About the Book

Acknowledgements to the First Edition
Acknowledgements to the Second Edition

Preface to the First Edition
Preface to the Second Edition

1. Immigration, Race, Ethnicity, Colonialism

Beyond Ellis Island—How Not to Think about Immigration History
Not Assimilation but Race Making: The Immigrant Assimilation Model; The Transnational Diasporic Model; The Panethnic Formation Model; Race vs. Ethnicity: The Difference, and the Difference It Makes; Ethnic Formation Processes; Colonialism and Race Making
Words Matter: Some Terms the Reader May Want to Think about Differently; An Idea that May be New
Notes

2. Colliding Peoples in Eastern North America, 1600-1780

What Do We Celebrate?
In the Beginning There Were Indians: Diversity; Origins
There Goes the Neighborhood: European Incursion and “Settlement”: Spanish, French, and Dutch Encounter Native Peoples; English Immigrants Encounter Native Peoples; Resistance, Conflict, Genocide
A Mixed Multitude: European Migrants: English Immigrants; Immigration Policy under the British; Other Europeans; Indenture; From English to American
Out of Africa: To Become a Slave; Dimensions and Effects; How “Black” and “Slave” Came to Mean the Same Thing; Variations on a Theme; From Igbo and Bambara to Negro
Merging Peoples, Blending Cultures: The End of an Age; Identity: Black, White, and Red; Assimilation
Notes

3. An Anglo-American Republic? Racial Citizenship, 1760-1860

Slavery and Anti-Slavery in the Era of the American Revolution: Thinking about Freedom, and Not; Three-fifths of a Person; Partly-Free People of Color and One Drop of Blood; Africans and Indians
Free White Persons: Defining Membership
European Immigrants: Beginnings of US Immigration Policy; Immigration, but Not “Old” or “New”; British; Germans; Peasants Into City People: The Famine Irish; Sephardim and German Jews
Issues in European Migration: Individual Choice or Embedded in a Web of Industrial Capital?; Recruitment and Chain Migration; Changes in Transportation Technology and Travel Conditions
Nativism
Were the Irish Ever Not White?: Making a White Race
Notes

4. The Border Crossed Us—Euro-Americans Take the Continent, 1830-1900

US Colonial Expansion Across North America: Making Empire, Making Race: Manifest Destiny and Westward Expansion; Indian Deportation to the West; Resistance and Genocide; The Remnant: Reservation Indians; Disappearing Peoples; Native American Panethnic Formation
Taking the Mexican Northlands: Forget the Alamo: Taking Texas for Slavery; Expanding Aggression; Incorporating Mexico’s People, and Not; Making Race in California
Racial Replacement
East from Asia: Chinese Immigrants; The Anti-Chinese Movement
Slave and Citizen
Colonialism and Race Making
Notes

Projecting the Future

Some Issues to Consider As We Look Ahead

What Do Immigrants Cost?

How Shall We Deal with Inequalities that Have Been Shaped by Generations?

Who Is an American?

Reprise

Hope for the Future?

Notes

Appendix A

About the Authors

The first edition of Almost All Aliens was written by Paul Spickard, published in 2007. Francisco Beltrán and Laura Hooton joined as co-authors for the second edition, published in 2022. Carolina Jones Ortiz created the original artwork for the cover of the second edition and the website banner. The website for the first edition was crafted by Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly. Laura Hooton did the bulk of the work in fashioning this edition’s more expansive website.

Paul Spickard

Paul Spickard is Distinguished Professor of History and Affiliate Professor of Asian American Studies, Black Studies, Chicana/o Studies, East Asian Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has held positions at 20 universities and institutes in the United States and abroad. He has written or edited 24 books and over 100 articles on race, migration, identity, and related topics, including: Shape Shifters: Journeys Across Terrains of Race and Identity (2019); Red and Yellow, Black and Brown: Decentering Whiteness in Mixed Race Studies (2017); Race in Mind (2015); Global Mixed Race (2014); Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race and Colonialism in American History and Identity (2007, 2022); Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World (2005); Racial Thinking in the United States (2004); Japanese Americans (1996, 2009); and Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in 20th-Century America (1989). His current project is Race Changes.

Francisco Beltrán

Francisco Beltrán is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Oklahoma State University. He is a US historian who specializes in Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x history, race and ethnicity, immigration, and borderlands. He is currently working on a manuscript that examines the Mexican American Community Press of San Diego, California during the 1960s and 1970s. Dr. Beltrán completed his PhD at UC Santa Barbara in 2019. He has previously taught at UC Santa Barbara, San Francisco State University, and the University of Michigan.

Laura Hooton

Laura Hooton is Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Previously, she taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where she founded the Black History Project (https://www.westpoint.edu/academics/academic-departments/history/black-history-main). She works at the intersection of African American history, borderlands history, and Black and ethnic studies. She is interested in race, ethnicity, identity, and citizenship, especially in the context of African American history, Latinx history, and comparative race and ethnicity in the American West and U.S.-Mexico borderlands, social movements, the North American borderlands, and migration and immigration. Her first monograph, under contract with University of Oklahoma Press, focuses on Little Liberia, an African American agricultural community in Baja California in the early twentieth century, as well as its larger place in United States, Mexico, and Baja California History, Black studies, and social movements. Her work on Little Liberia appears in Farming Across Borders: A Transnational History of the North American West and California History (2017). She received her Ph.D. in history with an interdisciplinary emphasis in Black studies from UC Santa Barbara in 2018.

Carolina Jones Ortiz – Artist

Carolina Jones Ortiz likes her name to be pronounced in Spanish (Cah-roh-lee-nah), even though her father picked her a name that could easily be translated into English. She also refuses to erase “Ortiz” from her surname even though all her official US documents did.

Carolina Jones Ortiz is a stubborn Mexican-American artist that likes to draw all the things that make life uncomfortable and complicated. Never straying far from her roots, Carolina makes comics about her experience growing up on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Similarly, her illustration work aims to depict the many nuances of the immigrant experience.

Reviews

Placing race at the center of his story, Spickard offers an important corrective to dominant immigrant narratives about European huddled masses and bountiful golden doors. As immigration debates rage, Almost All Aliens provides vital historical perspective.
— Thomas A. Guglielmo, Associate Professor and Chair of American Studies at GWU

Almost All Aliens is simply stunning. Spickard powerfully connects the study of immigration to the histories of race, slavery, and the displacement of Native peoples. In doing so, he revises both immigration history and American history
— Erika Lee, author of At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 and The Making of Asian America or America for Americans.

With Almost All Aliens Paul Spickard again demonstrates that he is one of our most skillful and innovative interpreters of race and ethnicity in American life. He challenges most of the assumptions made about the topic since Crèvecoeur asked his fateful question and provides an exciting analytic narrative of our immigrant past.
— Roger Daniels, Charles Phelps Taft Professor Emeritus of History, University of Cincinnati

Almost All Aliens is a stunning achievement! By combining the insights of the massive recent literature on immigration, race, and colonialism, Paul Spickard has produced a masterful new narrative of U.S. immigration history for the 21st century. Immensely readable and thoroughly provocative, it will delight students and scholars of immigration alike.
— George J. Sanchez, University of Southern California, author of Becoming Mexican American and Boyle Heights

With this book, Paul Spickard has produced the best single-volume study of American immigration history available today.
— K. Scott Wong, Williams College

Almost All Aliens

Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity

About the Book

Contents

Acknowledgements to the First Edition
Acknowledgements to the Second Edition

Preface to the First Edition
Preface to the Second Edition

1. Immigration, Race, Ethnicity, Colonialism

2. Colliding Peoples in Eastern North America, 1600-1780

3. An Anglo-American Republic? Racial Citizenship, 1760-1860

4. The Border Crossed Us—Euro-Americans Take the Continent, 1830-1900

5. The Great Wave, 1870-1930

6. Cementing Hierarchy: Issues and Interpretations, 1870-1930

7. White People’s America, 1924-1965

8. New Migrants from New Places, Since 1965

9. Redefining Membership amid Multiplicity, Since 1965

10. The Return of White Supremacy?