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LEGAL_ST 305-0

American Immigration

1 Unit · Undergraduate

Themes in history of immigration, especially from Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Law, racial formation, acculturation, transnational and international contexts, competing notions of citizenship. Taught with HISTORY 305-0 ; may not receive credit for both courses.

2026 Fall

Topics

  • We have six primary objectives in this course: 1) To gain an analytic framework for understanding the processes by which immigrants have helped create and recreate their own and the United States' culture and society. 2) To understand the ways in which law has structured (and been structured by) the immigration experience, including to engage with scholarship describing the historical structures, processes, and practices that shape racism and anti-racism; power and resistance; justice and injustice; equality and inequality; and belonging and subjection. 3) To acquire knowledge of historical phenomena (U.S. legal, social, political, cultural, and social practices and their interdependent development over time in their local, regional, and global contexts) as examined through immigration and migration. 4) To develop skills of historical analysis, including the means to evaluate sources and become acquainted with scholarly historical debates and discussion. 5) To help students acquire historical perspective on the present, think and communicate critically about historical and contemporary society and politics, and appreciate the impact of historical developments in immigration history and in the historical study of immigration. 6) To foster analytical, reading, discussion and writing skills and learn to express the results of historical investigation effectively and persuasively in written, oral, and visual forms, and engage in debate with current and past interpreters of history.

Readings

  • Natalia Molina, How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts, UC Press 2014 ISBN 978-0-520-28008-3 Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, Princeton 9780691160825 Anzia Yezierska, The Bread Givers, 3rd edition, Persea Books, 2003, ISBN 0892552905 Additional materials available via Canvas.
    Class Materials (Required)

Prerequisites & course information

Historical Studies Foundational Discipline SoC Individual and Social Behavior Distro U.S. Perspectives on Power, Justice, and Equity

Sources