In Memory of Oscar Handlin, the Father of Immigration Studies

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Last week, the father of immigration studies passed away at age 95. Oscar Handlin was the New York-born son of Jewish immigrants who went on to teach at Harvard. His 1941 classic Boston’s Immigrants was one of the first academic studies of a group generally regarded as beneath serious scholarship. His 1951 book The Uprooted won the Pulitzer Prize. In it he wrote, “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”

Handlin’s response to modern anti-immigrant sentiment was to place nativism in its historical context.

“Remember that when you say ‘I will have none of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange,’ you have denied America with that word.”

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Patrick Young blogs daily for Long Island Wins. He is the Downstate Advocacy Director of the New York Immigration Coalition and Special Professor of Immigration Law at Hofstra School of Law. He served as the Director of Legal Services and Program at Central American Refugee Center (CARECEN) for three decades before retiring in 2019. Pat is also a student of immigration history and the author of The Immigrants' Civil War.

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