Abstract
Immigration policy is one of the hottest political potatoes in the United States today, pitting, as it does, the rights of U.S. laborers to protect their jobs (whether or not there is an immigrant threat to their jobs is debatable) versus the desirability of sustaining the U.S. self-definition as a country that takes in “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” a country in which we were all once immigrants. The legal status of people who arrive in the United States without permission (or without permission to stay) and the legal status of employers who engage these workers fuels another debate. What is to be done? American Israelis: Migration, Transnationalism, and Diasporic Identity does not address these “immigration debates” but rather attempts to describe one particular immigrant group, Israelis. One should not criticize a book for what it does not do, yet I think a major opportunity was lost in not placing Israelis in the larger context of immigration controversies. Doing so might have made clear that the current debate is not about immigration, as much as it is about socio-economic class. In fact, the words “visa” and “illegal” do not appear in the index.