referencebooks

United States Immigration: A Reference Handbook

By E. Willard Miller and Ruby M. Miller.

Published by ABC-CLIO in their Contemporary World Issues series, 1996.

This is a 6" by 9" hardbound book running to 305 pages plus a brief preface.

This book aims to provide a full complement of reference information on U.S. immigration, including statics, information about policy and law, chronologies, bibliographies (including audiovisual resources), historical trends, directory information, and a glossary. The information is presented in chapters, subchapters, and bite-sized sub-subchapters, with some data tables in the mix.

The six chapters (with subchapters in parentheses) are:

1. Immigration: A Perspective (Roots of Immigration; U.S. Immigration Policy; Immigration Trends; Illegal Immigration; Migrants; Refugees; Immigration out of the United States; Impact of Immigration; References)
   
2. Chronology (Laws and Regulations; Legislative Process Leading to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; Chronology of Refugee Admissions; Illegal Immigration)
   
3. Laws and Regulations (Immigration; Naturalization; Refugees; Special Legislation)
   
4. Directory of Organizations (Immigration; Migration; Migrant Workers; Refugees; Organizational Sources)
   
5. Bibliography (Reference Sources; Books; Journal Articles and Government Documents; Selected Journal Titles)
   
6. Audiovisual Aids (Immigration; Immigration Legislation; Immigrants; Aliens; Migrant Labor; Refugees; Regional Immigration)
   

The information presented is quite objective and factual. I am always looking for a lack of objectivity in reference books, and thought I had spotted it in the table of contents to this one. In the first chapter section on Refugees, the sub-subchapters listed are Hungary, Cuba and Vietnam - and that's it. Aren't there a lot of Palestinian refugees in the U.S.? Aren't there a lot of refugees from Central and South American dictatorships? Turning to that subchapter, our explanation is right in the first sentence: "As a result of U.S. criteria concerning which immigrants can be classified as refugees, nearly all the refugees who have entered the United States since the 1940's have been from communist countries (Table 15)." It was thoughtful of the authors, in my opinion, to provide this explanation right up front, and state that they are using the U.S. government definition of a refugee in the data that they present.

I would say that this is a handy and reliable guide to factual information about U.S. immigration.