Will the Twenty-First Century World Embrace Immigration History?

Abstract

In countries such as Canada, the United States and Australia, twentieth-century nation-building projects explicitly acknowledged the salience of linkages between histories of immigration, race and ethnicity. In these countries—and a few others, such as Argentina and France—immigration history has a rich and worthy history. Yet, immigration history as a scholarly field also carries the burden of histories of slavery and imperialism. Today, many countries around the world are faced with the challenge of transforming mobile people into citizens, or at least denizens. Can the model of ‘nation of immigrants’ travel across time and space to do nation-building work in the twenty-first century? The evidence presented in this paper suggests that is an unlikely outcome of globalization as more countries, including at times even the United States, debate or openly reject the immigrant paradigms as a model for their futures.