About this item
A sweeping history of the twentieth-century battle to reform American immigration laws 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 law that choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from southern and eastern Europe and outright banning those from 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 FDR 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.
About the Author
Jia Lynn Yang is a deputy national editor at The New York Times. She was previously deputy national security editor at The Washington Post, where she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Trump and Russia. Before becoming an editor, she wrote about business and economics at the Post and at Fortune magazine for over a decade. Jia Lynn grew up in Northern Virginia and graduated from Yale with a B.A. in philosophy. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.
