EP #236 - 03.09.2021 - Immigrants in COVID America

Today I speak with Erika Lee and Maddalena Marinari about their project Immigrants in COVID America.

Erika Lee is a Regents Professor of History and Asian American Studies and Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. Recently elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, she is the Vice President of the Organization of American Historians and author of four award-winning books, including, most recently, The Making of Asian America: A History and America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States. America for Americans won an American Book Award and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. It was also 

highlighted by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the New York Public Library as one of the most important books illuminating the Trump era and informing essential issues in the 2020 election. 

Maddalena Marinari is associate professor of history at Gustavus Adolphus College. She has written extensively on immigration restriction, U.S. immigration policy, and immigrant mobilization. Her book Unwanted: Italian And Jewish Mobilization Against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882–1965 (2020) explores Italian and Jewish mobilization against restrictive immigration laws from 1882 to 1965. Along She is co-editor, with Maria Cristina Garcia and Madeline Hsu, she is one of the editors of A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: U.S. Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924–1965 (2019), an anthology on the impact of immigration restriction on the United States in the twentieth century. She is the co-editor with Erika Lee of a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of American History on the hundredth anniversary of the passage of the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924.