In this well-documented and clearly written book, Libby Garland tells the largely ignored story of Jewish illegal immigration to the United States during the era of immigration quotas from the 1920s to the 1960s. Garland estimates that tens of thousands, possibly more, Jews entered the country illegally in that period. This is a high number for a group that has largely been erased from both history and popular memory, though it is the equivalent of perhaps one year's influx during the time of peak immigration just before and after World War I—an indication of both the quota regime's effectiveness and the ways in which the borders remained porous. But, as Garland argues persuasively, the story's importance goes beyond numbers. Issues of migration were central to modern Jewish politics and the increasing difficulty in entering the United States influenced the course of subsequent Jewish history. Along with Italians, Jews were one of the largest immigrant groups of the early twentieth century, and their image in the eyes of other Americans shaped the laws themselves and attitudes toward enforcement. As the modern nation state increasingly sought to define its geographic and demographic borders, even the existence of a few anomalous border crossers seemed threatening and aroused great anxiety.

Garland seeks to write a social and political history of immigration restriction and Jews’ relationship to it. She argues that laws are one thing, but how they were applied and experienced is another. The migrants and smugglers themselves thus helped to determine the true meaning of restriction. Their efforts to circumvent the laws by continuing to do what others very much like them had been doing all along—crossing borders—bring into focus the laws' fundamental contradiction, which was that the restrictions themselves created noncompliance by redefining as criminal behavior that which had previously been sanctioned. The business of migrant smuggling likewise had a paradoxical relationship to the legal regime, since it depended on the obstacles to movement for its existence, even as it demonstrated the regime's ineffectiveness. Throughout, Garland keeps in mind the question of how Jews were first “associated with, and then … decoupled from, illegal alienness” (2–3). Her answer hinges on the “strenuous political efforts” (10) of American Jewry to achieve the decoupling.

Garland thus writes the history on two levels. The first deals with the Jewish communal response to growing official limitations on who and how many could enter the country. Restrictionist efforts grew from the 1870s, taking on a racialist cast through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and subsequent laws excluding Asians altogether. In the post-World War I and Red Scare atmosphere of xenophobia, restrictionists finally succeeded in placing limits on the numbers of people who could enter the country annually. In an effort aimed explicitly at Jews and other ethnic groups prominent in the “new immigration” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the immigration acts of 1921 and 1924 also included discriminatory quotas on how many could enter from each country. Throughout, American Jewish organizations attempted to defend Jewish rights, but in doing so they felt forced to walk a thin line. On the one hand, they initially opposed the restrictive laws, and after their passage strove to mitigate their harsh effects by arguing for leniency in individual cases and liberality in enforcement policy. Whenever possible, they pushed to change the law to make it easier for immigrants to enter. On the other hand, they did so with an anxious eye toward showing that American Jews were law-abiding citizens with a primary loyalty to the United States, and they stressed that Jews seeking to enter were likewise law abiding and, partly for that reason, desirable as immigrants. Few went as far as Rabbi Martin Zielonka of El Paso, Texas, who took a hard law-and-order line toward Jewish illegals crossing over the nearby Mexican border. But in arguing for the desirability of Jews as potential American citizens, Jewish leaders often sought to distance them from Asians and Mexicans, who were beginning by the end of the 1920s to be widely linked in the public mind to illegal presence in the country.

On the individual level, Garland details the efforts of Jewish migrants and smugglers to circumvent the law. This is a hard issue to get at since the subjects in question by definition took pains to cover their tracks. Nevertheless, Garland skillfully uses police and court records, the transcripts of legislative hearings, memoirs of regulators and migrants, newspaper reports, and other sources to uncover as much as possible the motives and methods behind the underground flow from Europe to the United States. Understandably, individual migrants made decisions based on familial and personal interests, seeing laws as obstacles to get around, not as sacrosanct precepts to follow. They were motivated, as most migrants are, by the need to make a living and the desire to reunite families. They were aided by networks of smugglers, many of whom had experience moving illicit commodities, such as alcohol and drugs—as well as prostitutes—across borders. And they echoed an east European Jewish disregard for borders and suspicion of the state that was nearly a tradition. Jewish emigrants had been crossing the Russian-Austrian border illegally in large numbers for some time. Now they sneaked over the Mexican and Canadian borders, or made their way by boat from Cuba into the United States. Or they falsified papers to take on identities as individuals in one way or another more acceptable to American authorities or admissible under the quota regime. Some, having been caught, protested that they had never meant to defraud American authorities, from whom they had received valid official visas based on false identities, but only the Poles or Russians with whom they had established those false identities in the first place.

Until the end of the quota regime in 1965, Jews fought—with increasing success—against an image of “foreignness” or “alienness,” concepts that Garland argues were as central as “whiteness” to the process of ethnic adaptation to America and adoption of American identities. In the 1930s and ‘40s, Jewish organizations opposed alien registration laws as stigmatizing, unnecessary, and counterproductive. They backed laws and policies that would treat refugees differently from regular immigrants. And they supported the Hart-Celler Act that ended the quota regime in 1965, although it retained an overall limit on the number of immigrants who could enter the country and placed a limit for the first time on those from the Western Hemisphere. Hart-Celler was both the result and the symbolic acknowledgement of the changed status of Jews and other white ethnic minorities. All along, however, Jewish leaders implicitly sought to distance Jews from Asians, Mexicans, and others whose perceived foreignness was even greater than that of Jews. They thus bowed without objection to the redefinition of the problem of illegal aliens from a particularly European one to a particularly Mexican one.

This is obviously a timely book, and the reader cannot help to draw comparisons between policies, politics, and experiences of the past and those of the present. Garland attributes some of the communal and historiographical amnesia concerning Jewish illegal immigration to an “investment” in a distinction between the good immigrants of the past and the bad ones of today. On closer examination, it appears that the two cohorts are not so different, notwithstanding their different historical contexts. In the end, writes Garland, “illegal immigration points to the impossibility of defining citizens and borders, insiders and outsiders, as cleanly as states would like, even as it also highlights the extent to which such definitions remain central to the building and maintenance of state power” (216).