"A History of Immigrant Dreams, American Realities, and Global Connections"

"The subsequent story told by Lee is both heroic and tragic, as Asian migrants came to the United States and Hawaii in successive ethnic waves through the early 20th century—Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Korean—only to be labeled by white nativists as racial, economic and sexual threats. Nativist, racist movements subjected each of these Asian populations to violence, segregation and exploitation. Eventually they succeeded in excluding Asians from immigration, beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. But the migrants persevered, using any legal and illegal means available to them. They went to court to defend themselves, and they also subverted the nation's attempts to shut them out of the country by becoming undocumented migrants. The exclusion era would not end until 1965, when the U.S. finally eliminated racial quotas for immigration."

Viet Thanh Nguyen in the Los Angeles Times reviews Erika Lee's The Making of Asian America.