Both El Salvador and the United States are ‘nations of emigrants’, as Susan Coutin notes in her new book, although the consequences of this emigrant orientation have been and are very different. The United States receives, not always willingly, what El Salvador and other countries expel. She notes how the term ‘nations of emigrants’ inverts the more common ‘nation of immigrants’: ‘To be a nation of immigrants is to be capable of consuming and transforming alien others, producing generic citizens’ while ‘“nations of emigrants” highlights both the interconnectedness of nations and that fact that immigrants come from somewhere else’ (pp. 3–4). In the case under review, that interconnectedness assumes a variety of historical and contemporary forms: remittances, political violence, deportation and legislative histories, all of which ‘are in some respects facets of one another’ (p. 14). Even when dealing with highly technical legal issues, Coutin never loses sight of the fact that the movement of people across national borders involves the hopes and dreams and the future possibilities and past (and present) tragedies of flesh-and-blood people.

Thus she chronicles the complex history of flight, settlement and, in some cases, forced return, weaving in accounts of executive orders, legislative strategies, external and internal pressures and bureaucratic action (and inaction) that contributed to the transformation of Salvadoran emigrants/refugees from ‘undesirables’ and inadmissible aliens during the US-financed Salvadoran civil war (roughly 1980–92) to deserving immigrants or, in the words of one immigration official cited by the author, ‘people we knew’ (p. 27). Even as Salvadorans were granted Temporary Protected Status and eventually ‘included’ within the US body politic through the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act, they remained vulnerable to deportation for even minor legal trespasses. Coutin devotes considerable attention to disentangling the surface appearances of law from the underlying realities. She notes how the proper ‘path of law’, which intends a strict separation of ‘the permissible from the impermissible’ elides the fact ‘that there is something lawful within illegality, and that the illegal can exist within law’. Thus ‘the essential legality and deservingness that law eventually acknowledged was part of Central American asylum seekers when they were still being denounced as illegal immigrants’ (p. 71). A moving chapter on the retornados – expelled from the United States for (often minor violations) – evidences the limits of inclusion. Many retornados arrived in the United States at young ages, yet found themselves involuntarily repatriated to another society with which they have little or no familiarity. In some cases they may not even speak the language. Toward the book's end, Coutin discusses recent changes in immigration policy toward Salvadorans and regarding migrants seen by some as potential terrorists in the wake of September 11, or as a needed low-wage working class.

Two chapters examine emigration from the official and nonofficial Salvadoran perspective. Since 2001, when the government dollarised through a fixed exchange rate with the colón, the nation's economy has been kept afloat by several billion dollars in annual remittances generated from Salvadorans dwelling outside the country, mainly in the United States. Coutin details the numbers-game involved in counting remittances, and discusses government efforts to maintain and strengthen relationships with the emigrant community, commonly referred to as ‘Department Fifteen’. She observes that in El Salvador and elsewhere remittances ‘are considered untainted by the market, pure profit …’ (p. 132), but she might also have noted that only by foregoing basic desires (which is to say residing in poverty US-style) are some US-dwelling Salvadorans able to remit enough money, given their low earning power, to lift stay-at-home family members out of an even more debilitating Salvadoran-style poverty. In any case, Coutin's informants are probably correct in their assessment that the economy has become remittance dependent and that maintaining the current high level of remittances depends on a continuous process of new emigration, what some of her interviewees referred to as a ‘politics of expulsion’ (p. 142).

Discussions of violence make repeated appearances in this book, whether the violence of the long civil war that most people now admit contributed to a massification of emigration, that experienced by migrants during the journey north, post-war criminal violence or the violence exercised by the state through the ‘new penology’ which ‘resembles state-sponsored repression in that each justifies extreme measures by placing certain individuals outside the bounds of the polity’ (p. 171). Emigrants are often held responsible by the press, government and the public for high post-war levels of violence, either as hardened criminal retornados, or as parents whose absence contributes to family disintegration and out-of-control gang banging youth.

In an effort both to detail specificities and demonstrate connections, Coutin tacks from one theme to another, drawing liberally on a range of written sources and interviews conducted in the United States and El Salvador with documented and undocumented migrants, retornados, immigration lawyers, non-governmental organisations, activists, officials from both governments and others. The writing is crisp and the author keeps the narrative moving along, even through lengthy technical passages devoted to immigration law and its enactment. She has a particular knack for turning conventional wisdom on its head, as in her discussions of the unlawful within the law, the legal in the illegal, the crime in politics and the emigrants' presence in their absence. She also demonstrates the value of analysing both El Salvador and the United States as ‘nations of emigrants’ mutually bound through complex transnational relationships.

Although the book focuses narrowly on El Salvador and the United States, many of Coutin's conclusions have broad relevance for Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua and other countries in Latin America and elsewhere. Nations of Emigrants will be of interest to students of migration, transnationalism, citizenship studies and violence studies, and useful for a range of graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in Anthropology, Sociology, History, Political Science and Law, among others.