Closing the Door: The 1924 Immigration Act and Its Impact on Jewish and Asian Communities, with Hasia Diner and Bill Ong
Click here to register for this free virtual program, co-presented by the Workers Circle / Arbeter Ring of Northern California.
Jewish Americans have long known how the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act prevented many of their ancestors from escaping death during the Holocaust. Less well-known and understood in the Jewish community is the role this Act played in freezing Asian immigration to the United States through 1965.
At a time when immigration has become a wedge issue in this country, Jewish American historian Hasia Diner and University of San Francisco immigration law professor and activist Bill Ong Hing will shed light on the law’s impacts on these two communities and their responses, with lessons about current anti-immigrant policies in the United States and abroad.
Hasia R. Diner is Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History and Professor Emerita at the Departments of History and of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Among her many books are Opening Doors: The Unlikely Alliance Between the Irish and the Jews in America (2024); Immigration: An American History (with Carl Bon Tempo, 2022); How America Met the Jews (2017); Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (2015); 1929: Mapping the Jewish World (2013, winner of the National Jewish Book Award); We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (2009, winner of the National Jewish Book Award); The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 (2006); and Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (2002).
Throughout his career, University of San Francisco immigration law professor and activist Bill Ong Hing has pursued social justice through a combination of community work, litigation, and scholarship. He is the author of numerous academic and practice-oriented publications on immigration policy and race relations, including Humanizing Immigration: How to Transform Our Racist and Unjust System (2023); American Presidents, Deportation and Human Rights Violations (2019); Ethical Borders: NAFTA, Globalization, and Mexican Migration (2010); Deporting Our Souls: Morality, Values, and Immigration Policy (2006); Defining America Through Immigration Policy (2004); and Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy (1993). His book To Be An American: Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation (1997) received the award for Outstanding Academic Book by the librarians’ journal Choice. He was also co-counsel in the precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court asylum case INS v. Cardoza–Fonseca (1987), and represented the State Bar of California in In Re Sergio Garcia (2014), in granting a law license to an undocumented law graduate. Hing is the founder of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco and continues to volunteer as general counsel for this organization.