By Amitabh Pal.

• Position: Book review

The very act of being an immigrant is not easy. From the family members left behind to the regular reminders that you don't completely "fit in," there are layers of complications that an average native-born person doesn't have to cope with. Two books from the past year reveal to us the many facets of the lives of immigrants.

Erika Lee's The Making of Asian America: A History (Simon & Schuster) is a magisterially sweeping chronicle that starts with the earliest Asian immigrants to the New World (sixteenth century Filipino sailors) and concludes with recent Asian American activism. In between these bookends are the myriad heartbreaks and triumphs that this community has dealt with in the past many centuries.

But The Making of Asian America is not just a historical saga. Lee also has interesting social insights. A particularly incisive observation is about how Asian Americans are redefining the very meanings of nationhood and citizenship.

"Contemporary Asian Americans are creating new, multilayered identities," she writes. "They are simultaneously racial minorities within nations, transnational immigrants who engage in two or more homelands, and diasporic citizens making connections across borders."

Muslim Americans form a unique group of recent immigrants to the United States because of the special scrutiny and treatment they have received. Moustafa Bayoumi gives them a voice in This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the...