WITH THE KLAN OR AGAINST?:

The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 is where Yang begins her story of this forty-year battle over immigration. In meticulous detail, she reveals how a seemingly singular historical event, like one law's ratification, is actually a confluence of circumstance, personal agenda, and public emotion. The passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, for instance, converged with the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan, public anti-Semitism from prominent figures like Henry Ford, a post-World War I industrial depression, a steady rise in Japanese immigration, and lingering anxieties about white racial purity. All this pushed President Calvin Coolidge to impose severe immigration quotas based on the 1890 census, as well as a literacy test, immigrant-targeted taxes, and a ban on immigration from nearly all countries in Asia. The 1924 law relied on false nostalgia for a census that only seemed to depict a homogenous, Northern European-descended nation: in reality, 15 percent of the nation were immigrants in 1890. [...]

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is a history of immigration discourse as much as it is a history of immigration law. Yang skillfully traces the ways in which words betray collective fears and insecurities. In the early twentieth century, politicians spoke of immigrants with dehumanizing detachment. They were, as Labor Secretary James J. Davis wrote in 1924, no longer the "beaver-men" of his lineage who had built up the country, but hordes of "rat-men" who needed to be weeded out if they could not be "assimilated," "absorbed," or "submerged" into American culture. Yang writes that immigrants were seen as invaders of the "American bloodstream"; as bent nails, too flimsy to build the state; or as weeds to be culled, lest they "choke or stunt" the American crop. Lawmakers worried that other nations would treat the United States as a "trash basket of all creation," dumping their least desirables who would then become dependent wards of the state. By the 1950s, Yang writes, the very definition of race had changed, as the idea of biological distinctions among races was abandoned after World War II and the horrors of eugenics. "Ethnicity," "cultural roots," and skin color began to make their way into discourse in what Yang calls a "rewiring of race in America." Such a shift made it possible for most European immigrants and their children to be seen as simply "white." By the time Eisenhower was president, lawmakers were using the term "refugee" to bring in survivors of natural disasters in Europe and people fleeing the Cuban Revolution.

Since 1965, Yang notes, the number of immigrants in the United States has quadrupled, despite the imposition of overall caps on numbers. However, this influx hasn't been marked by greater welcome or less prejudice. It is, in the end, a story of new vocabulary and how we made exceptions to the rules: refugees, asylum seekers, amnesty grantees, and family-reunification cases.

Today, many of our immigration anxieties seem unchanged from 1924. We fear the loss of resources, language, culture, and identity. We fear invasion and subversion. Immigration itself still seems to threaten an Americanness largely invented or misremembered. In light of the stories that Yang brings to life, we can more clearly see that new dehumanizing language ("illegals"; "aliens"; "anchor babies"; "terrorists") and policies (Muslim bans, border-detention camps, family separation) are also human creations. One Mighty and Irresistible Tide asks us to consider who is shaping immigration legislation; with what words and motivations they persuade; and how we too write the story with our words, our votes, or our silence.

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