Guarding the golden door: American immigration policy and immigrants since 1882 by Roger Daniels. 340 p.
I'm interested in the topic of this book, but found actually reading it to be an incredible slog. The two major points I came away with are 1. America's immigration policies have been racist and nativist for as long as those policies have been codified in legislation--it's just that the targets of the policies change and 2. Every time America changes immigration policy, the patterns of immigration change, but never in the fashion that the policymakers expect it to. Also, back in the day (up until the 1920s), a woman born in America would be stripped of her citizenship if she married a non-citizen.
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