The walls within: the politics of immigration in modern America

"In 1965, the Hart-Celler Act abolished the national origins quotas of the 1920s that had severly limited immigration to American from everywhere but Western Europe.

The result was mass immigration from Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia.

The wave of immigration and the restrictionism it produced led to a bitter political struggle over immigrants' rights that continues to this day.

This book is a history of the post-1965 political battles between advocates of expansive admissions policies, rights, and benefits for immigrants and their anti-immigration, or restrictionist, opponents.

Coleman argues that as immigration rendered what had once been seen as hard boundaries of the physical nation-state into something more porous, the rights of immigrations became crucial to immigration control.

Restrictionists sought to limit immigrants' access to the American welfare state by arguing that they were a burden to the state an