One Mighty and Irresistible Tide, Jia Lynn Yang
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide, Jia Lynn Yang
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One Mighty and Irresistible Tide
The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965

Author: Jia Lynn Yang

Narrator: Laural Merlington

Unabridged: 11 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/19/2020


Synopsis

The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from southern and eastern Europe and outright banning those from nearly all of Asia.

In a riveting narrative filled with a fascinating cast of characters, from the indefatigable congressman Emanuel Celler and senator Herbert Lehman to the bull-headed Nevada senator Pat McCarran, Jia Lynn Yang recounts how lawmakers, activists, and presidents from Truman through LBJ worked relentlessly to abolish the 1924 law. Through a world war, a refugee crisis after the Holocaust, and a McCarthyist fever, a coalition of lawmakers and activists descended from Jewish, Irish, and Japanese immigrants fought to establish a new principle of equality in the American immigration system. Their crowning achievement, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, proved to be one of the most transformative laws in the country's history, opening the door to nonwhite migration at levels never seen before—and changing America in ways that those who debated it could hardly have imagined.

About Jia Lynn Yang

Jia Lynn Yang, a deputy national editor at the New York Times, was previously deputy national security editor at the Washington Post, where she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Trump and Russia. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Ari on June 14, 2020

Starts off powerfully but loses a little steam towards the end, where it devolves into a kind of review of legislators' memoirs. I wish she had convered more of the why of the 1965 INA instead of the nuts and bolts how of the bill passage process. Would be interesting to know what the impetus behind......more

Goodreads review by William on March 15, 2022

To my three followers, thanks, but I am working of a series of novels set in 1923 and felt this text would have some valuable information on the mindset of the early part of the Jazz Age when it comes to immigration. It did not disappoint. The first 100 pages were a wealth of information for my rese......more