One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965

    • 4.6 • 22 Ratings
    • $13.99
    • $13.99

Publisher Description

Winner of the Zócalo Book Prize

Shortlisted for the Arthur Ross Book Award

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice


A "powerful and cogent" (Bethanne Patrick, Washington Post) account of the twentieth-century battle for immigration reform that set the stage for today’s roiling debates.

The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from southern and eastern Europe and outright banning those from nearly all of Asia. In a riveting narrative filled with a fascinating cast of characters, from the indefatigable congressman Emanuel Celler and senator Herbert Lehman to the bull-headed Nevada senator Pat McCarran, Jia Lynn Yang recounts how lawmakers, activists, and presidents from Truman through LBJ worked relentlessly to abolish the 1924 law.

Through a world war, a refugee crisis after the Holocaust, and a McCarthyist fever, a coalition of lawmakers and activists descended from Jewish, Irish, and Japanese immigrants fought to establish a new principle of equality in the American immigration system. Their crowning achievement, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, proved to be one of the most transformative laws in the country’s history, opening the door to nonwhite migration at levels never seen before—and changing America in ways that those who debated it could hardly have imagined. Framed movingly by her own family’s story of immigration to America, Yang’s One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is a deeply researched and illuminating work of history, one that shows how Americans have strived and struggled to live up to the ideal of a home for the “huddled masses,” as promised in Emma Lazarus’s famous poem.

GENRE
History
RELEASED
2020
May 19
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
336
Pages
PUBLISHER
W. W. Norton & Company
SELLER
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
SIZE
2.2
MB

Customer Reviews

BrudY42 ,

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide

Not often do I read a history book that I can’t put down! The politicians were really brought to life for me, maybe because of our national travesty of the Trump presidency, but I found myself hating and loving these historical characters like I do with today’s cast of good and evil politicians. As to the idea of this helping Asian-Americans understand their past, it also helped this Jewish-American understand the effects racism played in trapping my coreligionists in Europe and why nothing was done to save them. Thank you for writing this great history of the American 20th Century.

Bruce A. Goldman, DDS

juliusa ,

Excellent!

A superb historical retelling with a bang up analysis in the epilogue. Well written, important, honest and necessary. Worth your time.

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