In this ambitious book, historian Roger Daniels contends that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the watershed event in the history of American immigration legislation. Prior to 1882 American politicians were committed to the notion that national survival depended on attracting foreigners to populate the countryside. This sentiment changed after the Civil War when people began to question the long-range economic and cultural impact of immigrants on the nation. Chinese émigrés were the chief targets of American nativists during this era. Many Anglo-American laborers worried that Chinese workers would steal their jobs on the west coast, while others viewed them as invaders intent on conquering the United States. These economic and racial misperceptions came to a fateful head in 1882, when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first law in American history that placed restrictions on immigration.

According to Daniels, passage of this act set the stage for a series of restrictive and biased immigration laws that would follow for the next half century. In the 1920s Congress, motivated by a growing xenophobic fear that an immigrant tide from Southern and Eastern Europe endangered the “Anglo-Saxon race” in the United States, built upon the legacy of Chinese exclusion and passed laws that created a punitive immigrant quota system in the 1920s. Tensions over immigration continued into the Great Depression. Although many employers were happy to hire cheap Mexican laborers to work their fields in California, the nation's economic unrest convinced the government to deport hundreds of thousands of workers to Mexico. Even worse, lingering distrust of immigration during the 1930s, along with an ugly anti-Semitism, prevented Franklin Roosevelt from opening American borders to Jews fleeing Nazi terror. By the 1940s the United States was simply not the safe haven that many of its citizens wanted to believe it was.

The Second World War, however, marked a critical turning point in the nation's immigration policy. During the conflict, the federal government relaxed restrictions on Mexican migrants. In 1943, furthermore, lawmakers rewarded China, a wartime ally, by revoking the Chinese Exclusion Act. The United States also opened its doors to admit thousands of postwar refugees. The nation's immigration policy continued to liberalize during the Cold War. Although Congress intended the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 to maintain the 1920s status quo when it came to immigration, the act contained some critical elements that paved the way for increased immigration from Asia and other nations in the western hemisphere. The movement towards less restrictive immigration policy reached its high point in 1965 when Congress passed legislation that abolished the quota system and made it much easier for immigrants to reunite with family members in the United States.

It was this law that redefined immigration in significant and unexpected ways in the decades that followed. Most important, it redefined migration patterns. The sponsors of the act had intended to correct the nativism of the 1920s and to allow more southern and eastern Europeans to enter the country. In reality, the act helped initiate a burst of new migration from Asia, South America, and southeast Asia that transformed the United States into an even more multicultural society. In the face of this unexpected remaking of immigration, Americans began to support a new round of restrictive legislation to control a perceived flood tide of foreigners. Once again, misperceptions fueled these measures and they had unintended results. In 1986, for example, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act to get tough on illegal immigrants and seal the nation's borders. Yet the act made sure that farmers in the southwest would continue to have a cheap supply of Mexican labor. As a result, the law actually boosted immigration to the United States. Daniels urges readers to keep such historical ironies in mind as they contemplate immigrant restriction.

Daniels raises issues critical to both American history and modern politics. Most important, he demonstrates that racist assumptions and a willful blindness to the nation's diverse ethnic past have generated restrictive immigration laws in the United States. His masterful reading of the Immigration Act of 1924, for example, highlights how festering racism and historical amnesia led to immigrant quotas that “perpetuated old injustices and created new ones which endured for decades” (p. 56). Moreover, he helps lay bare the painful fact that restriction often had unforeseen consequences that raised new problems and, in turn, generated new myths that colored the popular perception of who immigrants were and what they were doing in the United States. This fact becomes particularly clear in his discussion of immigration since the landmark immigration law of 1965. This book should be required reading for any politician convinced that he or she alone has a foolproof plan to manage the nation's borders in an era of increasing globalization.

At times, however, Daniels struggles to tie this collection of informative musings into a larger argument. The book often reads like a daisy chain of events, legislation, and people linked chronologically, and the chapters do not always flow together. The biggest problem is that it lacks either a robust introduction or a convincing conclusion. Daniels starts the book with a brief discussion of how he believes historians incorrectly periodize immigration policy, yet he says little about how his book engages larger scholarly debates or how it may help inform contemporary policymaking. Furthermore, he concludes with only a fleeting analysis of immigration after the tragedy of 9/11 and misses a chance to drive home a larger point. A more involved beginning and end would have helped other historians with a range of interests, such as race, ethnicity, economics, or politics, situate immigration policy in the broader context of American history. It also would have made the book more accessible to general readers interested in the rich tale of American immigration. Still, Guarding the Golden Door offers valuable lessons about how racism, cultural misperceptions, and an inability to think historically have often combined to make the nation's immigration policy a harsh arena of unintended consequences and cold realities.