Print

| The Making of Modern Immigration: An Introduction xii in U.S. culture could have a pernicious side as racism on the campus of the Uni- versity of Massachusetts was an issue fomented by poor relations between cam- pus police and minorities in the student body. This played out before my eyes against the backdrop of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” blaring from our dorm rooms. Further on in my college career, as a student in Boston, I recall taking a spring break trip to California, where, without fail, I saw hosts of Mexican gardeners trimming the immaculate lawns that graced the homes of the residents of the Hol- lywood Hills. While still in my college studies, I had a chance meeting with the venerable Archibald Cox, the former special prosecutor in the Watergate investi- gation that brought down President Richard Nixon. We found ourselves alone to- gether during one of Harvard University’s alumni gatherings, and I asked him why he looked so vexed. He explained that he had just come from a debate between his classmates on whether to adopt or reject bilingual education in the United States, and he was saddened that, among his peers, the cream of U.S. intellectual life, the vote was for English only. “The WASPs won,” he said. When I look outward from my own rather parochial upbringing, I marvel at the changes witnessed during my four decades of life, particularly in the attitudes to- ward the study of immigration. Who would have thought, for instance, that five years ago anyone would be asking to pursue coursework in Hmong studies—let alone at the University of Minnesota or the University of Wisconsin? In the af- termath of 9/11, the tremendous rise in interest in Muslim Americans has fueled numerous works on a relatively quiet, conservative subculture. Emerging tech- nologies and massive digitization projects like the commercially run Ancestry.com have encouraged amateur genealogists to explore their immigrant heritage. Pro- fessor Henry Louis Gates is using DNA to trace our national roots. For the 2010 census, the United Sates Census Bureau will use sophisticated analytical tools to obtain segmentation estimates on the who, what, and where of our national mosaic, in addition to the individual head counters who make human contact in various regions of the country. Then there are the numerous policy and legislative initia- tives, some of which are given extensive detail in this encyclopedia, together with the high-tech measures being used to protect national borders. We can find immi- gration rights advocates using electronic mailing lists for information sharing and the formation of “virtual coalitions.” In the Academy, centers for the study of this ethnic group or that, institutes for migration studies, and all the adjunct institu- tions that touch on immigration questions—whether in departments of economics, health, criminology, or politics—have all emerged in the last few decades. Muse- ums have made immigration the centerpiece of many of their collections and ex- hibits. 1 There is no denying that immigration in the United States is a concern of mammoth proportions that invites new ways of seeing and acting on the complexi- ties of the problem.