This book looks at Italian American campaigns to reform American immigration laws from 1945 to 1965. It argues that even while Italian Americans were members of a coalition that pushed for liberal immigration reforms, their campaigns reflected a mix of liberalism and conservatism. Italian American immigration reformers invoked both secular principles of democratic liberalism and arguments based on Catholic social thought to call for a more humane and equal system of regulating immigration than the one in place based on a system of National Origins quotas. Yet in practice, Italian American camp ... More

This book looks at Italian American campaigns to reform American immigration laws from 1945 to 1965. It argues that even while Italian Americans were members of a coalition that pushed for liberal immigration reforms, their campaigns reflected a mix of liberalism and conservatism. Italian American immigration reformers invoked both secular principles of democratic liberalism and arguments based on Catholic social thought to call for a more humane and equal system of regulating immigration than the one in place based on a system of National Origins quotas. Yet in practice, Italian American campaign rhetoric and legislative strategies often reflected a socially and racially conservative vision of Americanism. Through displays of anti-communism, household mass consumption, assimilation, and advancing narratives of immigrant contributions to the nation, Italian Americans largely asserted their group’s fitness for immigration and citizenship rights in the United States. Each of those displays was highly racialized and hardly contested accepted political and social boundaries, but rather reaffirmed them. Those actions demonstrated that Italian Americans were just as concerned with their group’s political and social equality with older-stock whites as they were with liberalizing American immigration laws.