From All Points: America's Immigrant West, 1870s-1952

At a time when immigration policy is the subject of heated debate, this book makes clear that the true wealth of America is in the diversity of its peoples. By the end of the 20th century the American West was home to nearly half of America's immigrant population, including Asians and Armenians, Germans and Greeks, Mexicans, Italians, Swedes, Basques, and others. This book tells their rich and complex story--of adaptation and isolation, maintaining and mixing traditions, and an ongoing ebb and flow of movement, assimilation, and replenishment. These immigrants and their children built communities, added to the region's culture, and contended with discrimination and the lure of Americanization. The mark of the outsider, the alien, the nonwhite passed from group to group, even as the complexion of the region changed. The region welcomed, then excluded, immigrants, in restless waves of need and nativism that continue to this day.

"This richly detailed history of immigrants in the 20th-century American West rewards the reader with close attention to individual voices of immigrants. Encyclopedic in coverage, loaded with personal stories of real people, this book is unparalleled in its coverage. Finally the West becomes a full part of American immigration history." --Walter Nugent, author of Into the West: The Story of Its People

"This book is a cleary written, hefty synthesis of American immigration literature." --Lissa Wadewitz, Journal of American Ethnic History, Fall 2008 Indiana University Press Indiana University Press

"Written in the fashion of Oscar Handlin, this study makes a convincing case that immigration history comprises an essential part of the history of the American West, and that appreciation of the former and the roles played by myriad alien arrivals is essential for understanding the latter.... Barkan (emer., California State Univ.) combines vignettes based on immigrant reminiscences with keen analysis to explore four related themes: various groups' arrivals, their economic influences, their effects on public policy, and their adaptation and assimilation. The resulting narrative is readable and informative.... Recommended." --Choice Indiana University Press

"... important demographic profiles, and on a meticulous reading of the vast secondary literature that is so masterfully synthesized here." --Arnoldo De Leon, Register of Kentucky Historical Society, Summer 2007

"Within this handsome volume, Barkan has set a benchmark for further research in the varied histories of immigrants from all points" --Frederick C. Luebke, New Mexico Historical Review, Fall 2008

"From All Points deserves high praise for a number of good things, including meticulous research, expert synthesizing, keen conceptualization, and rich narrative. More important, Barkan's ambitious project does a great service to western historians who have longed for an overview of immigration." --MONTANA: MAG OF WESTERN HIST, Spring 2009

"An engaging and complex work, From All Points makes a persuasive case for the centrality of immigrants to the growth of the West." --Frank Van Nuys, Western Historical Quarterly 39, Autumn 2008

"Elliott Robert Barkan comes ideally equipped for the task of this book... By including vignettes of individual life stories, he manages to capture both the forest and the trees of the immigrant experience, and puts a human face on many of the general tendencies and developments he describes." --H-Net Reviews, October, 2009

"From All Points is a remarkable synthesis of the West as a region of immigrants. It tells the story of how vital immigrants were to economic growth and modernization. This will be the prime reference for 21st century scholars of immigration and ethnicity in the American West." --Annals of Wyoming, Spring 2010

A magisterial history of immigrant groups and their contributions to the making of the modern American West

Elliott Robert Barkan is Professor Emeritus of History and Ethnic Studies at California State University. He is author of Our Multicultural Heritage: A Guide to America's Principal Ethnic Groups and And Still They Come: The Immigrant in American Society, 1920s-1990s. He lives in Corona, California.

Preface

Acknowledgments

Note on Translation and Transliteration

Introduction: Defining Themes--The West, Westerners, and Whiteness

Prelude: Western Immigrant Experiences

Part 1. Laying the Groundwork: Immigrants and Immigration Laws, Old and New, 1870s - 1903

1. Immigrant Stories from the West

2. The Draw of the Late-Nineteenth-Century West

3. Where in the West Were They?

4. Targets of Racism: Chinese and Others on the Mainland and Hawaii

5. The Scandinavians and Step Migration

6. The German Presence

7. Proximity of Homeland: The Mexicans

8. In the Year 1903

9. Foreshadowing Twentieth-Century Patterns

Part 2. Opening and Closing Doors, 1903 - 1923

10. Immigrant Stories and the West in the 1900s

11. Who Came?

12. The Dillingham Commission and the West

13. The Continuing Evolution of Immigration and Naturalization Issues and Policies (Asians)

14. Miners, Merchants, and Entrepreneurs: Europeans Compete with Europeans (Greeks and Others)

15. Land, Labor, and Immigrant Communities: Hawaii and the Mainland (Asians, Portuguese, Armenians, and Scandinavians)

16. Newcomers, Old and New (Italians, Basques, French, and Mexicans)

17. The First World War and Americanization

18. State and Federal Laws and Decisions, 1917 - 1920

19. The Early 1920s: Threshold of Momentous Changes

Part 3. "Give me a bug, please": Restriction and Repatriation, Accommodation and Americanization, 1923 - 1941

20. A World of Peoples: The 1920s and 1930s

21. Demographic Trends: A Changing West and Changing Westerners

22. Institutionalizing the Quota System: 1924

23. Divided Yet Interlinked: The Rural West

24. Filipinos: The Newer Immigrant Wave Bridging the Rural and Urban West

25. Divided Yet Interlinked: The Urban West in the Interwar Years

26. Urban Landscapes and Ethnic Encounters

27. From "Reoccupation" to Repatriation: Mexicans in the Southwest between the Wars

28. Darker Turns during the Interwar Years: Workers and Refugees

29. Aliens and Race Issues on the Eve of the Second World War

30. Interwar or Interlude? Twilight and Dawn in the West

Part 4. America's Dilemma: Races, Refugees, and Reforms in an Age of World War and Cold War, 1942 - 1952

31. Voices from America on the Eve of War

32. War: Against All Those of Japanese Descent

33. The Second World War's Other Enemy Aliens: Italians and Germans

34. The Homefront in Wartime: Preface to an Era of Change

35. Wartime and Postwar Agricultural Issues: Land, Labor, Growers, and Unions

36. Immigrants and Ethnics in the Postwar Years

37. The Cold War Heats Up: The Politics of Immigration, 1950 - 1952

38. Dora and the Harbinger of Coming Events

39. Looking Back on America's Immigrant West

Appendix

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index