A compassionate, reasoned look at the left- and right-wing origins of anti-immigration sentiment.
A political work examines anti-immigrant ideas and policies in America from the 19th century to the present.
As an Arizona state senator, Worsley (who also founded the company SkyMall) broke ranks with his fellow Republicans in his vocal opposition to a bill that would allow law enforcement to racially profile and arrest undocumented immigrants. A descendant of Europeans who joined the mass migration movement of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to Utah, the author sees the immigration issue as personal. He also spent years as a missionary in South America and helped start multiple Latino Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints congregations in Mesa, Arizona. The book’s metaphor of describing anti-immigration ideas as a “horseshoe” contends that the “radical ends of the political spectrum often have more in common with each other than they do with the moderate political center.” Indeed, his well-researched history not only critiques today’s xenophobia from the right, particularly from President Donald Trump, but also ironically traces its ideological origins to the left. For example, notable early- 20th-century progressives, such as the leader of the conservationist movement, Madison Grant, and the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, included strict immigration restrictions and racist eugenics in their platforms. Worsley convincingly connects the pseudoscientific racism that permeated the anti-immigration wing of the Progressive Movement to today’s ethnocentrists, particularly John Tanton (the co-founder of the controversial Center for Immigration Studies), who deploy similar environmental and eugenicist arguments in their opposition to immigration. Moreover, even icons of the modern Democratic Party, such as Barbara Jordan—the first Black woman elected to Congress from the South—placed a dramatic reduction of total immigration as a centerpiece of their political agendas through the 1990s. Given Worsley’s proximity to Mesa’s immigrant community, he also provides a detailed look at how state and federal enforcement of racially motivated immigration policies have disrupted the lives of Arizona’s immigrant population. Though the book’s history of the Progressive Movement leaves out supporters of immigration (such as Jane Addams), the work is a solid primer for those looking for an accessible history of anti-immigration movements in the United States and their continued reverberations in contemporary politics.
A compassionate, reasoned look at the left- and right-wing origins of anti-immigration sentiment. (acknowledgements, endnotes, index)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64543-650-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: RealClear Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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