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Chapter 6 analyzes Italian and Jewish reform advocates’ final efforts to abolish the national origins quota system but also sheds light on the constraints they faced in seeking reform. After pushing for immigration reform for over forty years, many of them, sensing that the window for reform was closing, realized that they had to compromise to accomplish their goal. Although Lyndon B. Johnson and his administration marginalized the voices of Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates who had long fought for immigration reform, many of these activists remained quiet as the negotiations over the final bill hinged on the imposition of a cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. For many of them, in the end, their priority remained the abolition of the national origins quota system, which they regarded as marking them as undesirable, second-class citizens. As many of them had hoped, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolished the national origins quota system and prioritized immigrants with family ties and skills, but it also imposed global quotas, including on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, which created new barriers for migrants from the Americas and exacerbated the debate over illegal immigration.

The Holocaust, the establishment of the state of Israel, the Cold War, postwar American prosperity and the American civil rights movement all recast debates about race, immigration, and law. Chapter Six traces how these forces, along with ongoing American Jewish activism, helped redefine the relationship between Jews and U.S. immigration law, and complete the process of severing the association between Jews and illegal immigration. The new language of “refugees” helped to validate the claims that European migrants had on the nation. So did the 1965 abolition of the quota system, which had come to be seen as an embarrassing legacy of a racist past. During this same period, illegal immigration increasingly came to be defined as nearly synonymous with Mexican immigration, a racialized equation which, in turn, helped erase the history of the illegal European incursions of the prewar period.

This chapter explores how Asian American advocates negotiated the growing marginalization of Asians and Asia within the immigration debates between 1952 and 1965. If the McCarran-Walter campaign marked a peak in Asian Americans’ influence amid unprecedented U.S. intervention in East Asia, the revision efforts that followed relegated Asians, and by extension Asian Americans, to the periphery of the national conversation on immigration. This chapter examines Chinese and Japanese Americans’ efforts to include Asians in 1950s refugee admissions, experiments in interethnic cooperation, and role in shaping the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Hawaii’s admission as the nation’s fiftieth state and the election of the first U.S. congresspersons of Chinese and Japanese descent helped institutionalize Asian Americans’ political voice in Washington, DC, with important ramifications for 1960s immigration reform.

Chapter 5 shows that, after the debacle of 1952, Italian and Jewish reformers, along with other advocacy groups, pragmatically focused on pushing for ad hoc legislation and piecemeal immigration reform to undermine the very premise of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. Contrary to what the sponsors and supporters of the 1952 immigration law had envisioned, the number of immigrants entering the United States steadily went up during the rest of the decade in part thanks to many of the small legislative changes pushed by Italian and Jewish immigration reform activists. Many immigrants from Asia took advantage of the preference for family reunification and skill-based immigration and began to change the migratory flows to the United States, thus paving the way for the diversification of U.S. society usually associated with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Nonetheless, while these changes helped immigrants with family ties and desirable skills, they did little to help unskilled temporary migrants or to address the racialization of and violence against immigrants illegally in the country.

This chapter explores the intimate relationship between the history of immigration and the antiracist movements of the 1960s. Though often taken for granted and deemed in some ways unsympathetic to the problems of the local minorities, the immigrants are in fact deeply implicated in U.S. racial discourse following the sixties. With the passing of the 1965 Immigration Act and the emergent antiracist movements, the immigrants were given special focus by the U.S. government, in terms of participating, however unwittingly, in social experiments and archival operations designed to reinforce the hegemony. The academy is the ideal site for exploration in this case, as student migrants are engaged in politics of affirmation, whereby the institution supports minority affirmation as a way of regulating the constructive and destructive effects the immigrant communities place upon state power.

To set the scene for what will happen in Flushing over the next 35 years, Chapter Three turns from the second World’s Fair to the historical context of 1965’s watershed immigration legislation, the early history of Flushing’s new immigrant communities and religions, why they chose to settle in Flushing, the construction of places of worship and transnational ties to religion in the home country, as well as issues specific to each group. The major immigrant communities in Flushing are based on nationality and further broken up into the religion(s) represented by each group, and the story (which relies heavily on oral history) continues to the end of the twentieth century.

The conclusion examines the impact Italian American involvement in immigration reform campaigns and interactions with Italian newcomers had on their racial and ethnic identities in the postwar period. The prevailing literature in the field contends that white ethnic revivals in the late twentieth century emerged primarily as a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement as groups like Italian Americans attempted to distance themselves from the nation’s history of racial oppression and articulated their culture of white ethnic grievance in response to minority rights movements. This chapter, however, suggests an earlier chronology and more diverse origins for the roots of those ethnic revivals.

While this book focuses on the Indian-American community post-1965, the first chapter describes the small number who came in the early twentieth century, before exclusionary immigration policies shut the door. This chapter chronicles their struggles as they trickled in from British India (mainly from Punjab in northwest India to the U.S. West Coast, but also from Bengal in eastern India to the East Coast). The authors reveal a community that struggled to find a foothold as it battled deep-rooted racism and bigotry, and dwindled to insignificant numbers before the end of World War II and India’s independence, and later the cold war, intervened to turn the tide.

The epilogue touches on how the United States’ internment of Japanese Americans and their supervised parole during World War II provided displaced persons for hire as servants. It also briefly explores the 1948 Displaced Persons Act, whose sponsorship requirements meant that European refugees could agree to work as live-in servants in exchange for asylum. More attention is devoted to the labor exceptions built into the 1965 Immigration Act, which provided Jamaican and other Caribbean women with a short-lived opportunity to enter the United States after taking advantage of immigration quota rankings that privileged domestic servants. Policies that continue to authorize migrant servants’ temporary admission into the United States, contingent on their performance of domestic service to the employers they entered with, also garner focus here. Finally, the epilogue concludes by discussing how household consumers have exploited domestic and care workers classified as undocumented—and how the absence of state action has enabled this social relation of production.

This chapter examines the final end of formal anti-Asian policies in the Immigration Act of 1965, which gave Asian nations equal immigration quotas with all other nations in the world. An important part of this egalitarian context was Hawaii statehood because the new state’s large Asian American constituency boosted this group’s political influence in Congress. At the same time, the civil rights and anti-war movements and protests rooted in the Asian American movement during the long 1960s stirred scholarly and popular interest in the history of Asian exclusion and Japanese American internment that flowered throughout the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries into a robust cultural memory that, curiously, occluded the significance of the egalitarian opposition to anti-Asian racism. Instead, the picture of the past was stark, emphasizing racism, injustice, victimization, and white domination.

The global encounter continues apace. Not only are American evangelicals fanning out throughout the world, but immigrants are moving into the United States. Some come with hopes of revitalizing the American church. Though underreported because of its origin among nonwhite populations, New England has been the home of a spiritual awakening called the “quiet revival.” Tightened borders and persistent racial separation limit immigrant influence at present. But the synergy of the Immigration Act of 1965, the Evangelical Immigration Roundtable, and the southernization of global Christianity is accelerating the global reflex as 2045, the year the United States may become a minority-majority nation, approaches.

This chapter considers stylistic developments in Pandit Chitresh Das’s manner of teaching and performing kathak through the lens of Indian gender theory. In the 1980s and 1990s, Pandit Das began teaching mostly first- and second-generation South Asian American students whose families established themselves in the States following the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. This demographic shift led to broad changes in Pandit Das’s teaching, reflected in softer, rounded hand positions, upper-body movements, and repertoire considered more feminine. The chapter’s second section discusses masculine aspects of Pandit Das’s own dance, including his practice of dancing with dumbbells. Together, these sections consider how concepts of gender were expressed in Pandit Das’s evolving kathak style and how the half-male, half-female Hindu deity ardhanārīśvara influenced Pandit Das’s dance philosophy.

To explore the ways in which migrants negotiated longing, gender, intimacy, courtship, marriage, and identity across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the 1960s and 1970s, chapter 1 opens by examining and analyzing the broader racial, labor, and environmental contexts shaping José Chávez’s—the author’s father—experience as a Mexican laborer in Imperial Valley in the 1950s and 1960s. Specifically, it pays attention to working and living conditions in el valle and how those contributed to his loneliness, isolation, and ambivalence as a border dweller, despite his status as a green card holder and his ability to engage in return migration. Next, it examines letter writing as a form of courtship as detailed in the love letters he crafted and the cultural tools—stylized letter writing, the English language, portraits, songs, movies, and the radio—he drew upon to convince Maria Concepción “Conchita” Alvarado—the author’s mother—to accept his marriage proposal. Finally, it shows that while Conchita never formally agreed to the nuptials, she walked down the aisle and married José, an act that set her life on a new course. Indeed, within a few days, she left her hometown and relocated with José to the Mexicali-Calexico border, where they set out to create a new future for themselves.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the relationship between religion and the body politic in the United States as crafted by both religious and political leaders has moved through four stages. Following the Second World War, the dominant discourse emphasized unity while affirming a selective religious diversity. By the 1960s, the main theme had become a reluctant acknowledgment of disunity when it came to Americans’ common life, but a disunity that prevailed amid expanding religious diversity. The weakness of this formulation generated a third motif, prominent by the mid-1970s, promoting a contrived unity that masked increasing religious diversity. The new millennium witnessed a fourth pattern, a struggle to find and affirm a common ground when an ever-expanding pluralism had stripped a shared religious base from the collective life and experience of the American people. The question today is whether constructing a mutually meaningful symbolic cluster of is even possible.