Dorothee Schneider has written an excellent and comprehensive synthesis of the transnational history, politics, and policy of immigration of the United States. Her work eschews what has traditionally been a split between top-down narratives, common in American political development accounts of changing legislative and bureaucratic frameworks, and bottom-up narratives, evident in recent historical studies that highlight the agency of immigrants. Schneider instead reconceputalizes the migration process as a series of border crossings and transitions that begin in the home country, as a migrant makes the decisions to leave, and continue into the new country all the way through the naturalization process, as immigrant becomes citizen. Her work situates the stories of the people attempting to control immigration, such as border agents, advocates, and legislators, alongside the lives of ordinary immigrants.

Each border crossing involves a struggle between the individual migrant and the overall system and Schneider is clear that, in every part of the process, the negotiation between immigrant and bureaucracy reshaped the identity of both. Attempts to exclude Asian immigrants, for example, led to stricter border controls up and down the West Coast. Even so, three-quarters of all West Coast Asian arrivals gained entry to the country, mainly because the rise of these same regulations led to “well prepared … and successful strategizing for the encounters at the border stations” (p. 109). Most importantly, Schneider stresses that border crossings do not occur in a linear fashion, with migrants moving in a straight line from home country to America to citizenship. Instead, the migration process is ever fluid, propelled at a faster or slower rate depending on a range of factors, such as race, national origin, gender, and era of arrival.

Crossing Borders is arranged both thematically and temporally, focusing primarily on the early decades of the twentieth century, when the process and structures for crossing the border—the legal framework for inspection in the home country or at the American border, for example—were set in place. She begins in the late nineteenth century with the immigrant's decision to leave the home country and illustrates that even this first move was fraught with difficulty. Instead of the Oscar Handlin-esque immigrant-as-blank-slate, Schneider details the myriad ways in which potential migrants first negotiated with their own home governments for permission to leave, possibly made a journey through a third country, and, after the quota laws of the 1920s, contended with a US official at their point of departure—all before arriving in the United States.

After detailing the many routes through which immigrants left their countries, Schneider moves forward in time and forward in the process of migration, through the experience of entering the United States, navigating the potential hazards of deportation, Americanization, integration, and finally the naturalization process. In arguably the strongest section of the work, Chapter 5, she traces how the legal process and experience of becoming a citizen shifted from the local and regional contexts of the nineteenth century to federal control in the twentieth. During this same period, the reasons for which an immigrant might seek citizenship also transitioned, from access to the franchise, to access to family reunification visas, to access to the welfare state.

At certain points in the narrative, bureaucrats are firmly in control of the process of defining borders and deciding who qualified for admission. But Schneider is clear that this power was not absolute, and the immigrants in her narrative have more agency than might be expected. People arriving at Ellis Island and other eastern seaboard ports, as the author tells us, “seemed nearly without power,” as they waited in interminable lines, and underwent intrusive medical and background examinations. But their sheer numbers, coupled with an underfunded and understaffed immigration service, meant that they held a distinct advantage. Equally so, knowledge of the specific procedures at each point of entry (and the standards varied widely) were shared among webs of migrants (pp. 76–9). Although scholars such as Erika Lee and Mae Ngai have detailed the ways in which Chinese migrants learned to memorize and relay the information most likely to make them admissible, uncovering a similar process in play for Europeans illustrates just how universal were the strategies for circumventing the hardships of bureaucratic exclusion.

Schneider also makes clear that nonwhite groups, such as Asians, Latinos, and black Caribbean migrants, navigated a far different system than did white Europeans. In deportation, for example, Europeans could access a form of voluntary repatriation, where the US government paid for their return trip, while those on the southern border had to contend with a “fast-tracked” voluntary departure—without hearing, appeal, or recompense—for those agreeing to leave on their own dime (p. 121). Likewise, advocacy groups looking to Americanize immigrants (into an idealized system of American values) focused on Europeans, and largely ignored nonwhites. Here too, though, Schneider argues that exclusion from formal structures of integration did not keep these groups from going through the process on their own, either “without official Americanization,” for Mexican immigrants who developed their own Mexican American identity, or “without ever becoming citizens,” for Asian immigrants barred from naturalization (p. 182).

Schneider is correct in her contention that the first few decades of the twentieth century played a significant role in defining the structures under which bureaucrats and immigrants negotiated what it meant to be American, and what it meant to cross the border. But with an introduction that marks the genesis of the project from the mid-1990s debates to strip away welfare rights and criminalize border entry (p. 1), she gives us relatively little about the post-1965 era. Her epilogue, while discussing the major legislative developments from the Hart-Celler Act in 1965 through the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act and Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996, lacks the interplay between immigrant and official that permeates the rest of her work. Schneider tells us, for example, that in the early twentieth century, “borders and border crossings were organized in ways that have endured to this day” (p. 5), but, certainly the enhanced border efforts since the mid-1990s and post-9/11 emphasis on national security have altered the terms under which immigrants and officials approach the migration process. How, then, does the process of navigating border crossing and transition occur in the modern era?

Schneider has given us one of the best syntheses of immigration history currently available, and her work stands as an accessible yet thorough classroom volume. With a fountain of examples and evidence, Crossing Borders is equally poised to be saved for instructors and doled out in anecdotes over a series of lectures. Most of all, her work provides future scholars with a framework for studies of immigration that does not compromise between history from above and history from below but, rather, explains that it is only in the negotiation between those controlling the system and those entering it that the nation's borders and identity are created. It will be up to others to apply this framework to the present immigration battles.