At America's Gates

“This is the most thorough, complex, and subtle study I have read about Chinese immigration during the era of exclusion. Erika Lee’s book offers both a remarkable social history of the Chinese immigrants who challenged the laws meant to keep them out and a sobering account of how suspicions of nonwhite immigrants legitimated the expansion of repressive state power. A major contribution to the history of immigration, race, and nation in modern America.”—Gary Gerstle, author of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century

“Lee opens a new chapter in immigration history with a rich, poetic and careful transnational account of how the 'exclusion period' produced anxiety, division and successful resistance among the Chinese it failed to exclude. She strikingly demonstrates how this drama changed the whole story of immigration restriction.”—David Roediger, author of Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past

“Makes a very significant contribution to both Asian American history and to U.S. immigration history. The amount of research that went into this book is prodigious. Lee addresses a multiplicity of issues and deftly weaves together several themes that, in the past, had been treated separately.”—Sucheng Chan, coeditor of Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era