Kirjahaku

Korea has had a long, great civilization, with four golden ages. Destruction caused by foreign powers has failed to extinguish the Korean spirit for survival. Korea, at least its southern part, is at the threshold of another golden age, despite the handicap of being a divided nation. To understand Korea's present situation, one must look back at many thousands of years of Korean history. The purpose of this study is to look squarely at that history, including the atrocities committed against Koreans by several countries, especially Japan in the periods of 1592-1598 and 1895-1945. Some of the questions addressed in this study are: How did Koreans rebuild their country time after time, following destruction by foreign invaders? How could Koreans, in recent years, rebuild their economy in such a short time? What motivates them? Why is North Korea so different from South Korea? What is the potential of Korea in the twenty-first century? Why do Koreans have such difficulty unifying their country?

In 1997 the United States accepted more legal immigrants than all other countries combined. This large influx of newcomers, however, has alarmed many Americans. Immigration is a controversial issue because it intersects with the most contentious issues of our time: multiculturalism, bilingualism, unemployment, crime, etc. Opinion polls since 1965 show that a strong majority want to reduce immigration. Yet our government has refused to respond to the public's wish. In 1996, Congress scuttled a proposal to reduce immigration by a third. (Earlier, in 1990, Congress voted to increase immigration by a whopping 40 percent.) This is all the more surprising because the United States has had no qualms about severely restricting immigration in the past.Kenneth Lee explains why recent immigration policy has failed to reflect the public opinion by approaching the question from a broad, historical outlook, and from a focused, contemporary perspective. He traces several momentous historical changes that have abetted the pro-immigration block and weakened the restrictionists' clout (mainly, the rise of conservative economics in the 1970s and the growing racial liberalism in America). He also examines immigration policy on a micro-level: detailing the intense lobbying that went on for the 1990 and 1996 immigration bills, and he also shows how unlikely players as, for example, Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed, helped defeat the restrictionist bill in 1996.