Crossing borders
Subtitle: migration and citizenship in the twentieth-century United States
By: Dorothee Schneider
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 316
ISBN-13: 9780674047563
Description: "Aspiring immigrants to the United States make many separate border crossings in their quest to become Americans - in their home towns, ports of departure, U.S. border stations, and in American neighborhoods, courthouses, and schools. In a book of remarkable breadth, Dorothee Schneider covers both the immigrants' experience of their passage from an old society to a new one and American policymakers' debates over admission to the United States and citizenship. Bringing together the separate histories of Irish, English, German, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican immigrants, the book opens up a fresh view of immigrant aspirations and government responses.

Ingenuity and courage emerge repeatedly from these stories, as immigrants adapted their particular resources, especially social networks, to make migration and citizenship successful on their own terms. While officials argued over immigrants' fitness for admission and citizenship, immigrant communities forced the government to alter the meaning of race, class, and gender as criteria for admission. Women in particular made a long transition from dependence on men to shapers of their own destinies."--Pub. desc.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : crossing borders and nation building; title: Leaving home; title: Landing in America; title: Forced departures : deportations from the Progressive Era to the 1960s; title: Building a nation and community : Americanization, 1906-1950; title: Crossing the final border : becoming a United States citizen; title: Epilogue : crossing borders in the late twentieth century.