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Unguarded Gates: A History of America's Immigration Crisis. By Otis L. Graham Jr. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. xvi, 242 pp. $26.95, ISBN 0-7425-2228-8.)
This slender volume recounts efforts to limit immigration throughout American history. Otis L. Graham Jr. argues that the restrictions, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the quota laws of the 1920s, benefited the country, and he urges that the United States reduce immigration today. Despite the book's subtitle, A History of America's Immigration Crisis, the book reads more like an article for a journal of opinion than a work of history; more than half of it is devoted to the contemporary drive to restrict immigration, which Graham favors because of the environmental, cultural, and economic problems immigrants allegedly cause.
Light on evidence, Graham's Unguarded Gates makes many claims that are either wrong or insufficiently supported. "In the public debate" leading up to Chinese...