Common threads in the long-term integration experience of migrants, past and present
Leo Lucassen is a professor of global labour and migration history and director of the International Institute of Social History at Leiden University. He is the coeditor of Migration and Membership Regimes in Global and Historical Perspective and The Encyclopedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe, from the Seventeenth Century to the Present.
"This book is an important addition to the literature on
integration in Western Europe, and draws on a balanced selection of
key works that have contributed to an understanding of the impact
migration processes have on both the host society and on the
migrants themselves. . . . With a historian's eye for comparative
detail that links the past and the present, Lucassen has written a
book that shows how perceptions of migrants as problematic and
threatening to the host nation are not a new phenomenon."--Patterns
of Prejudice
"The acid test of a scholarly book is whether we learn something
new from reading it—a more stringent version, whether we learn
something new about a subject we thought we already knew well. By
that tougher standard, Leo Lucassen's new book, The Immigrant
Threat, passes with distinction. . . . It rescues a nearly lost
history, that of earlier immigrations to western European
countries, such as the movement of Italians to France. . . .
Lucassen is convincing that the comparison between past and present
has produced a 'feast of recognition' of similarities between
different eras, notwithstanding the obvious
differences."--International Review of Social History
"By far the most persuasive and important message of the book is
the general one that historians and social scientists should get
together more and pool their resources. Certainly social science
researchers examining recent and contemporary migrations have
tended to overlook the past. On the one hand, the successful
incorporation of immigrants in earlier migration epochs has become
an invisible part of national histories and memories; on the other
hand, the longer-term assumption (based especially on the U.S.
experience) of successful assimilation hides many difficult phases
of discrimination and ethnic identity survival."--International
History Review
"Well-written and extremely well-researched. . . . Makes a
significant contribution to current immigration debates and should
be widely consulted."--Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare
"Important reading for U.S. as well as European audiences. Highly
recommended."--Choice
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