(To request a review copy, contact Barbara Jester by phone, fax, or email.)
Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians represent three out of every four immigrants who arrived in the United States after 1970. Yet despite their large numbers and long history of movement to America, non-Europeans are conspicuously absent from many books about immigration.
In Other Immigrants: The Global Origins of the American People (416 pages/$70, cloth; $22, paper), published this January by New York University Press, David M. Reimers, emeritus professor of history at NYU and author of the groundbreaking work on immigration, Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America, offers the first comprehensive account of non-European immigration, chronicling the compelling and diverse stories of frequently overlooked Americans. He traces the early history of black, Hispanic, and Asian immigrants from the 15th century through World War II, when racial hostility led to the virtual exclusion of Asians and aggression towards blacks and Hispanics. He then tells the story of the post -1945 immigration, when these groups dominated the statistics and began to reshape American society.
The capstone of groundbreaking work on immigration, Reimers’s thoughtful history recognizes the ambiguity and subjectivity of race, noting that individuals often define themselves more complexly than census forms allow.