Throughout much of the twentieth century, the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB), an immigrant rights organization, fought against what they called “the deportation terror.” When I saw that Rachel Buff had written a history of this organization, I wondered how it was that no one had done so before. After all, the ACPFB was a leader in the defense of the Constitutional rights of immigrants in the United States. They waged legal battles against discrimination and unjust deportations and worked to help immigrants naturalize, if they chose. They defended the rights of not just one national group but all immigrants. And this last fact makes it clear why Buff is the right person to finally take this project on. Immigration history is most commonly approached through one of its many silos (e.g. Jewish history, Mexican American history). It is rare for scholars to take into account the experience of more than one ethnic or racial group, but Buff has done so masterfully through her entire career.

Buff brings to this project strengths she has honed over fifteen years of looking at racial and ethnic groups in comparative and relational ways. Her first book, Immigration and the Political Economy of Home (2001), explored similarities between immigration and migration through the unorthodox juxtaposition of an immigrant group (West Indians) and a domestic group (Native Americans). Her unique investigation exposed the different ways groups in the United States are racialized and how their responses to racialization expose capitalist and colonial hegemonies.

Whereas other histories have focussed more on the structural challenges that immigrants face, Buff, as an activist scholar in the contemporary immigrant rights movement and a historian of immigration, centers immigrants’ agency. In her well-known edited collection Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship (2008), as in her first book, Buff questioned widely accepted models for thinking about citizenship and broke open new pathways for thinking about the limits of the citizenship model.

In this latest work, Buff not only crosses racial and ethnic lines but also challenges traditional chronologies. Many immigration monographs are framed around the passage of key immigration Acts like those passed in 1924 and 1965. But because Buff examines the ACPFB from its origins in the 1930s until its end in the 1980s, her work places these landmark immigration Acts into a fuller context. As a result, Buff is able to make linkages between immigration advocacy, reform, and state oppression that others have not made. For example, by extending her history beyond the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, she explores topics usually associated with the civil rights movement – including urban policing and systemic inequalities in education – alongside immigrant rights movements, to demonstrate how immigrant rights intersected with domestic agendas. In doing so, she traces the formation of a unique political culture and the racial solidarity that resulted from these intersections.

Buff's sustained focus on the ACPFB, which was organized along regional lines, took her to multiple archives across the country. That breadth of vision allows her to put into conversation a variety of events, chronologies, organizations, theories, and literatures that are typically considered in separate histories. For example, Buff examines well-known historical figures, such as the labor organizer Harry Bridges, alongside Filipino American workers to demonstrate how race and country of origin could affect immigrant and labor rights simultaneously. Each of these events and historical figures is framed by the larger context of immigration law and a rich landscape of the various organizations operating in this field at the time and is deeply rooted in the literature.

Buff's book will do much more than fill a gap. This is not a book that could have been written within the framework of traditional history. She has mastered and synthesized debates and theories across a range of disciplines including US history, immigration history, ethnic studies, cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology – and has skillfully illuminated the tensions and contradictions among these fields. She also takes on and pushes forward important debates, for example showing how groups we consider “white” today were stigmatized as “ethnic” and “foreign” well into the 1960s. This meant that they were more likely to find affinities with other immigrants, such as Mexican and Asian immigrants, and work with them for immigration reform, which we see in the work of the ACPFB.

This book will be readily adopted in immigrant history courses, ethnic studies courses, and US history courses. It will be taught alongside classic immigration histories, such as Mae Ngai's I mpossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004), and leading emerging literature, such as Kelly Lytle Hernandez’s City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (2017). Like both those pioneering works, Buff's book makes an important contribution to our understanding of immigration and the relational construction of race.