There has been a rapid growth in writing on immigration into the Republic of Ireland commensurate with the nation's transition into a country of net immigration (since 1996). Studies so far have covered the new configurations of racism in turn-of-the-century Ireland, as well as the adjustments of Irish society to its new status, critiques of policy, and newer studies of immigrant communities (notable among these, in addition to Bryan Fanning's work, are R. Lentin and R. McVeigh, eds., Racism and Anti-Racism in Ireland [Belfast, 2002], and After Optimism: Ireland, Racism and Globalisation [Dublin, 2006]). A specialist online journal, Translocations, has also been started up in recent years (http://www.translocations.ie). One of this first wave of contributions was Fanning's Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (2002), which dealt with the Republic's history of constructing minorities and addressing them socially and politically: Travellers, Jews, Protestants, and, more recently, immigrants (both labor migrants and asylum seekers). The current volume, he states in the introduction, was planned as a sister publication.

The perennial problem for edited volumes to overcome is lack of coherence. Here, Fanning has done a decent job of keeping these fifteen contributions relatively even in quality and focus around a keyword while respecting the diversity of the topics, disciplinary norms, and the approaches of the eighteen other contributors.

Empirical social psychological fieldwork, for example, sits alongside secondary source–based analysis and the examination of models of social policy. The chapters range from theoretical syntheses of literature on human rights (Fanning) and integration (Mac Éinrí), through analyses of legislation (Mullally; Fanning), to studies of migrant groups (Ugba, Halilovic-Pastuovic; Lichtsinn and Veale; Feldman) and analyses of the economic contexts for migration into Ireland (Allen; Barrett and Bergin).

The empirical qualitative fieldwork is the most arresting, especially the two chapters on the impacts of asylum status on Nigerian single mothers (Lichtsinn and Veale) and a variety of asylum-seeking individuals interviewed by Ryan and colleagues. These insert the reader into a relationship with the subjects at a level beyond the discourses that construct immigrants as one-dimensional figures in various negative ways. These chapters demonstrate the alienating consequences of leaving people disempowered and in administrative limbo. This is complicated further in the Irish case by the fallout from government action on citizenship and the response to Irish children born to foreign nationals over recent years (Mullally). The accruing psychological toll on these people is alarming and makes Maja Halilovic-Pastuovic's report that most Bosnians with refugee status in Ireland systematically return to Bosnia for the summer entirely comprehensible. Western states’ ongoing obsession with making asylum-seeking status into a virtual punishment to appease hostile public opinion on immigration results in the production not of grateful and integrated new citizens, but of alienated people who can never see their adopted countries as “home.” Indeed, Abel Ugba's African Pentecostalists negotiate their interaction with secular and Catholic Ireland as a struggle over epistemologies and ethics played out against the numbing fallout of their fragile immigration status. Throughout the empirical fieldwork here, non–European Union (EU) nationals in Ireland are in various stages of anxiety regarding their status, a condition that has deleterious knock-on effects on their various attempts to become actors in Irish society as students, workers, and agents within voluntary-sector organizations (Feldman; Chadayamo et al.). In light of these narratives, Piarás Mac Éinrí's subtle, probing chapter on integration near the end of the book reads as a poignant call for reviewing the assumptions on which asylum and immigration policies are rooted.

Of the work based on secondary sources, Kieran Allen's outline of the neoliberal framework of Ireland's immigration policy highlights the construction of immigrants as solely temporary economic units, while Alice Feldman's survey of the migrant voluntary sector illustrates the organizational obstacles facing that sector as a whole, in addition to those of bodies seeking to broaden the agenda beyond racial discrimination.

The book's interdisciplinary basis means that there is no central theoretical problem around which these essays are hung, which might well increase its appeal for some readers. However, it also means that the essays’ critical edges are very uneven. The themes of racialization and the State's role in this remain explicit (in Allen, Mac Éinrí, and Feldman) or, more frequently, implicit. There is some material here to be related to theories of the “racial State” for example, but the labor of connecting findings critically to theoretical frameworks is left undone here. Katy Hayward and Kevin Howard's essay, “Cherry-Picking the Diaspora,” is an example of work that could be analyzed further. They trace the state-sponsored search for Irish and Irish-descended workers to come and fill key positions in the economy. These racialized clarion calls are couched in terms that suggest that particular people have a bond with Ireland that can only be accounted for through bloodlines and historical relationships.

I thus have two critical observations to make. First, the range of essays here is interestingly and laudably eclectic and does include migrants as contributors, but there is also a noticeable and major gap: nothing here deals directly with those Eastern and Central European migrants who have composed the majority of foreign nationals to immigrate to Ireland since 1999.

Second, while the various roles of the State are foregrounded by some, there is space here for a more ambitious synthetic essay—at the end—which brings some of these threads together. The State is a central actor in the processes around immigration, and in this collection it acts on the people it has the power to control (asylum seekers, labor migrants who need visas), but it has little power over EU nationals, a phenomenon also visible in the British government's ongoing focus on making access to citizenship more difficult as a solution to perceptions of immigrants absorbing precious resources. Of course, the need for an overarching essay at the end, rather than the obligatory and usually weary outline of contents is a critique that can be leveled at most collections in the social sciences. However, it is nevertheless pertinent to an emerging field that has reached a point where more theoretically sophisticated and possibly international comparative work should be emerging. The challenge for scholars in this field is to make that analytical step up.