A Nation of Nations, Tom Gjelten
A Nation of Nations, Tom Gjelten
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A Nation of Nations
A Story of America After the 1965 Immigration Law

Author: Tom Gjelten

Narrator: David Colacci

Unabridged: 12 hr 35 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/03/2015

Synopsis

In 1950, Fairfax County, Virginia, was ninety percent white, ten percent African American, with a little more than one hundred families who were "other." Currently the African American percentage of the population is about the same, but the Anglo white population is less than fifty percent, and there are families of Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American origin living all over the county. A Nation of Nations follows the lives of a few immigrants to Fairfax County over recent decades as they gradually "Americanize." Hailing from Korea, Bolivia, and Libya, these families have stories that illustrate common immigrant themes: friction between minority groups, economic competition and entrepreneurship, and racial and cultural stereotyping.

It's been half a century since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act changed the landscape of America, and no book has assessed the impact or importance of this law as this one does, with its brilliant combination of personal stories and larger demographic and political issues.

About Tom Gjelten

Tom Gjelten is a veteran journalist and the author of Sarajevo Daily: A City and Its Newspaper Under Siege and Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause. Over a thirty-year career as a correspondent for NPR News, he has covered wars in Central America, the Middle East, and the former Yugoslavia, as well as major national stories in the United States. His NPR reporting has won him two Overseas Press Club Awards, a George Polk Award, and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. He is a regular panelist on the PBS program Washington Week, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the editorial board at World Affairs Journal.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Carlos on August 08, 2023

It’s rather lengthy and overly anecdotal for the relatively mundane points the author offers, but I still learned a lot reading this. Kind of wish he leaned more into the Fairfax County aspect. Prose is decent.......more

Goodreads review by Gabriel on October 12, 2017

This is different sort of review than most and different than I've ever done before. I actually won't be doing much of a review as much as a psychological and ideological assessment of myself using this book. It might sound like deconstructionist drivel, but I hope you can catch my meaning and under......more

Goodreads review by Kevin on March 06, 2019

Gjelten offers an overview at why the 1965 Immigration Law came to become the law of the land through critical circumstances in a changing American landscape. The window in which the American imagination of immigrant integration was ever so minuscule during this tumultuous time of advanced Civil Rig......more

Goodreads review by Lee on July 11, 2020

This book is interesting as an analysis of immigration in America, but is a bit of hot mess, trying to take on too much. I really liked Gjelten's take on the subject of the 1965 Immigration law and the way America's policy moved away from white supremacy driving immigration policy. He mixes discussi......more

Goodreads review by Ruby on July 18, 2017

"The 1965 Act committed the United States for the first time in its history to accept newcomers on a nondiscriminatory basis, and the expanded allocation of family visas made it easier for foreigners to qualify for U.S. residents status." "Just as immigrants adapt to life in America, the American na......more

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