PositiveThe Washington PostWhen Congress sharply restricted immigration in 1924, it acted on the basis of ideas about race and heredity known to be false. The story of this triumph of ignorance has been told before, but never more vividly than by Daniel Okrent in a book that appears in another era when well-financed engines of deceit affect immigration policy ... a rigorously historical work ... Okrent enlivens his narrative with vivid portraits of Aldrich, Lodge and other prominent figures active in the campaign to avoid the \'race suicide\' said to follow from allowing the northwestern European population of the United States to be overwhelmed by ostensibly inferior groups ... Jews and Italians had become \'white,\' and eventually — as Okrent takes almost perverse pleasure in pointing out — many of the restrictionists’ children married sons and daughters of immigrants of the very demographic groups their parents most despised.
