The author tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. The reader will see how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants made and remade Asian American life in the United States. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a "despised minority," Asian Americans are now held up as America's "model minorities" in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States. Published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the United States' Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that has remade our "nation of immigrants," this book provides a new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today.