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In a book of deep and telling ironies, Peter Schrag provides essential background for understanding the fractious debate over immigration. Covering the earliest days of the Republic to current events, Schrag sets the modern immigration controversy within the context of three centuries of debate over the same questions about who exactly is fit for citizenship. He finds that nativism has long colored our national history, and that the fear-and loathing-of newcomers has provided one of the faultlines of American cultural and political life. Schrag describes the eerie similarities between the race-based arguments for restricting Irish, German, Slav, Italian, Jewish, and Chinese immigrants in the past and the arguments for restricting Latinos and others today. He links the terrible history of eugenic "science" to ideas, individuals, and groups now at the forefront of the fight against rational immigration policies. Not Fit for Our Society makes a powerful case for understanding the complex, often paradoxical history of immigration restriction as we work through the issues that inform, and often distort, the debate over who can become a citizen, who decides, and on what basis.

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This is a book about Irish nationalism and how Irish nationalists developed their own conception of the Irish race. Bruce Nelson begins with an exploration of the discourse of race--from the nineteenth--century belief that "race is everything" to the more recent argument that there are no races. He focuses on how English observers constructed the "native" and Catholic Irish as uncivilized and savage, and on the racialization of the Irish in the nineteenth century, especially in Britain and the United States, where Irish immigrants were often portrayed in terms that had been applied mainly to enslaved Africans and their descendants. Most of the book focuses on how the Irish created their own identity--in the context of slavery and abolition, empire, and revolution. Since the Irish were a dispersed people, this process unfolded not only in Ireland, but in the United States, Britain, Australia, South Africa, and other countries. Many nationalists were determined to repudiate anything that could interfere with the goal of building a united movement aimed at achieving full independence for Ireland. But others, including men and women who are at the heart of this study, believed that the Irish struggle must create a more inclusive sense of Irish nationhood and stand for freedom everywhere. Nelson pays close attention to this argument within Irish nationalism, and to the ways it resonated with nationalists worldwide, from India to the Caribbean.

Race --- Irish --- National characteristics, Irish. --- Physical anthropology --- Irishmen (Irish people) --- Ethnology --- Irish national characteristics --- History. --- Ethnic identity. --- Ireland --- African Americans. --- Afro-Caribbeans. --- Anglo-Irish Treaty. --- Boer. --- Boers. --- British Empire. --- British foreign policy. --- Catholic Irish. --- Daniel O'Connell. --- Darwin. --- Eamon de Valera. --- England. --- English. --- Erskine Childers. --- Frederick Douglass. --- Ireland. --- Irish Catholics. --- Irish Parliamentary Party. --- Irish Patriotic Strike. --- Irish Progressive League. --- Irish Republican Brotherhood. --- Irish Revolution. --- Irish identity. --- Irish immigrants. --- Irish nationalism. --- Irish nationalists. --- Irish nationhood. --- Irish race. --- Jan Christian Smuts. --- Michael Davitt. --- Protestant Ascendancy. --- Sinn Fin. --- abolition. --- abolitionists. --- activists. --- anti-Semitism. --- antislavery. --- black nationalism. --- dispossession. --- evolution. --- intellectuals. --- land. --- nationalist movement. --- nationality. --- oppression. --- race. --- racial discourse. --- racial identity. --- racialization. --- republican movement. --- slavery. --- slaves. --- socialism. --- war correspondent.