History professor’s recent book, which probes the vagaries of the U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery and exposes broader immigration issues, has won two significant awards.
Rutgers University–Camden Assistant Professor of History Carly Goodman appears to have written the right book at the right time. Her double award-winning Dreamland: America’s Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction, published by the University of North Carolina Press, brings to life the history of the U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery and tells the wider story of the nation’s immigration history and policy.
Goodman sets the diversity lottery as the foreground to her exploration of the complex macrocosm of border walls and other obstacles to migration in today’s America—where anti-immigrant policies and systemic anti-Black racism persist.
In Dreamland, Goodman deftly narrates the history of the most unlikely government immigration program that may have ever emerged from Washington, D.C. In vivid and engaging prose, Goodman, an accomplished storyteller, draws readers into the caprices of the visa lottery, perhaps the last goodwill immigration pathway. Open since 1990, it has awarded the much sought-after green card to a relatively tiny number of American dreamers.
Much of Dreamland takes the reader along on Goodman’s journeys through the African countries of Ghana and Cameroon, where the lottery has flourished and fostered dreams of living in America. In local post offices and internet cafes, aspiring emigrants, visa agents, and others embrace the promise of the lottery and try their luck in a time of austerity and limitations.
“Rising African immigration to the United States has enriched American life, created opportunities for mobility, and nourished imagined possibilities,” said Goodman. “But the promise of the American Dream has been threatened by the United States's ongoing, if not growing, embrace of anti-immigrant policies and persistent racism.”
Goodman writes in Dreamland: “The lottery’s story helps us recognize that immigration includes but is not limited to what happens at the U.S.–Mexico border. And when we think about immigration, it is not enough to identify anti-immigration policies as cruel and harmful, though they are. Instead, [the visa lottery] is a positive example of immigration’s potential gifts. The United States and Americans stand to benefit if we embrace broad, forward-looking policies that create conditions of welcome and that challenge white supremacy.”
Dreamland delivers an essential assessment of American immigration from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first major law to restrict immigration to the United States—to the present. The book begins with an exploration of the 1980s rush of undocumented immigrants from Ireland, many of whom arrived in America on student and other temporary visas and remained after those visas expired.
Shut out of access to legal immigrant visas, members of this savvy cohort pushed back, going to Washington to argue for visas for people like themselves—those who wanted to immigrate to the U.S. to live their dreams but could not qualify for visas under the traditional family-based system. Their advocacy laid the groundwork for the visa lottery, which has ultimately delivered visas to people from all over the world and has been a crucial pathway for African immigrants.
Dreamland is the winner of the 2023 Furniss Book Award, conferred annually by the Mershon Center of The Ohio State University to a first-time book author who “makes an exceptional contribution to the study of international, national, and/or human security.” The nominating committee said, “This well-researched and well-written book covers an important topic from both sides: the countries where the applicants lived as well as the U.S., the country to which they yearned to go. Alas, it is very topical!”
Goodman also received the 2024 First Book Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society (IEHS), which recognizes the work of early-career scholars in the field of immigration and ethnic history of the United States and/or North America.
Additionally, Goodman is a senior editor for the Made by History section of TIME Magazine.
