What's Wrong with Immigration History?

Paul Spickard has written a massive study, which is evidently based on years of reading in a wide variety of historical literatures, as 147 pages of endnotes attest. It is the product of an admirable ambition, voiced in enthusiastic and uncompromising terms, to straighten out our misunderstandings and faulty conceptualizations of our entire history of racial and ethnic diversity. Spickard seeks to achieve this goal largely through finding ways to get race and ethnicity, via new conceptualizations of immigration and its meanings, to speak with one another rather than past one another, as he believes has always been the case. His specific purposes are clear and simple enough. He means to tell the story of American immigration from the voyages of European discovery and the earliest encounters between European colonist and Native Americans to the day before yesterday, but to do that as, he believes no one has ever done, by bringing together the insights that have been accumulating, principally in history and ethnic studies.

Based on critical, racialized notions of American diversity from within ethnic studies and revisions of immigration historiography, in the service of this purpose, he wishes to employ:

1. 1. a wider than conventional analytical lens that brings race and ethnicity in constant dialogue with one another such that every group but Native Americans are considered migrants from elsewhere, whether they came to be part of the American people by conquest and coercive territorial incorporation, territorial purchase, the slave trade, exile, or, as conceived traditionally, by voluntary migration in search of opportunity and individual freedom. The new lens allows for seeing the arrival, resettlement, and incorporation of peoples against the backdrop of internal and external expansion by which the United States conquered territory and replaced indigenous social systems with its own social structures based on class, ethnic, and racial hierarchies. Spickard also means to widen the analytical lens to achieve a greater inclusion of women migrants, whom he says appear in immigration history merely as if "they were just along for the ride, like a kind of baggage" (p. 234).

2. 2. a new chronology that rejects divisions between colonial and post-independence periods, or between the Old and the New Immigration, as in the first instance wrong, because the United States only recently has ceased the formal acquisition and incorporation of territory (in other words, colonialism); and in the second instance, because it fails to account for the presence of the Old Immigrants from northern and western Europe in very large numbers among the New Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What is central for Spickard, under any circumstance, is not so much the cast of character-peoples at any given time, but the cycles of population movement linked to economic growth and development throughout all of American history, the conquering of territory rich in resources within North America and beyond, and the displacement and replacement of its original inhabitants.

3. 3. an expanded geography that puts every area of the country into play simultaneously in order to counter what the author argues is the bias of immigration historiography in favor of the analyzing the East Coast and in particular, New York City, and of American historiography generally in favor of seeing frontiers in Turnerian terms, as lines between civilization and savagery, rather than as zones of cultural and social mixing and interaction. Spickard, in fact, finds the West Coast and Southwest more historically significant than the eastern and middle states, because the Far Western socio-economic system brought into social relations simultaneously a more comprehensive cross-section of races and peoples, including Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans, who were for long periods of time less a presence or no presence at all east of the Mississippi River, as well as Euro-Americans and African Americans.

4. 4. a changed analytical vocabulary, composed of new terms, such as normative whiteness (p. xiii ), by which he...