Immigration History

When you hear about one of the biggest scandals in modern home office history, it piques your interest. The Windrush Scandal is an example of the mentality of a bygone era in operation at the top levels of the UK government. Citizens of the British Commonwealth were invited to stay in the UK indefinitely between the end of the 1940s and the start of the 1970s in an attempt to bolster the UK labor market. Many people took up the invitation, upending their lives in an attempt to create a better life in their mother country.

Ellis Island and Angel Island: The History and Legacy of America’s Most Famous Immigration Stations examines how these islands became immigration inspection centers and what life was like for those who landed in each place.

By the middle of the 19th century, New York City's population surpassed the unfathomable number of one million people.This was mostly due to the fact that so many immigrants heading to America naturally landed in New York Harbor, well before the federal government set up an official immigration system on Ellis Island. Many of these immigrants, who were arriving with little more than the clothes on their back, didn't travel far and thus remained in New York.

Most Holocaust survivors who came to the US after WWII settled in big cities, but some chose an alternative way of life on American farms. More of these accidental farmers wound up raising chickens in southern New Jersey than anywhere else. Speaking Yiddish to Chickens is the first book to chronicle this chapter in American Jewish history when these refugees—including the author's grandparents—found an unlikely gateway to new lives in the US on poultry farms.

Why is tonight different from all other nights? Tonight we kill dad. In 2022, American Jews face an increasingly unsafe and anti-Semitic landscape at home. Against this backdrop, the Jacobson family gathers for Passover in Los Angeles. But their immediate problems are more personal than...

Why Has Nationalism Come Roaring Back? Trump in America, Brexit in the U.K., anti-EU parties in Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, and Hungary, and nativist or authoritarian leaders in Turkey, Russia, India, and China -- Why has nationalism suddenly returned with a...

“A passionate, incisive critique of the many ways in which women and girls of color are systematically erased or marginalized in discussions of police violence.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow Invisible No More is a timely examination of how Black women, Indigenous women...

“This isn’t a story about black people—it’s a story about the Left’s agenda to patronize blacks and lie to everyone else.” For decades, the Left has been putting on a play with themselves as heroes in an ongoing civil rights move­ment—which they were mostly absent from at the...

Despite its reputation as a carnival of vice, Tijuana, was, until recently, no more or less violent than neighboring San Diego. But then something changed. Over the past 10 years, Mexico’s third-largest city became one of the world’s most dangerous. Hundreds of women are now found dead in the city each year, or bound and mutilated along the highway that lines the Baja coast. When Dan Werb began to study these murders in 2013, rather than viewing them in isolation, he discovered that they could be understood only as one symptom among many.

Dawit Gebremichael Habte fled his homeland of Eritrea as a teenager. In the midst of the ongoing Eritrean-Ethiopian war, Dawit and his sisters crossed illegally into Kenya. Without their parents or documents to help their passage, they experienced the abuse and neglect known by so many refugees around the world. But he refused to give up. He stayed resilient and positive. Journeying to the United States under asylum - and still a boy - he found a new purpose in an unfamiliar land.

Borders can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life. Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place.

When thinking about the border separating the United States from Mexico, what typically comes to mind is an unwelcoming zone with violent, poverty-ridden towns, cities, and maquiladoras on one side and an increasingly militarized network of barriers and surveillance systems on the other. It was not always this way. In fact, from the end of Mexican-American War until the late twentieth century, the border was a very porous and loosely regulated region.

When Ye Pei dreamed of Venice as a girl, she imagined a magical floating city of canals and gondola rides. And she imagined her mother, successful in her new life and eager to embrace the daughter she had never forgotten. But when Ye Pei arrives in Italy, she learns her mother works on a farm far from the city. Her only connection, a mean-spirited Chinese auntie, puts Ye Pei to work in a small-town café. Rather than giving up and returning to China, a determined Ye Pei takes on a grueling schedule.

It wasn’t surprising when the first abandoned bicycles were found along the dirt roads and farmland just across the border from Tijuana, but before long they were arriving in droves. The bikes went from curiosity, to nuisance, to phenomenon. But until they caught the eye of journalist Kimball Taylor, only a small cadre of human smugglers - coyotes - and migrants could say how or why they’d gotten there. This is the story of 7,000 bikes that made an incredible journey and one young man from Oaxaca who arrived at the border with nothing, built a small empire, and then vanished.

This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in US immigration policy - a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the 20th century.

Inside Syria and Iraq, and even along the refugee trail, they’re a religious minority persecuted for their Christian faith. Outside the Middle East, they’re suspect because of their nationality. A small remnant of Christians is on the run from the Islamic State. If they are wiped out, or scattered to the corners of the earth, the language that Jesus spoke may be lost forever - along with the witness of a church that has modeled Jesus’ way of nonviolence and enemy-love for two millennia.

Legendary writer Trevanian brings readers his most personal novel yet: a funny, deeply felt, often touching autobiographical novel destined to become a classic American coming-of-age story.

A modern-day civil rights champion tells the stirring story of how he helped start a movement to bridge America’s racial divide. Over the summer of 2013, the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II led more than a hundred thousand people at rallies across North Carolina to protest restrictions to...

The story of early Asian immigration to the United States is also one about race legislation and discrimination at a time when global populations were moving with more frequency and merging ahead of their ability to practically assimilate. The greatest involuntary migration in history took place as some 12.5 million Black African crossed the Atlantic as slaves.

“Ojito has done truth an invaluable service. Extraordinary.”—Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 2014 International Latino Awards Finalist A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist uncovers the true story of an immigrant's murder that turned a quaint village on the...