Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (review)

Paul Spickard's Almost All Aliens is about much more than immigration, as that topic is typically conceived. It is an attempt to integrate the study of immigration with the study of native peoples, slavery and emancipation, and race and ethnicity in general, from about 1600 to the present. Spickard does not maintain one analytical framework in carrying out this integration. He draws, to varying degrees, on three approaches to understanding these issues. The first is the "assimilationist" approach, the notion that much of immigrant history can be understood as a convergence of immigrant groups to some median American culture. Spickard finds this concept to be deeply flawed, in that Asians, Hispanics, African Americans, and Native Americans are never considered by many white Americans to be suitable candidates for assimilation to the Anglo-American "norm." A second approach considered by Spickard looks at migrants as part of a "transnational diaspora" who move as part of the international flow of commerce and who maintain ties in their country of origin even as they develop connections in their new home. Spickard makes use of these themes but considers this conception of migration to be mainly relevant for a relatively well-educated and privileged subset of the migrant community. Finally, Spickard considers the process of immigration and its aftermath as part of "panethnic formation," in which members of various nationalities and ethnic communities, sharing some physical characteristics but having different histories, cultures, and languages, evolve into a "panethnic" aggregation (e.g. Native American, Black, Hispanic, Asian American) in the eyes of whites and, as a result of common treatment by whites, in their own understanding as well.

The book is structured largely chronologically. While the first chapter lays out the themes described above, the nine remaining chapters carry us from the 1600s to the present day. There are varying emphases on the experiences of immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Latin America; Native Americans; Mexicans "transported" from Mexico to the US as a result of war and the redrawing of boundaries in the mid-1800s; and African Americans under slavery and after emancipation. Two appendices are provided. One is a timeline of important changes in immigration law. The other is a very comprehensive set of tables detailing the magnitude of immigrant inflows from a wide variety of countries.

A main strength of the book is its ambitious scope. By treating European immigrants alongside those from Asia and Latin America, Spickard is able to highlight the centrality of evolving conceptions of race in determining the status of these groups. His discussion of immigrants from China and Japan, who were a fairly small share of all immigrants but who generated a considerable amount of anguished discussion regarding the limits of their likely assimilation, is particularly enlightening. Spickard, a professor of history at UC-Santa Barbara, has published extensively on the history of Asian and Pacific peoples, and this expertise shines through in these sections of the book. His incorporation of the evolution of naturalization law, a topic often insufficiently treated in discussions of immigration but one that is particularly relevant in the experience of Asian peoples, is also very useful. The vibrancy of Spickard's writing is also a strength.

The weaknesses of the book largely parallel these strengths. The scope of the material is so broad that some sections feel superficially descriptive and somewhat disjointed. The material on Native Americans and African Americans in particular is sometimes poorly integrated, leading to interruptions of the main thrust of the narrative. A more thematic organization rather than a chronological one, perhaps with chapters focusing on the history of citizenship law, the evolution of the legal meaning of "whiteness," and similar topics might have made the analytical content more plain while also reducing the amount of repetition and retracing of arguments created by the chronological structure.

Similarly, while the energetic and informal rhetorical style is in some ways a strength, the frequent use...