What follows from Shanks's framework is the intriguing argument that U.S. immigration policy is driven not by the structural dynamics of international relations nor by the interplay of domestic interests. What does shape immigration policy are values. Shanks understands that values may not be significant in many policy areas, but as she puts it: “For immigration policy, values trump interests every time” (p. 8).

Shanks goes on to emphasize that when values play such a central role in policymaking, the usual interest-group dynamics do not obtain. Drawing on the work of Giandomenico Majone, she highlights how values have drawn immigration policymaking into a deliberative process in which political actors must explain, interpret, and justify their actions in reference to commonly held conceptions of the public interest. Such dynamics are then highly unpredictable, because a given value, once invoked, can be used as a resource by all political actors. This in turn suggests (which Shanks does not emphasize) that such values-oriented policymaking exhibits considerable autonomy.

Pushing ahead with this intriguing analysis, Shanks argues that immigration policy has not been greatly driven by public opinion. Indeed, she agrees with Edwin Harwood that in this domain, public opinion follows policy, and to the extent that it pays attention, the public focuses on numbers of immigrants more than on their characteristics.

Even more emphatically, Shanks argues that unemployment explains little about shifts in immigration policy: “No evidence supports the hypothesis that unemployment affects immigration policy” (p. 236). She points out, for example, that during the 1920s, immigration restriction was implemented while the economy boomed. At the same time, she presents some compelling reasons, despite her own argument, that politicians continue to act as if such economic concerns drive immigration policy.

Shanks does acknowledge that domestic economic fluctuations do influence the apprehension of illegal immigrants. But for reasons she never adequately explains, such enforcement efforts are not within the purview of her conception of immigration policy. Similarly frustrating is her unexplained exclusion of illegal immigration from her analysis, all the more troubling since our historically high levels of illegal immigration and subsequent amnesties weaken her contention that our policy has grown “more restrictive.”

Shanks applies her framework to four different episodes of immigration policy change over the last century: the 1920s Quota Acts, the 1950s McCarran-Walter Act, the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, and the reform legislation of 1986 and 1990. In chapters devoted to each of these, she lays out a detailed analysis whose force is unfortunately undercut by her excessive reliance on numerous quotations for which the sources are completely unattributed in the text and buried in the footnotes.

Still more problematic is that Shanks pushes her argument about values too far. As she asserts: “In each era, immigration policy became ‘really about’ a value seen to be newly primary. Through argument, one value emerged as central to the public interest, and immigration policy was redesigned to support it” (p. 13). Thus, in her analysis of the 1986 and 1990 legislation, Shanks argues that economic competitiveness, especially with Japan and Germany, dominated the discourse and shaped the outcome: “When Japan became a threat in the 1980s, Americans construed the struggle as economic, so immigrants were excluded for economic reasons” (p. 266).

Yet this is simply not the case. Economic competitiveness was only one—and arguably the least important—of many considerations on the table during the decade-long 1980s debate over immigration. To be sure, economic concerns were cited, and in 1990 there was some movement toward a more skills-based immigration policy. But the basic outlines of the preexisting immigration policy regime were hardly changed: We continued (and continue) to receive huge influxes of predominantly unskilled immigrants for whom the rationale is family unification, not international economic competitiveness. Moreover, all this is driven very much by domestic political interests.

At the same time, a strong argument can be made that public anxiety with illegal immigration, an aspect of national sovereignty that Shanks curiously neglects, drove the debate leading up to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Once again, her neglect of illegal immigration is a problem. So, too, more generally is her explicit focus on formal immigration policies, excluding enforcement efforts, and not on actual numbers of immigrants admitted.

Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty is a difficult and demanding book whose genuine theoretical insights, unfortunately, do not bear as much fruit as promised on account of the narrow, formalistic treatment afforded them here.