Constructing America: A Socio-Legal History of Immigration

Catalog description

From the 1790 Act that restricted the right of naturalization to “free whites,” to the quota Acts of the 1920s that limited the entry of non-Nordic immigrants, to the reinvigorated restrictionism of the post-9/11 era, the laws of the nation and the discourses of immigration and immigrants that have enabled them have been key terrains in and through which legitimate and de-legitimized identities have been forged, and populations demarcated as viable participants in society or as undesirable Others to be excluded from full participation. Because immigration has been a central discriminating mechanism through which this selective peopling of the nation has been accomplished, the history of immigration and immigrants is a site par excellence for the examination of the mechanisms through which to examine contemporary issues of diversity, “difference,” and marginalization of populations. Social work’s development as a profession coincided with the period in U.S. history marked by the largest waves of immigration. The strategies the early U.S. social workers and social reformers devised to improve the poor and their communities were interventions located in and focused on immigrants and their neighborhoods. Work with poor immigrants in urban settings, shaped the nature and the direction of social work in these crucial early years of the profession. Moreover, in this work with the largely white immigrants—formulated and accomplished in the context of the rapidly developing social and physical sciences—social work cut its teeth, not only on the abiding issues of race, heredity, and culture, but on the still contested links between the individual and the environment. Examining the history of immigration—the history of the organic past which has constructed the particular demographic make-up of the present-day communities—is indispensable to understanding the profession’s…