Source: Harvard International Review

Marcelo Suarez-Orozco writes that “immigration—especially the ambivalence it generates—is constitutive of the US character…Immigrants are loved looking backwards but feared and mistrusted in the here and now.”

“That eternal ambivalence continues to define the U.S. national conversation about the kind of country it is again becoming: a country of new immigrants,” he concludes.

Suarez-Orozco’s essay on the history of immigration in the U.S. and current debate on the issue appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of the Harvard International Review.