Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective

by Donna R. Gabaccia

Histories investigating U.S. immigration have often portrayed America as a domestic melting pot, merging together those who arrive on its shores. Yet this is not a truly accurate depiction of the nation's complex connections to immigration. Offering a brand-new global history of the subject, Foreign Relations takes a comprehensive look at the links between American immigration and U.S. foreign relations. Donna Gabaccia examines America’s relationship to immigration and its debates through the prism of the nation’s changing foreign policy over the past two centuries. She shows that immigrants were not isolationists who cut ties to their countries of origin or their families. Instead, their relations to America were often in flux and dependent on government policies of the time.

An innovative history of U.S. immigration, Foreign Relations casts a fresh eye on a compelling and controversial topic.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gabaccia's book intervenes as a text of immigration studies that moves it squarely into the space of political history and international history--by insisting on the political ties, consciousness, and intentions of immigrants who find themselves residing in the U.S. Much of immigration history still likes to return to the Crevecourian notion (reasserted in books like Motomura's Americans in Waiting) that immigrants are all aspiring towards Americanization, ready to relinquish ties to their home countries and adopt American customs of culture, politics, and behavior. Here Gabaccia does not so much reject the notion of a degree of desirable assimilation--rather, she looks at the meaningful ties that immigrants have consistently maintained throughout history toward their countries of origin, continuing to feel emotional, economic, and political ties that inform their ways of being elsewhere. Why is this an important turn and argument to make? Not only because it reasserts the political agency and awareness of immigrants (though it does), but it also shows the ways in which immigration, once considered an issue intimately connected to subjects of global trade, warfare, etc., became a "domestic" issue through the vilification of foreign ties and sentiments during the rise of American nativism, eugenics, and isolationism. If the American government had always, to a degree, conceived of immigrants as key participants in trade networks, diplomatic relations, and cultural formation, then the shift from embracing and engaging in those ties to rejecting them or tainting them with suspicion was a manufactured one, and certainly a political one, that we should pay close attention to in our contemporary moment of immigration discourse.

This is not the easiest book to teach with--while it is a short text, its sections are often long and hard to break up--but Gabaccia's first and second sections on the essential connections immigrants had to American political discourse and international relations should be part of any global history course.

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book both for historians and a general audience. A broad overview of the history of immigration in the US from the founding through the Obama administration, focusing on how immigrants maintained connections to their countries of origin and how this has been a major influence on American foreign policy, as well as how these foreign ties shaped American born citizens' views on immigration and trade policy. Quick, well written, and very informative

[Ashtyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. i had to look up who wrote that goddamn “a very brief introduction to the history of immigration in the U.S.” cause i was convinced it was the same author. it isn’t and this book is better but nonetheless but i’m still raining jt low due to the flashbacks

[Dorian]

Skimmed this via advanced reader on word so do not ask me any questions about the contents I cannot help you babe