A photo described by Donna Gabaccia in this provocative book offers an apt metaphor for explaining her major thematic focus. Entitled Steerage, the 1907 photo by Alfred Steiglitz shows European migrants from an Atlantic passenger vessel dressed in well-worn Old World garb. Americans have widely assumed that the picture portrays European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in New York. Instead, the picture portrays European immigrants returning to Europe from the United States. “So powerful,” suggests Gabaccia, “is Americans’ image of the United States as a unique nation of immigrants that it renders literally invisible key dimensions of immigrant life, including the connections to the world that immigrants build and maintain” (25). Gabaccia argues that these connections constituted a foreign relations “from below” that intersected in important ways with the foreign policies of the US government. Her goal is to illuminate these interconnections (1).

A sweeping survey of US history, the book begins with an examination of how immigration policy became an outgrowth of foreign trade policy following the American Revolution. Although early US political leaders often portrayed themselves as isolated from the corrupting influences of Europe, this was primarily in the political realm. The new nation pursued an aggressive foreign trade policy and welcomed migrating workers from Europe, although not necessarily from Asia and Africa, as components of an expanding array of bilateral trade treaties. By 1850, over two million European immigrants lived in the United States. The high cost of Atlantic fares inhibited early immigrants from returning to their homelands. But using several case studies, Gabaccia demonstrates how some maintained contacts and even managed occasional trips back to Europe. Continued family ties fostered chain migrations in both directions that often lasted for generations.

Immigration between 1850 and 1924, suggests Gabaccia, must be seen within the context of global empire building and the enormous inequities in wealth between rich and poor nations that it created. These global processes fostered a complex array of migrations among both poor and wealthier groups, of which proletarian migrations to the United States constituted only a small part. Wealthy US empire builders who migrated to other countries, suggests Gabaccia, should be considered alongside those poorer immigrants who came to the United States in search of jobs. Both types of migration encouraged increasing xenophobia among Americans. Protectionists worried that wealthy US entrepreneurs abroad might take advantage of lower wage rates in other countries to produce cheap goods that competed with American products. Nativists feared competition for jobs from immigrant labor. Tariff and immigration politics thus became increasingly intertwined.

Also important in fostering xenophobia were the political mobilizations among immigrants. In particular, Gabaccia explores the Irish American Fenian invasion of Canada, the assassination of the Italian king by Italian American immigrant Gaetano Bresci, and the trans-Pacific Chinese merchant boycott of 1905. Incidents like these increased nativist anxieties that the US government was failing to protect them from foreign threats. Yet Gabaccia argues that, before 1900, immigration policy, like “much of the formulation and conduct of foreign affairs,” lay “beyond the reach of electoral politics and of the American voter” (120).

Over time, however, US “global activism” created an “isolationist backlash” that caused immigration policy to be “uncoupled” from tariff and foreign trade policy (122, 129). Although Congress had traditionally played an important role in determining tariff rates, the executive branch increasingly assumed control over tariff policy in the late nineteenth century by using treaties and reciprocity commissions. US Presidents often sought to employ the tariff as leverage to promote international economic integration. By contrast, popular fears of immigrants ensured that Congress remained concerned with immigration, culminating in the highly restrictive Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924. Gabaccia also traces subsequent Congressional legislation on immigration, such as the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 and the Hart-Cellar Immigration Reform Act of 1965, and explores the popular debates that swirled around them. She concludes with a chapter on the current US and global debates over immigration reform.

Imaginative and informative, Gabaccia's account nonetheless suffers from a failure to systematically consider literature in the field of US diplomatic history especially with regard to immigrant groups and US foreign policy. Although this literature is often weak in exploring the transnational social ties of immigrants that Gabaccia describes so well, it contains important insights into the political networks developed by immigrants in the United States and the periodic threats they posed to US foreign-policy goals and alliances. Contrary to Gabaccia's assertion that foreign affairs remained beyond the influence of electoral politics, these studies suggest otherwise and illuminate the need for more integration of the two approaches to “immigrant foreign relations” (1).