Tamar Jacoby

Tamar Jacoby (born 1954) is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, known primarily for her writing on immigration-related issues.

A native of New York City, Ms. Jacoby graduated from Yale University in 1976, after which she became a staffer on the New York Review of Books. From 1981 to 1987 she served as a deputy editor of the op-ed page of "The New York Times", and from 1987 to 1989 as a senior writer and justice editor at "Newsweek". She has also been assistant to the editor at the "New York Review of Books".

Her writing with regard to race relations and immigration has been published in numerous publications, including "Commentary", "Dissent", "The Nation", "The New Republic", "The Washington Post", the "Los Angeles Times", and the "New York Times Book Review", among other journals of political thought and newspapers of national or regional scope.

Her 1998 book, "Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration" (Basic Books), tells the story of race relations in three American cities—New York, Detroit and Atlanta.

More recently, Jacoby's career has been marked by an outspoken advocacy for policies that would liberalize America's immigration laws-which she believes is an essential policy shift in order to maintain the economic growth of the United States while preventing a brain drain to other nations-specifically, the passage of a broad guest-worker program, which some critics have described as an amnesty proposal.

To this end, she has repeatedly praised President Bush's guest-worker legalization plan and engaged in numerous debates with critics of legalization such as Mark Krikorian and John O' Sullivan.

In 2004, Basic Books published an anthology edited by Jacoby, "Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American", which expands upon these views, and gathers a diverse array of writers who advocate some form of absorption and assimilation of recent immigrants. The same year, she was confirmed by the United States Senate to a seat on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In addition to her written work and studies, Jacoby has also taught at various educational institutions, including Cooper Union, The New School For Social Research, New York University and Yale University.

External links

* [http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/jacoby.htm Manhattan Institute Scholar|Tamar Jacoby]
* [http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/race_class/thiercernese/speaker6.htm NYU Panelist Bios: Tamar Jacoby]
* [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/24/AR2006032401719.html 'Guest Workers' Won't Work]
* [http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript1228.html Fixing Immigration, Part One of Two] Discussion between Ben Wattenberg and Tamar Jacoby.
* [http://www.nationalreview.com/debates/debates021403.asp Debates: Jacoby v. Krikorian on Immigrants and the War on Terror]
* [http://www.opinionjournal.com/ac/?id=110004540 America as a Beacon]
* [http://www.claremont.org/projects/local_gov/Newsletter/immigration_Fonte.html Immigration and American Identity: An Open Letter to Tamar Jacoby]