Sobre El Autor
Hidetaka Hirota is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Waseda University. He was formerly a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University and a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at the City College of New York.
Obras de Hidetaka Hirota
Etiquetado
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Miembros
Reseñas
Premios
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 1
- Miembros
- 22
- Popularidad
- #553,378
- Valoración
- 4.0
- Reseñas
- 2
- ISBNs
- 4
I didn’t see too much in the book that surprised me, since we’d talked about a lot of it before. Hirota’s argument that modern US immigration regulations stemmed from state immigration regulation systems, and primarily from those of Massachusetts and New York, which in turn were built on the previous town-level “warning out” system, is well made. I wasn’t really left with any doubt about that progression by the end of the book. It was also interesting that state officials basically just switched hats and became the federal officials over immigration.
My biggest issue with the book is style. There is a lot of repetition and overlap. The chapters read as though they were intended to be 7 stand-alone essays that were bound together into one book. The same ground is covered multiple times. Some of this is probably my lingering impressions from reading the introduction, then chapter introductions, chapter conclusions, and then the conclusion. That’s pretty standard in academic history books, but it makes for hard reading if you’re going cover to cover.
What came first? Anti-Irish racism or economic concerns? In the conclusion, Hirota says that racism was the primary driving factor in creating anti-Irish pauper immigration, but throughout the book, the documents and people he quoted and the narrative he wrote gave me the impression that, while people didn’t overly care for the Irish, it wasn’t until they saw their cities and states being overrun by assisted pauper immigration and destitute, insane, criminal, starving Irish fleeing the famine that the rhetoric and restrictions kicked up a notch.
Anyway, it’s definitely worth taking a look at if you’re interested in American immigration history or Irish immigration to the US. I also found it interesting in terms of how it explored the shifting balance of power between local, state, and the federal governments.
… (más)