Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration

Tracing the metaphor of America as the Book of Revelation's New Jerusalem, Yii-Jan Lin shows how apocalyptic narratives have been used to exclude unwanted immigrants America appeared on the European horizon at a moment of apocalyptic expectation and ambition. Explorers and colonizers imagined the land to be paradise, the New Jerusalem of the Bible's Book of Revelation. This groundbreaking volume explores the conceptualization of America as the New Jerusalem from the time of Columbus to the Puritan colonists, through U.S. expansion, and from the eras of Reagan to Trump. While the metaphor of the New Jerusalem has been useful in portraying a shining, God-blessed refuge with open gates, it has also been used to exclude, attack, and criminalize unwanted peoples. Yii-Jan Lin shows how newspapers, political speeches, sermons, cartoons, and novels throughout American history have used the language of Revelation to define immigrants as God's enemies who must be shut out of the gates. This book exposes Revelation's apocalyptic logic at work in the history of Chinese exclusion, the association of the unwanted with disease, the contradictions of citizenship laws, and the justification for building a U.S.-Mexico wall like the wall around the New Jerusalem. This book is a fascinating analysis of the religious, biblical, and apocalyptic in American immigration history and a damning narrative that weaves together American religious history, immigration and ethnic studies, and the use of biblical texts and imagery.

About the Author :
Yii-Jan Lin is a historian of ideas and biblical texts and the author of The Erotic Life of Manuscripts. She is associate professor of New Testament at the Yale Divinity School. She is based in New Haven, CT.

Review :
Named one of “Fifteen Important Theology Books of 2024” by Englewood Review of Books “[Lin] argues persuasively that American political discourse since colonial times has been undergirded by the ‘New Jerusalem metaphor’—the foundational myth that America mirrors Revelation’s heavenly city.”—Times Literary Supplement 2025 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Textual Studies finalist, sponsored by the American Academy of Religion “Brilliantly unsettling, Immigration and Apocalypse definitively establishes the significance of the New Testament’s closing book to the entrenchment of American white supremacy. Ranging from ancient Mediterranean and early Christian studies to U.S. immigration history, Lin’s book challenges us to divest from the murderous romance of apocalyptic exceptionalism—before it is too late.”—Dan-el Padilla Peralta, author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League and Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic “A must-read for our times, this deeply original book excavates the legacies of the Book of Revelation in shaping dominant U.S. imaginations around immigration with particular attention to discourses of disease, citizenship, and the border wall.”—Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, author of Latina/o/x Studies and Biblical Studies “Once you have read this groundbreaking book, you will not see either American immigration policy or the book of Revelation in the same way. Any conversation about immigration in America that aims to be helpful must now start with Immigration and Apocalypse.”—Willie James Jennings, Yale University “Yii-Jan Lin creatively and astutely uses the Book of Revelation to read U.S. immigration history, highlighting how Revelation’s New Jerusalem has functioned as a founding myth to establish and reinforce an American sentiment of exceptionalism.”—Tat-siong Benny Liew, College of the Holy Cross