Winner of the Zócalo Book Prize

Shortlisted for the Arthur Ross Book Award

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

A "powerful and cogent" (Bethanne Patrick, Washington Post) account of the twentieth-century battle for immigration reform that set the stage for today's roiling debates.

The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from southern and eastern Europe and outright banning those from nearly all of Asia. In a riveting narrative filled with a fascinating cast of characters, from the indefatigable congressman Emanuel Celler and senator Herbert Lehman to the bull-headed Nevada senator Pat McCarran, Jia Lynn Yang recounts how lawmakers, activists, and presidents from Truman through LBJ worked relentlessly to abolish the 1924 law.

Through a world war, a refugee crisis after the Holocaust, and a McCarthyist fever, a coalition of lawmakers and activists descended from Jewish, Irish, and Japanese immigrants fought to establish a new principle of equality in the American immigration system. Their crowning achievement, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, proved to be one of the most transformative laws in the country's history, opening the door to nonwhite migration at levels never seen before -- and changing America in ways that those who debated it could hardly have imagined. Framed movingly by her own family's story of immigration to America, Yang's One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is a deeply researched and illuminating work of history, one that shows how Americans have strived and struggled to live up to the ideal of a home for the "huddled masses," as promised in Emma Lazarus's famous poem.

• We started tracking this book on April 28, 2020.
• This book was $12.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 57 times in the past 2,165 days.
• The current price of this book is $9.99 last checked one day ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past 90 days.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past six months is $8.10.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is $3.99.
• The lowest price to date was $3.99 last reached on February 13, 2024.
• This book has been $3.99 3 times since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $14.55 last reached on March 17, 2021.
• This book has been $14.55 one time since we started tracking it.

• HistoryAmericasUnited States20th Century
• Politics & Social SciencesPolitics & GovernmentSpecific TopicsImmigration
• HistoryUnited StatesImmigration
• HistoryAmericas
• HistoryUnited States20th Century

• Publication Date: May 19, 2020
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 331 Pages
• File Size: 26 KB