Mexico has traditionally been an exporter of migrants rather than a focus of immigration. Close to 10 per cent of Mexicans live outside their country, whereas foreigners compose 1 per cent of the total population. In ¿Deseables o inconvenientes?, Pablo Yankelevich traces the historically grounded ideological reasons for the Mexican governments’ reluctance to welcome foreign nationals following the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Additionally, having mined the national and migration archives, the author distinguishes, from among diverse nationalities, the phobias and preferences of the authorities and the population in the different regions of the country and at various historical conjunctures.

Yankelevich begins his study with the startling evidence that as recently as 2005, 42.1 per cent of Mexicans would not want to live under the same roof with a foreigner and, more understandably, 45 per cent of refugees to Mexico reported labour discrimination. Yet during the nineteenth century, the Mexican government was eager to attract foreign – read: European – migrants in its drive toward modernisation of agriculture and colonisation of sparsely populated territories, considering immigration as part and parcel of the civilising process. Miscegenation was one of the goals of Mexico's migration policies, but miscegenation of the right mix in order to create a mestizo population that would offset the imputed weak characteristics of the native people.

However, Europeans migrated elsewhere, and increasingly Mexico found itself attracting populations that the authorities believed undesirable. Yankelevich focuses his study on migration laws after the revolution that sought to steer the incoming population flows according to these racial and economic considerations, while no laws could bar Mexicans from seeking work in the United States and coming back when there were no jobs on the other side of the border. This phenomenon impinged significantly on Mexico's migration laws and practices.

The author lists races and nationalities that were barred from migrating to Mexico, or looked down upon, because supposedly they had little to add to Mexico's race and productive capacity: Spaniards, Arabs, Turks, Lebanese, Poles and Czechs were among this group because their goal was not to produce but to gain easy wealth through trade. The other consideration of lawmakers compiling migration norms after the revolution was how easily the immigrant population could mix with the local one. Yankelevich carefully pieces together the information he has gathered and creates a complex historical process not devoid of incongruous instances. The most notorious is of course the immigration of Jews to Mexico, the subject of recent works by other historians such as Alicia Gojman de Backal and Daniela Gleizer. Jews were considered an inassimilable ethnic group, and therefore undesirable. This consideration, which was compounded by the regulation that visas could be accorded only to individuals who lived in their own country, affected dramatically Mexico's relief to Jews, endangered by Hitler's racial laws, after they left Germany or Austria to save their lives.

The book's chapters are thematic, set in a chronological progression between the 1910s and the 1940s. One chapter is dedicated to the constitutional Article 33, by which a foreigner can be expelled from Mexico with no recourse to any judicial defence – the president is the final arbiter. This article, Yankelevich expounds, is a remnant of Mexico's sense of having been at the mercy of foreigners, notwithstanding the fact that the same article violates individual and human rights. The author follows the expulsions of foreigners from Mexico by nationality and economic and social – or rather anti-social – activity such as delinquency, together with expulsions for political activities broadly defined. In comparative terms most expulsions of foreigners from Mexico took place in the 1920s and abated in the 1930s during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40). The author argues that it was an act of good-will on the part of the president to use Article 33 as a threat rather than as a punitive action despite the violence that characterised the Cárdenas administration period and brought about interference by foreigners in domestic affairs. Cárdenas preferred to use the judicial system for each specific case.

The author includes tables that illustrate, in some cases, a drastic reduction of foreigners in the different states and overall. Between 1930 and 1940 the Chinese were expelled in large numbers, 60 per cent in total, due to both general xenophobia and prejudice against this particular national group, and due also to internal political rivalries which led to violence. The other two groups which were subject in larger numbers to Article 33 were Spaniards and North Americans. However, members of the latter group could benefit more than others from the intervention of their government and the leniency of the Mexican administration. Despite providing illustrations of the Mexican authorities’ application of Article 33, Yankelevich argues that one of the difficulties of studying this phenomenon is the lack of verifiable data, which only emphasises the discretion and arbitrariness of the expulsions.

With his expertise in the study of migration, Yankelevich is best suited to making wide-ranging comparisons; thus, it is a pity that this critical study of Mexican migration laws and practices after the revolution is not set more amply in a comparative Latin American perspective. An index would also have been useful to help the reader thumb easily through the book. That said, ¿Deseables o inconvenientes? is enlightening and a good read.