A succinct, positive look at the great benefits, both historically and currently, of embracing immigration.
An account of how the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, in broadening immigration beyond European quotas, transformed the racial makeup, economy, and politics of the U.S.
The elimination of origin quotas put in place since the 1920s, which had favored European immigrants, paved the way for a great surge of new immigration from Asia, Latin America, and, to a lesser extent, Africa and the Middle East. The change in numbers, as Foner clearly explains, was enormous. In 1960, for example, 75% of foreign-born residents came from Europe; by 2018, those born in Latin America and the Caribbean went from 9% to 50%, Asians from 4% to 28%, and sub-Saharan Africans from 1% to 5%. The astonishing racial shift has affected all aspects of American life (Whites comprised only 60% of the population by 2018). Foner—a professor of sociology and author of One Out of Three: Immigrant New York in the Twenty-First Century, among other books—makes a convincing argument, as other scholars have in recent years, that these changes have been positive and significant for the U.S. as a nation, countering uglier, speculative narratives about the detriments of immigration. Neighborhoods across America have shifted hugely, from all-Black (Caribbean and African) sections of Brooklyn to all-Asian sections of Los Angeles and other cities in California and elsewhere. The author closely examines the economic benefits in immigrant work, filling both the top and bottom of the occupational ladder, from innovative new companies to the caretakers and farm workers, all necessary for the functioning of the American economy. In scholarly but accessible prose, Foner also explores this huge cultural shift in terms of TV, movies, literature, and other elements of arts and culture. This book will be a good fit for libraries and school collections in order to refute erroneous and racist arguments regarding immigration.
A succinct, positive look at the great benefits, both historically and currently, of embracing immigration.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-691-20639-4
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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