Check It Out

Not fit for our society : nativism and immigration
by Peter Schrag
New Book Shelf JV6121 .S35 2010

Author Peter Schrag offers a scholarly history of the political movements that have sought to restrict immigration to the U.S. since its founding--from the 19th-century Know-Nothing Party through the years of American eugenics "research" that vastly influenced the Nazis in the years leading up to WWII. He takes up that question in "Not Fit for Our Society," a especially timely look at the spasms of anti-immigration that have defined our nation from the very beginning. He writes: "The history of American attitudes about immigration and immigration policy has long been a spiral of ambivalence and inconsistency, a sort of double helix, with strands of welcome and rejection wound tightly around one another."


He points out how the same anti-immigration and anti-immigrant arguments have been recycled across generations. "If this book tells anything about that three-hundred-year narrative," Schrag writes, "it's that almost everything that's being said in the arguments for closing the border and shutting down immigration has been said before, often in literally the same terms and tones."


Check out Not fit for our society : nativism and immigration by Peter Schrag , available now in the library on the New Book Shelf JV6121 .S35 2010 .