Strangers Among Us; How Latino Immigration Is Transforming America

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 25 cm. viii, 349 pages. Notes. Index, Signed by the author sticker on front of DJ. Inscribed and dated by the author on fep. Signed by the author on title page. Roberto Suro holds a joint appointment as a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the School of Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California. He is also director of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, an interdisciplinary research center exploring the challenges and opportunities of demographic diversity in the 21st century global city. Roberto Suro examines immigration with an emphasis on the Hispanic population, U.S. immigration policy, and U.S. public opinion regarding immigration - as a researcher, author, and journalist. His books include Strangers Among Us: Latino Lives in a Changing America, Watching America's Door: The Immigration Backlash and the New Policy Debate, and Remembering the American Dream: Hispanic Immigration and National Policy. Derived from a Kirkus review: An effective study; the narrative weaves together reportage, biography, and analysis. As a term, "Latinos" includes groups as diverse as Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, Chicanos, and Guatemalan Mayans. Suro shows that each Latino immigrant group is a separate story. Latino immigration as a whole has greatly accelerated over the past decade or so, and immigrants have arrived in the US at a time when a changing economy and an unsympathetic social mood make their futures in the US tenuous at best. At the same time, they become the repository of the majority population's fear of change and difference, and of the majority's own precarious position in a dynamic economy. The author, himself a second-generation Latino, argues forcefully and persuasively for rational and effective immigration controls, but also for social programs that will equip immigrants with the tools necessary for survival. This is a book of immediate importance and lasting significance.