Immigration History

When you hear about one of the biggest scandals in modern home office history, it piques your interest. The Windrush Scandal is an example of the mentality of a bygone era in operation at the top levels of the UK government. Citizens of the British Commonwealth were invited to stay in the UK indefinitely between the end of the 1940s and the start of the 1970s in an attempt to bolster the UK labor market. Many people took up the invitation, upending their lives in an attempt to create a better life in their mother country.

San Tran Croucher’s earliest memories are of fleeing ethnic attacks in her Vietnamese village, only to be later tortured in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. Katya Cengel met San when San was 75-years-old and living in California, having miraculously survived the Cambodian genocide with her three daughters, Sithy, Sithea, and Jennifer. But San’s family’s troubles didn’t end after their resettlement in California

Setting out from her classroom, Jessica Lander takes the listener on a powerful and urgent journey to understand what it takes for immigrant students to become Americans. A compelling listen for everyone who cares about America’s future, Making Americans brims with innovative ideas for educators and policy makers across the country.

The Scots are one of the world's greatest nations of emigrants. For centuries, untold numbers of men, women, and children sought their fortunes in every part of the globe, from the British Empire to the United States, in cities and on prairie farms, as traders, bankers, missionaries, soldiers, politicians, and engineers.

Paris Is Not Dead explores the past, present, and future of the City of Light through the lens of class conflict, highlighting the outsized role of immigrants in shaping the city's progressive, cosmopolitan, and open-minded character--at a time when politics nationwide can feel like they're shifting in the opposite direction. This is the Paris many tourists too often miss: immigrant-heavy districts such as the 18th arrondissement, where crowded street markets still define everyday life. Stangler brings this view of the city to life.

Over seven generations, Jessica Goudeau’s family members were church elders, preachers, Sunday school teachers and potluck organizers. Her great-grandfather helped establish a Christian university in Abilene, Texas, which she attended along with her grandparents, parents, siblings, and cousins. Her family's legacy—a word she heard often growing up—was rooted in faithfulness, righteousness, and the hard work that built the great state of Texas.

Ellis Island and Angel Island: The History and Legacy of America’s Most Famous Immigration Stations examines how these islands became immigration inspection centers and what life was like for those who landed in each place.

In a world of border walls and obstacles to migration, a lottery where winners can gain permanent residency in the United States sounds too good to be true. Just as unlikely is the idea that the United States would make such visas available to foster diversity within a country where systemic racism endures. But in 1990, the United States Diversity Visa Lottery was created to do just that. Dreamland tells the surprising story of this unlikely government program and its role in American life as well as the global story of migration.

Award-winning author Lisandro Perez tells Cuba's story through the lens of a single family: his own. The House on G Street is a unique depiction of one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century, told through generations of ancestors whose lives were shaped by dramatic historical forces. Perez disentangles the complex history by following his family's thread, imbuing political events with personal meaning. Their story begins with emigration to Cuba and follows the waning years of the colony.

Today the United States considers immigration a federal matter. Yet, despite America's reputation as a "nation of immigrants," the Constitution is silent on the admission, exclusion, and expulsion of foreigners. Before the Civil War, the federal government played virtually no role in regulating immigration. Offering an original interpretation of nineteenth-century America, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic argues that the existence, abolition, and legacies of slavery were central to the emergence of a national immigration policy.

Angel Island, the largest island in San Francisco Bay at about 740 acres, was originally named when Don Juan Manuel Ayala sailed into San Francisco Bay. Supposedly, the island was named “Angel” because the land mass appeared to him as an angel guarding the bay, and when Ayala made a map of the Bay, on it he marked Angel Island as, “Isla de Los Angeles”. This would remain the island’s name ever since, even as the use of the island would certainly change over time.

By the middle of the 19th century, New York City's population surpassed the unfathomable number of one million people.This was mostly due to the fact that so many immigrants heading to America naturally landed in New York Harbor, well before the federal government set up an official immigration system on Ellis Island. Many of these immigrants, who were arriving with little more than the clothes on their back, didn't travel far and thus remained in New York.

During the Second World War, people arrived in Britain from all over the world as troops, war-workers, nurses, refugees, exiles, and prisoners-of-war, chiefly from Europe, America, and the British Empire. Between 1939 and 1945, the population in Britain became more diverse than it had ever been before. Through diaries, letters, and interviews, Mixing It tells of ordinary lives pushed to extraordinary lengths.

Forever Prisoners offers the first broad history of immigrant detention in the United States. Elliott Young focuses on five stories, including Chinese detained off the coast of Washington in the late 1880s, an "insane" Russian-Brazilian Jew caught on a ship shuttling between New York and South America during World War I, Japanese Peruvians kidnapped and locked up in a Texas jail during World War II, a prison uprising by Mariel Cuban refugees in 1987, and a Salvadoran mother who grew up in the United States and has spent years incarcerated while fighting deportation.

Angel has just lost her father, and her mother's grief means she might as well be gone, too. She's got a sister and a grandmother to look out for, and a burgeoning consciousness of the unfairness in the world - in her family, her community, and her country. Set against the backdrop of the second Philippine People Power Revolution in 2001, the contemporary struggles of surviving Filipina "Comfort Women" of WWII, and a cold winter’s season in the city of Chicago is the story of a daughter coming of age, coming to forgiveness, and learning to move past the chaos of grief to survive.

A story of courage, unconventionality and lust for life. Vera Wasowski was just seven years old when German soldiers marched her family into the Lvov Jewish ghetto in Poland. She watched her father take his own life and her mother accede to sexual blackmail in order to ensure her and Vera’s survival. With unsparing honesty and the blackest humour, she recalls a world where the desire to survive was everything.

Nella ricostruzione di Gian Antonio Stella, ricca di fatti, personaggi, aneddoti, documenti, storie ignote o sconvolgenti, compare l'altra faccia della grande emigrazione italiana. Quella che meglio dovremmo conoscere proprio per capire, rispettare e amare ancora di più i nostri nonni, padri, madri e sorelle che partirono. Quella che abbiamo rimosso per ricordare solo gli "zii d'America" arricchiti e vincenti.

It wasn’t surprising when the first abandoned bicycles were found along the dirt roads and farmland just across the border from Tijuana, but before long they were arriving in droves. The bikes went from curiosity, to nuisance, to phenomenon. But until they caught the eye of journalist Kimball Taylor, only a small cadre of human smugglers - coyotes - and migrants could say how or why they’d gotten there. This is the story of 7,000 bikes that made an incredible journey and one young man from Oaxaca who arrived at the border with nothing, built a small empire, and then vanished.

This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in US immigration policy - a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the 20th century.

In this compelling book, Ther examines the major causes of mass flight, from religious intolerance and ethnic cleansing to political persecution and war. He describes the perils and traumas of flight and explains why refugees and asylum seekers have been welcomed in some periods - such as during the Cold War - and why they are rejected in times such as our own. He also examines the afterlives of the refugees in the receiving countries, which almost always benefited from admitting them. He reconceptualizes Europe as a unit of geography and historiography.