Toward a Better Life
Congratulations go out to Peter Morton Coan, whose book Toward a Better Life: America’s New Immigrants in Their Own Words was just picked up by Prometheus Books.
Long before Arizona passed its highly controversial immigration law last week, immigration has been one of the nation’s hottest and most contentious issues, with a recent CNN/Gallup poll showing that 69 percent of Americans favor less immigration. And rarely a day goes by without major newspapers & periodicals running immigration related pieces. Even President Obama couldn’t escape this issue as last year his aunt was accused of being an illegal alien and was subjected to an immigration hearing to determine her status.
When we think of immigration, we often think of Ellis Island, but while 16 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island in its 62 years of operation, since then more than 75 million immigrants have crossed our borders, including as many as 10 million illegally. Today nearly a quarter of the US population are immigrants, more than at any time since World War II. More than 900,000 immigrants became U.S. citizens in 2008 while the INS detained or deported more than 40,000, another record.
Peter Morton Coan’s previous book, Ellis Island Interviews, was an attempt to record the stories of the last surviving immigrants who came through Ellis Island from 1892-1954. The book offered the accounts of immigrants’ lives in their own words, oral histories told by the men, women and children who lived them. Toward a Better Life will utilize the same approach and will be the first book to offer a comprehensive anthology of oral histories about American immigrants from the Ellis Island era right up to today.
Clearly this is a story for our time. What all immigrants share in common is the desire for freedom: to improve one’s lot in life. Few subjects remain as controversial and emotionally charged – and central to being an American – as immigration, and in the great tradition of Studs Terkel, Toward a Better Life will provide a forum for immigrants of all kinds to tell their stories in their own words.
