Book review, ‘Almost All Alien’
The book by Paul Spickard ‘Almost All Aliens’ tackles the issue of immigration in an unconventional way by integrating the study of immigrant people in relation to the native people, slavery, freeing of slaves, race and ethnicity in general. The author analyses the various approaches in understanding immigration. The assimilation approach as tackled in the book requires that various cultures converged in the United States and into some modified, median American culture. He does not agree with this theory however, as African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and the Native Americans never fitted the bill for assimilation to the Anglo-American culture. The other approach considered by the author is where the immigrants are considered as part of a transnational Diaspora who is a part of the native places of origin as they assimilate with their new home. By utilizing these aggregations, the author delves into the aftermath of immigration where people are classified by having some similarities in physical features but not necessarily similar cultures or histories. The whites appear as the main people in the American community who have the authority to demand that other cultural groups conform to their culture. The Anglo-American culture is viewed as the template against which the other societies should measure up to.
The other issue tackled in the book is the issue of Asian immigrants. Immigrants from the Asian regions of china and Japan are viewed as to have slimmer possibilities for assimilation into the American culture in comparison to the other cultural groups. The conservative culture practiced in most Asian countries made them ill suited to assimilate effectively into the American culture owing to its liberal nature.
The enduring theme raised in the book is that of “almost all aliens” as the title suggests. The only indigenous people to the United States are the indigenous Americans who make a very small percentage of the American population. However, the European immigrants, most specifically the English, consider everyone else as foreign with the rest of the Caucasian population being less foreign in comparison with the other ethnic groupings. This notion portrays the feeling of superiority of the whites over the rest of the people and the need for everyone else to assimilate to their ways of doing things.
Works Cited
Spickard, Paul R. Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.
