Customer Reviews

AMERICAN DREAMING GLOBAL REALITIES: Rethinking U.S. Immigration History (Statue of Liberty Ellis Island)

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If you're picking this up, you're probably either a student required to read it or a faculty member considering it-- and I think the latter group will find this a very mixed bag. While the editors have managed to gather together a group of the hottest scholars in transnational/new immigration history (Erika Lee and Gabaccia herself, for instance), this collection is firmly focused on the period from 1880 to 1925; post-1965 immigration, to the degree it's covered at all, only appears toward the end of the book, and receives spotty coverage (an article on Polish emigrees in the Reagan years, for instance, but only one article on undocumented Mexican immigration). The authors also either seem unsure about what audience they are aiming toward or perhaps were sometimes recycling journal articles. Some of the pieces here are appropriate for undergraduates, while others are aimed more toward academic audiences and those fascinated by reviews of the literature. I would recommend cherry-picking the best from this but not using the whole book in an immigration class-- especially since you'd have to assign a different book to cover post-WWII immigration in any case.