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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.

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.

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.

This chapter studies how immigration policy can be deployed as a key instrument of grand strategy, a site where state actors might use the levers of immigrant and refugee admissions to advance both a comprehensive and integrated set of social, economic, and security goals at home. Indeed, a diverse array of US presidents, lawmakers, and activists have had grand strategies in mind as they pursued major immigration reform. The chapter focuses on a particularly significant effort to remake the US immigration system—the 1960s struggle to dismantle national origins quotas and reopen US gates to immigrants and refugees—in order to illustrate the possibilities and limitations of grand strategizing in this policy realm. One can discern these dynamics in immigration reforms and executive actions from the 1920s to the present, but the successful battle for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 provides an especially illuminating example. Before turning to this case, however, the chapter first considers immigration control and grand strategy in the early American republic and the rise of rival interests and ideals that make significant policy innovation contingent on incongruous coalitions and uneasy compromises.

This chapter shows that recent efforts to deport criminals also serve to underline citizenship's fragility and its contested nature. Drawing upon the example of the United Kingdom, it shows how governments have redrawn the boundaries of membership to bring some groups of people previously accepted as members into the reach of deportation power, generating controversy and contention. The changing historical contours of deportation are examined through the parliamentary discussions surrounding four pieces of UK legislation relating to the British state's deportation power. These are Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962; the Nationality, Immigration, and Asylum Act 2002; the Immigration, Asylum, and Nationality Act 2006; and the UK Borders Act 2007.

This chapter examines the U.S. government's systematic monitoring of the political activities and loyalty of Chinese Americans in the country in response to the communist revolution in China and the outbreak of the Korean War. It considers the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which related racial equality to the advancement of the U.S. Cold War foreign policy of internationalism, as an illustration of America's attempt to contain communism. Focusing on the 1951 Chinese extortion racket and the 1956 Chinese slot racket, it also demonstrates how the government incorporated Chinese loyalty into its expansionist goals in Asia to promote the extension of civil rights to Chinese Americans through immigration reform. It argues that immigration reform helped secure the rights of all and promote the credibility of U.S. democracy during the early Cold War years.

Family reunification provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (the McCarran-Walter Act) allowed ethnic women, for the first time, to sponsor the migration of their alien husbands and children outside the limited quota slots for Southern and Eastern Europeans. This chapter explores advice columns in New York’s Il Progresso Italo-Americano to examine the gendered implications of the 1952 act on postwar Italian migration. The 1952 act granted Italian women a new and controversial visibility in the Italian-language press and in the larger ethnic community as instigators of immigration. During the 1950s, this chapter argues, advice columns about the 1952 act turned into platforms for both exalting and policing Italian women’s roles in initiating postwar migrations, marriages, and families.

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.

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.