One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924-1965 began as an attempt by New York Times journalist and second-generation American Jia Lynn Yang to understand the law that allowed her parents to come to the United States from China and Taiwan, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The result is a gripping account of 40 years of Congressional wrangling over immigration law in the United States.
Yang successfully argues that the idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is a relatively new one--and demonstrates that laws controlling immigration are even more recent. The book centers on the passage of three major immigration laws--in 1924, 1952 and 1965--and the competing ideas about ethnicity, race and the nature of the United States as an entity that shaped those laws. Yang never loses sight of the fact that laws are passed by people. She introduces us to the often colorful and sometimes awful politicians and activists who lobbied for and against changes in immigration policy, clearly evoking each man's character as well as describing his political career. She outlines ugly relationships between immigration laws and the eugenics movement, isolationism, anti-Communist rhetoric, McCarthyism, anti-Semitism, and calls to keep the United States true to its "Northern European roots."
Ending where she began, Yang considers the impact of the 1965 bill. It opened the door to non-white immigration, yet closed the border with Mexico for the first time, changing the United States in ways that its promoters had never anticipated. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins