Simon & Schuster
September 2015
On Sale: September 15, 2015
415 pages ISBN: 1476743851 EAN: 9781476743851 Kindle: B00UDCNLH4 Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
The dramatic and compelling story of the transformation of
America during the last fifty years, told through a handful
of families in one suburban county in Virginia that has been
utterly changed by recent immigration.
In the fifty
years since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the
foreign-born population of the United States has tripled.
Significantly, these immigrants are not coming from Europe,
as was the case before 1965, but from all corners of the
globe. Today non-European immigration is ninety percent of
the total immigration to the US. Americans today are vastly
more diverse than ever. They look different, speak different
languages, practice different religions, eat different
foods, and enjoy different cultures.
In 1950,
Fairfax County, Virginia, was ninety percent white, ten
percent African-American, with a little more than one
hundred families who were “other.” Currently the
African-American percentage of the population is about the
same, but the Anglo white population is less than fifty
percent, and there are families of Asian, African, Middle
Eastern, and Latin American origin living all over the
county. A Nation of Nations follows the lives of a
few immigrants to Fairfax County over recent decades as they
gradually “Americanize.” Hailing from Korea, Bolivia, and
Libya, these families have stories that illustrate common
immigrant themes: friction, between minorities, economic
competition and entrepreneurship, and racial and cultural
stereotyping.
It’s been half a century since the
1965 Immigration and Nationality Act changed the landscape
of America, and no book has assessed the impact or
importance of this law as this one does, with its brilliant
combination of personal stories and larger demographic and
political issues.
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