Journalist Roy Beck vividly portrays the damaging effects of mass immigration on American workers and local communities. See the disastrous consequences of immigration not only for the coastal cities but for interior towns such as Storm Lake, Iowa, and Ashland, Alabama, and Garden City, Kansas, and Lexington, Nebraska. The 500% increase in immigration numbers has played an integral part in destroying middle-class occupations and turning them into minimum-wage jobs. The book describes many occupations where this has happened. It gives special attention to the way the immigration policy of Congress has reduced economic opportunity for black Americans, deepened the poverty of farm workers, destroyed the health of poultry plant employees and turned many construction, manufacturing and service jobs into "work Americans won't do." Especially shocking is the detailed story of how immigration was used at the turn-of-the-last century to create the working conditions in the meatpacking industry described by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle — how the curtailment of immigration from 1925 to 1965 allowed those same jobs to become one of the safest and best-paid occupations in America — and how the new mass immigration has driven working conditions and wages right back to the Jungle level. Using numerous, recent little-known studies published in top academic journals, the book shows the role of immigration in the 20-year decline in non-supervisory wages, the widening of income disparity and the squeezing of the middle class. And it provides a review of immigration history that shows that these have been the destructive effects of immigration every time in American history when the numbers have surged. This is a book that changes people's minds and convinces the apathetic of the urgency for action.

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