issue and that, in the end, a combination of civic and ethnic notions has influenced what it means to be an "American."	2
Additional chapters highlight key historical and contemporary debates about U.S. immigration. Particularly strong are chapters on undocumented immigrants, immigrant rights, and whether humanitarian concerns should dictate U.S. immigration policy. The chapter "How Have Immigration Issues Affected U.S. Foreign Policy?" addresses an important, interesting, but often overlooked issue. Documents pertaining to Japanese and Mexican immigration to the United States, Presidents Harry S. Truman's and John F. Kennedy's criticism of the immigration quota system set up by the National Origins Law of 1924 for hindering U.S. foreign policy aims during the Cold War, and the pressure exerted by Cuban immigrants to continue U.S. sanctions against the Cuban government of Fidel Castro provide an opportunity to look at American immigration within an international context—from the "outside-in" rather than only from the "inside-out." Surprising however, is the fact that some significant voices in the immigration debate are missing, such the nineteenth-century African American leader Frederick Douglass' opposition to Irish immigration, organized labor's criticism of Chinese immigration in the 1870s and 1880s, and the Sierra Club's concern over immigration's negative impact on the environment in the late twentieth century. These silences give an oversimplified impression of the politics of the conflicts over American immigration as being between liberals and conservatives, when, in fact, the politics are more complicated than that.	3
This book will prove very useful to teachers of the U.S. history survey as well as more specialized courses in the history of American immigration and ethnicity. Complementing the book's "issues-centered approach to teaching and thinking about America's past" (xi) are a chronology of events in immigration history as well as a listing of all of the primary documents in chronological order. The book and chapter introductions are concise but thorough, and the clarity of its organization and prose make it accessible and easy to use for both students and teachers. In the end, Henry Bischoff's Immigration Issues demonstrates both that immigration, as historian Oscar Handlin put it, is the story of the American people and that it has been and remains a contested story (xv).	4
University of Auckland, New Zealand Jennifer Frost

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