Borderline Citizens: The United States, Puerto Rico, and the Politics of Colonial Migration by Robert C. McGreevey (review)

While it's easy to understand how migration is shaped by border policies and citizenship definitions, Robert C. McGreevey joins a chorus of scholars who recognize that the reverse is also true—that immigrants shape the politics of entry and the content of citizenship. Borderline Citizens traces shifts in Puerto Ricans' US citizenship status from the final years of Spanish colonial rule in Puerto Rico until the 1930s. He demonstrates the role that migrants played in spurring shifts in US policy toward the entire island. Throughout the period, Puerto Ricans entering the United States mainland accentuated the contradictions and tensions in Puerto Rico's political status that employers, labor organizers, and politicians debated and the US judiciary was forced to resolve. Resulting judicial transformations in Puerto Rican citizenship were not always as favorable and farreaching as they appeared on paper. Even after the Jones Act promised full citizenship in 1917, Puerto Ricans' rights were limited and selectively enforced with the consistent result that islanders were integrated into the US imperial economy without enjoying full political rights—a situation that remained into the 1930s when the narrative ends.

One of the overarching threads in McGreevey's analysis is that US policies integrated Puerto Ricans into the imperial economy without providing corresponding political rights. In some ways, this is a feature of all colonial regimes that depend on the labor and resources of the colonized without providing substantive political rights. However, US pretensions to democratic governance on the island and the amorphousness of American rule kept the citizenship question open for debate. Once the Foraker Act (1900) created a civilian government in Puerto Rico under the oversight of the US Congress, questions remained about the status of the island itself, its degree of representation in the US government, and the relationship of the US Constitution to Puerto Ricans themselves. The short-term result was exclusion and contradiction, though the act did lay the groundwork for negotiations to come. For example, from the earliest years of US rule, Puerto Rico received a "coastwise" designation, placing its ports within US domestic territory, even as Puerto Rican people were counted as foreigners (3–4).

This unstable policy and the numerous contradictory ones that replaced it were transformed under legal challenges that often arose from migrants. The 1904 Supreme Court decision that created the category of "US national" to classify Puerto Ricans as "neither foreigners nor citizens" was used to resolve a question about whether Puerto Ricans could sign labor contracts to migrate to the US mainland (42). Since the 1885 Foran Act disallowed foreign contract labor in the United States, courts had to decide whether Puerto Ricans were foreigners when a man named Jorge Cruz inadvertently tested the law. In these and other cases, McGreevey demonstrates skill in contextualizing the debates and overlapping concerns about migration, political rights, and the role of the US Constitution in colonial ventures. As a result, McGreevey clarifies US political logic and the origins of contradictory policies.

The 1904 ruling increased Puerto Ricans' ability to enter the US mainland, and McGreevey's analysis of the decade leading up to the 1917 Jones Act is especially well done. He uses Samuel Gompers's 1904 visit to Puerto Rico to demonstrate how organized labor influenced migration policies with similarly ambivalent ideas about Puerto Ricans. Gompers's AFL participated in transnational alliances with Puerto Rican labor unions who organized strikes repeatedly between 1904 and 1917. However, Gompers's efforts to improve labor conditions on the island were motivated by the desire to stem the migration that was believed to increase competition and reduce union power on the mainland. Interestingly, AFL solidarity with Puerto Rican laborers included support for requests for full citizenship, which, when achieved, fully opened the doors to Puerto Rican migration. Besides adding to ongoing scholarship on migration policies within the United States' imperial sphere, McGreevey...