Journalist Jia Lynn Yang Wins the 11th Annual Zócalo Book Prize

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide Challenges the Well-Worn American Immigration Narrative

Jia Lynn Yang, national editor at the New York Times, is the winner of the 11th annual Zócalo Book Prize for her debut book, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965, a clear-eyed look at how America’s modern immigration policy came to be.

Pushing back against the mythology that America has always been a nation of immigrants, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide centers on the four-decade period between the passage of the Immigration Law of 1924, which created a permanent race-based quota system, and the passage of the Immigration and …