| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882. By Roger Daniels. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. xii, 328 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-8090-5343-8.)

Long acknowledged as an expert on the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II, Roger Daniels has made considerable contributions to the general field of immigration history as well. In this volume, Daniels offers an in-depth examination and critique of American immigration from 1882 to the present. He takes 1882 as his starting point because that was the year the first Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, the first restrictive American immigration bill based on race and class, as it barred the entry of Chinese laborers for ten years. It was subsequently renewed a number of times and not repealed until 1943. Daniels and others have thus argued that the Chinese Exclusion Act was, in effect, the first piece of immigration legislation that moved American immigration policy from one of fairly free access to entry to one of restriction based on nativist ideas of inferiority and unassimilability. After his discussion of the exclusion of the Chinese, Daniels offers a detailed analysis of the evolution of the Immigration Act of 1924, which established national quotas for all immigrants and also barred the entry of anyone "ineligible to citizenship." These two facets of the act greatly reduced immigration from southern and eastern Europe and nearly all Asians, as they were the only people deemed racially ineligible for naturalization.

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