Today Asia provides four times as many newcomers to America as does all of Europe, and millions of other would-be U. S. citizens pour in yearly from throughout the non-European world. That is a stunning new reality whose ramifications affect every facet of American life. How this situation has evolved and what the next chapter holds are subjects that touch everyone who has ever wondered whether a nation professing to believe in human equality can create harmony among. Peoples fundamentally dissimilar--in color, culture, means, and expectations. In reviewing more than two hundred years of the American experience, A Nation of Strangers shows that many of the questions raised by America's newest immigrants are identical to those raised by earlier waves. How many newcomers can the country comfortably absorb? What should be required of those seeking admission? Will the native-born suffer if foreigners come in? Every generation has grappled. With such questions. The result has been a constant tension between the desire to welcome and the impulse to exclude. On one hand, America has taken in more immigrants than any other nation on earth. Yet, she has repeatedly given in to xenophobia and paranoia--and consequently excluded thousands fleeing Naziism or, more recently, trying to escape repression in Haiti. In the beginning the immigrants--African slaves excepted--were overwhelmingly British; and colonial. Leaders assumed the United States would continue to be made up predominantly of Protestants of British origin. By the mid-1800s, however, that assumption was vanishing beneath a wave of Irish-Catholic and German immigration. Following the Civil War, blacks were granted naturalization and citizenship rights. Later in the century, a new flood of immigrants arrived--many of them Jews or Catholics from eastern and southern Europe. In the 1940s Chinese, East Indians, and. Other Asians were eligible for naturalization. By the middle 1980s, the English flow had become little more than a trickle. Great Britain ranked twelfth as a place of origin for newcomers--behind Mexico, the Philippines, Korea, Cuba, India, mainland China, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Jamaica, Haiti, and Iran. Now, as America faces her largest immigration influx since the turn of the century, questions about her ability to absorb newcomers take on an added. Urgency--all the more so because the new group is more ethnically diverse than any previous wave in history. A Nation of Strangers analyzes the complicated array of political and social forces that have brought about the immigration increase and the startling changes in immigrant ethnicity, while providing important insights into the challenges those changes portend for the future and for all Americans, white and minority alike.