11 History Within and Beyond Academia

Since completing my third-year review, my research agenda has intensified in part because national and international events have offered me opportunities to share my research and my expertise beyond academia. I have continued reviewing book and article manuscripts for presses and journals, have written a few book reviews, and have contributed an essay titled “Migration, War, and the Transformation of the U.S. Population” to the fourth volume of the Cambridge History of America and the World edited by Mark Bradley, David Engerman, and Max Friedman. The invitation to write for this series has offered me the opportunity to rethink how migration scholars periodize immigration and its impact on American society and has allowed me to advance a new interpretation that looks at how war in the twentieth century has shaped immigration policy, Americans’ perceptions of immigration, and Americans’ ideas about which immigrants to welcome and which pose a threat. Besides working on these publications, I have spent most of my time working on my monograph, seeing through publication my co-edited anthology, and conducting research for my next project.

After receiving encouraging reviews, the University of North Carolina Press offered me a contract for From Unwanted to Restricted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization Against Restrictive Immigration Laws (1882-1965). Weaving together political, social, policy, and transnational history, the book examines how Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates in the United States mobilized against restrictive immigration laws from 1882 to 1965 within a transnational framework. As they tested the limits of citizenship and citizen activism, Eastern European Jews and Italians had to strike a balance between resisting restriction and presenting themselves as full-fledged Americans. I have spent the last year revising the manuscript following the reviewers’ suggestions and recommendations. I resubmitted the manuscript this summer. The book will be in print in the fall of 2019.

A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: The U.S. in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965, the anthology I have coedited, will appear in December 2018 with the University of Illinois Press. My co-editors, Maria Cristina Garcia (Cornell University) and Madeline Hsu (UT Austin), and I brought together thirteen renowned migration scholars who each tackle a different aspect of the impact of U.S. immigration restriction on ideas about citizenship, labor relations, and foreign policy during the mid-twentieth century. Contrary to assumptions in the existing literature, this era witnessed intense debates regarding immigration and its contradictory relationship not only to citizenship, national security, and labor but also to international business, foreign relations, and shifting beliefs concerning the nature of racial difference and inequality. These issues remain largely unexplored, and this anthology represents a first effort to bring scholars together to demonstrate how these decades shaped U.S. society and U.S. immigration legislation to this day.

Since arriving at Gustavus, I have applied regularly for outside funding to sponsor my research for my next project. This year, my efforts paid off. I received a Franklin research grant from the American Philosophical Society. Thanks to this grant and to additional funding from the Kendall Center, I have made significant progress on my research for my next project. I visited archives in New York City and Washington, DC that have provided me with the material necessary to continue working on the draft of an article that I hope to be able to submit for consideration to the Journal of American History next spring. The article is a first step in my exploration of the history of undocumented immigrants from Italy before 1965. My research advances our understanding of the history of ‘illegal’ immigration in two ways. First, it reaches deep into the lives of unauthorized Italians to explore the connections among policing, immigration restriction, and national racial projects more broadly and comparatively than previous studies have. I argue that Italian migrants’ experience highlights the role that race plays in the divide between legal stipulation and selective enforcement of immigration policies. Second, my research complicates our understanding of the role that critics of immigration restriction play in shaping discriminatory immigration policies to benefit their own constituency over others.

I have also continued organizing panels and presenting my own research. This coming year alone, I will attend three major conferences and am waiting to hear about a fourth submitted panel. In response to current events, I have also increased my engagement as a public historian. I was one of the project managers of  #ImmigrationSyllabus, a crowdsourced syllabus project that places the current immigration events into historical context. Two other authors and I have also written a piece about the website and will present about it in the fall in Minneapolis. I have contributed two articles and an interview to Public Radio International (“We’ve Been Here Before: Historians Annotate and Analyze Immigration Ban’s Place in History” and “Another Time in History that the U.S. Created Travel Bans—Against Italians”) that focus on some of the most recent developments in immigration today. Together with Julian Lim, I have organized a forum on the mythology of the United States as a ‘nation of immigrants,’ which will appear in January 2019 and I have agreed to discuss my research on immigration restriction at the Center for Jewish History in New York City next spring, an event sponsored by Carnegie Hall.

I have also tried to share my research and expertise beyond academia in other ways. This spring, I advised two students in Hawaii and Texas working on the passage of the 1965 immigration act for National History Day. This fall, I will give two presentations on immigration history and current events at the St. Peter Community Center as part of a program sponsored by the town hall, “LIFE: Learning is Forever.” Lastly, for the past year, I have served as a consultant for the “Nation of Immigrants Teaching Project,” a program co-Sponsored by the Center for Asian American Studies and the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin and the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, to provide high school teachers with synopses and primary sources about key issues in U.S. immigration history.

During the last year, I also served my last year on the board of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society (IEHS). In my second term as a board member of the IEHS, I have been involved in soliciting panels on immigration at national conferences and recruiting new members for the society. I have also been involved in conversations about how the society can adapt to the changing social media landscape and contribute its expertise to provide a historical perspective on current events. I am pleased that I have been asked to continue to serve on the program committee for the society. Lastly, I recently accepted the invitation to participate in Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop, Migration and Migrants in Terrifying Times, sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota from 2018 to 2020. This promises to be an exciting opportunity for collaboration and a chance to expand my knowledge on what other disciplines that work on immigration are doing.