Arguing Immigration Book Review by Nicolaus Mills

Introduction

With the end of the Cold War era new fears have arrive to leverage politics. The perception is that the atomic age has been restored by the age of migration. Even though migration has been a common phenomenon in world annals it is now advised a new security issue. Like the movement of goods and services, the movement of people has become a really global phenomenon. Facing this new challenge all major OECD countries are actually experiencing a urgent position of legitimacy in migration policy. More and more political leaders address the issue of migration as a social and political threat. More and more citizens in nations of immigration seem uneasy about immigration. The globalization of the media has fostered the insight in immigration countries that all the social and political ills are imported by migration into their countries. For political leaders of convictions as well as irresponsible populists, immigration assists afresh as a "hot-button-issue". They win elections by shocking their voters (Peter H, 33).

This research aim is on this ideological dimension of immigration policy. It endeavors to find an response for the next question: Why is immigration afresh a contentious issue at this juncture of American economic and political history? My hypotheses are that the debate about immigration is mostly propelled by ideological anxieties and motivations. I will contend that the present argument comprises a new nationalism that is are against to the traditional American liberalism. However, I will furthermore argue that it is difficult to forecast what genuine leverage the argument about immigration will have on the new immigration legislation. Economic concerns, securely entrenched in the political system, appear to be mighty sufficient to prevent any spectacular concluding of the border. But the ideological argument might have substantial influence in altering the social rights of immigrants. (Peter H, 33).

Discussion and Analysis

The year 1965 comprises in numerous modes a watershed in U.S. immigration policy. For the first time a really liberal immigration regulation was introduced. Although the United States is recounted as a traditional "country of immigration," it is often disregarded that it was furthermore a pioneer in the development of systematic limits on immigration. In compare to the exact American cosmopolitan and democratic tradition—"E pluribus Unum" expressing the essence of America's cosmopolitan faith—the U.S. developed an immigration policy founded on racist theories. Restrictionist principles started in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act and peaked in the 1920s with the Immigration Act of 1924. The "golden door" was closed for all Asians and application curtailed for most Europeans. Until 1952, Japanese, Koreans, and Southeast and Southwest Asians were still ineligible for citizenship and therefore refuted admission as immigrants. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, passed over President Harry S. Truman's veto, made the naturalization laws color-blind. The liberalization was, as Roger Daniels writes in his immigration history, a crop of the Cold War: "Engaged in a labor for the hearts and minds of what it admired to call the Free World, the United States could ...