Erika Lee, director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, is here to explain just how long the Statue of Liberty has been an absolute joke, a monument to openhearted immigration policy in a country that has excluded the Chinese, harassed the Germans and the Irish, and corralled the Mexicans and the Japanese into concentration camps. Lee's early work focused on the Chinese Exclusion Act, but her new history, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States, takes a broader view, examining the connections between racism and xenophobia over the last couple hundred years. by Rich Smith