From Subjects to Actors: Italians and Jews and the Fight against Immigration Restriction in the United States

Abstract

This article explores how Louise Tilly's examination of nonstate actors, collective action, and transnationalism remains relevant to scholars today. More specifically, I address how her scholarship has influenced the conceptualization of my first book project, which investigates how Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates in the United States mobilized against restrictive immigration laws within a transnational framework. Tilly's work has helped me complicate the story of immigration restriction in the United States by looking at how grassroots ethnic organizations took advantage of their members’ ability to naturalize to challenge the legitimacy of draconian immigration laws that marked them as undesirable. In addition to the influence that her scholarly agenda still has on the field, this article contends that Louise Tilly's commitment to interdisciplinarity and collaboration with other scholars is a model to emulate and represents another major aspect of her legacy.