From the raw material of popular and elite discourse about the perils of immigration, Leo Chavez constructs a ‘Latino Threat’ narrative, a set of interrelated beliefs and assumptions about Latinos that is toxic and untrue. A primary goal of this book is to demonstrate that the negative stereotypes are pervasive and unrelenting, obscuring the many contributions Latinos make in US society and fomenting harsh restrictive laws and policies. Chavez traces the narrative back 40 years and sometimes more, citing arguments from a wide range of sources, including respected media outlets and academic authors like Samuel Huntington and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The narrative draws its power from its pervasiveness – false claims and premises tend to become, upon repetition, common-sense truths, as Gramsci and others have suggested. The narrative has great inertial power because it is unquestioned; inconvenient facts are mostly ignored. The September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, Chavez suggests, amplified already existing concerns about the threats immigrants pose and the ‘porosity’ of US borders.

The Latino Threat narrative ‘is part of the grand tradition of alarmist discourse about immigrants and their perceived native impacts on society’ (p. 3). This particular narrative is more powerful, however, because Mexicans have been in the United States for hundreds of years. The law's uncompromising stand toward these immigrants, which has declared so many of them ‘illegal’, has facilitated a popular discourse that casts them as the ‘quintessential’ illegal aliens who are unwilling, or unable, to adapt themselves to ‘American’ values as other groups have done. This image of non-adaptive foreignness feeds fears of an invasion from the south, highlighted in recent years by the spectacle of the Minutemen guarding the border with Mexico, the wall between the two nations and an ever more militarised border zone.

Chavez takes on the perhaps quixotic task of challenging each element of the Latino Threat narrative. He devotes two chapters to the claim that Mexicans do not desire to assimilate, a charge that he refutes with empirical evidence and testimonials from immigrant students. Two other chapters examine the claim that Latina sexuality is ‘out of control’. This argument can be found in many respected news sources, but cannot be substantiated with contemporary fertility rates, which show sharp declines in Latino populations in both the United States and Mexico.

In other chapters Chavez describes an ugly debate, carried out in newspapers and blogs and on television, over who, among desperately ill people, is entitled to an organ transplant. Here he uses particularly highly publicised cases to reveal a pervasive assumption that ‘Americans’ should always be first in line for needed organs. They are ‘our’ organs, even if they come (quite often) from non-citizens. In fact, US citizens are net organ claimers; immigrants are net organ donors. What is interesting, and reassuring, is that doctors and medical centres seem not to have bought into this part of the threat narrative; it is their sometimes heroic efforts to save immigrants with donated organs that frame the dispute. The pressure against medically dictated and humanitarian criteria, however, has led to changes. The United Network for Organ Sharing policy now specifies that no more than 5 per cent of organs can go to ‘foreigners’.

The debate over organs is compelling because it exposes the almost visceral fear that Americans are losing out: the traditional benefits of citizenship are being traded away as more foreigners live among us and the world shrinks with easier international travel, including travel for medical emergencies. Here Chavez is exposing an emotional side of US views about citizenship that is seldom addressed in the academic literature, but is undoubtedly important in explaining why the Latino Threat narrative is so impervious to facts. In a sense, Chavez has put two parts of his book in tension with each other. The chapters on assimilation and on Latina sexuality proceed from a positivistic logic: clear, well-presented evidence can change minds. Yet the chapter on organ donation raises the spectre of policy driven by emotional attachments and anxieties, not facts and logic. Chavez anticipates this in his empirical chapters, closing each of them with a warning that evidence may not matter, no matter how strong it is. He thus acknowledges the rhetorical power of the Latino Threat narrative without giving up hope that facts matter.

The Latino Threat narrative, Chavez suggests, offers a useful way to study what Americans think about citizenship. He agrees with Linda Bosniak that citizenship can usefully be divided into four component parts: legal status, rights, political activity, and a sense of collective identity and sentiment. All four elements are hotly contested in the current sense of crisis over immigration reform. Congress is under pressure to change the rules that determine legal status. Rights are at issue in decisions over eligibility for drivers' licenses, compensation for workplace injuries, bail in criminal cases and other matters. The political contest over citizenship often focuses on spectacle: the flags, marches, border actions of Minutemen and humanitarians, and singing of the national anthem in Spanish.

Chavez draws upon each of Bosniak's elements of contemporary citizenship, but he does so through the lens of cultural citizenship. He starts from the premise that a sense of collective identity and sentiment is manufactured by law, politics and the mass media. This argument flows out of Jurgen Habermas' concept of a public sphere fed, and perhaps defined, by the media, and from Benedict Anderson's famous argument that in mass society, where people cannot possibly know more than a small fraction of their fellow members, a sense of nation is emotional, cultivated by the mass media and political discourse. What makes the Latino Threat narrative dangerous is its rhetorical power as a force for division and rejection. This narrative forms a wedge that separates Latinos from the American community.

Chavez appears to be suggesting, albeit indirectly, that the emotional rejection of Latinos is not so much an example of the skin-colour racism that has historically divided the United States. Rather, it is a more abstract rejection based on fears that Latino culture is essentially foreign and that Latinos will not assimilate to US culture and values. What drives such a misplaced sense of concern? Chavez argues that the driving force is a more fundamental fear: that US citizenship is losing ground in an ever more insecure world. The sense of insecurity that pervades the United States leads to a targeting of immigrants. Fears of job loss, a failed social services net and a declining economy are displaced. The irony is that the real enemies of public security – corporate giants that can overpower democratic institutions, a market system that is nearly impossible to regulate, lack of global environmental controls, a colossally large and expensive military–industrial complex – are to some extent responsible for the near historically high flow of immigration into the United States. Many of these people, after all, are seeking relief from their own dislocation.