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  • A Nation of Immigrants?
  • Julie Avril Minich (bio)
Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy, Katherine Benton-Cohen. Harvard University Press, 2018.
Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability, Jay Timothy Dolmage. The Ohio State University Press, 2018.
The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America, Beth Lew-Williams. Harvard University Press, 2018.

Immigration and asylum debates in the US appear to be in a state of unprecedented crisis. Throughout 2018, the Trump administration tested the limits of established asylum law, drawing the most dramatic public attention in the spring and summer when it forcibly separated more than 3,000 children of asylum seekers from their parents at the US–Mexico border.1 Less than a week after President Trump (under intense political pressure) formally ended the separations, the Supreme Court upheld another of his policies banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority nations from entering the country. Such measures have spurred impassioned critiques. "The Trump administration is not just changing the rules; it is making a mockery of them," wrote literary journalist Sonia Nazario in a searing New York Times editorial denouncing US asylum policy; she asked: "Are we willing to trash our own laws in order to try to seal the border?" Meanwhile, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a blistering dissent after her colleagues voted 5–4 to uphold the travel ban: "Our Constitution demands, and our country deserves, a Judiciary willing to hold the coordinate branches to account when they defy our most sacred legal commitments," she declared.

The appeals from Nazario and Sotomayor to laws that mandate fair hearings for asylum seekers and religious freedom for migrants make sense in an era when those who favor tighter immigration restrictions repeatedly assert their fealty to the rule of law. In effect, Nazario and Sotomayor show that such assertions of legality are selective and hypocritical at best—and disingenuous at worst. Yet new books by Jay Timothy Dolmage, Katherine Benton-Cohen, and Beth Lew-Williams also remind us that those favoring immigrant rights stand on precarious rhetorical ground when we attempt to wrest the discourse of legality from our political opponents and deploy it against them. These scholars demonstrate how flexible the laws [End Page 482] governing US immigration and asylum policies have always been. Their books examine anti-immigration sentiment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, detailing draconian immigration enforcement at Ellis Island, the creation of the Dillingham Commission (whose reports were used to justify immigration restriction in the 1920s), and the Chinese Exclusion Act. All three authors position their studies as critical resources for understanding the current political climate by uncovering a history that continues to influence immigration policy today. They offer a sobering reminder that, as unprecedented as the current crisis might feel, the debates dominating contemporary headlines are not new.

Dolmage's book, Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability (2018), differs from the other two in some important ways. Unlike Benton-Cohen and Lew-Williams, he studies rhetoric, not history. His is also the only book of the three that examines how disability was also a criterion for restricting immigration, alongside race, nationality, class, gender, and sexuality. In addition, while Benton-Cohen and Lew-Williams focus on the US, Dolmage offers a comparative analysis of US and Canadian immigration policy, exploring how both nations' immigration laws are steeped in eugenic thinking, challenging an assumption (widely held in the US and Canada alike) that the Canadian example models a more just policy.

Perhaps because his interest lies in rhetoric rather than history, Dolmage also makes the case most directly for the relevance of his material to the present moment. As he writes at the outset, he "is not arguing that history is repeating itself, though it certainly feels that way. Instead, the book is about the fact that these eugenic ideas about the value of bodies have never gone away" (4). That argument is divided into four sections—Island, Pier, Explosion, and Archive—in which Dolmage examines two nationally specific sites of immigrant exclusion (Ellis Island in the US and Pier 21 in...

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