Turkish Migration to the Unites States is the first attempt to produce a full account of past and present migration from the multiethnic and multiconfessional Ottoman Empire and the predominantly Turkish and Muslim Turkish Republic to the United States. Contributors attempt to explain the movement of people in terms of either their origin or destination based on Turkish and American official documents and lively personal accounts of immigrants. The first part of the book is an overview of sources and approaches to Ottoman/Turkish Migration to the United States. Rudolph J. Vecoli informs readers of the major issues in and changing approaches to the history of American migrations over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. John J. Grabowski's piece deals specifically with the two archival sources of early Turkish migration in the first two decades of the 20th century: the manifests of ships arriving in the United States and the U.S. federal-census schedules. According to Grabowski, both sources are important for understanding immigration and settlement patterns and intergroup relations of Turks and other Ottoman immigrants, including Armenians, Greeks, and Christian Arabs, in the United States.

The second part of the book deals with immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Two major themes are the motives for emigration from Ottoman domains and relations among the different Ottoman communities (millets) in the United States. Rıfat Balis' chapter deals with immigration of Sephardic Jews, Armenians, Greeks, and Muslim Turks from Anatolia to the United States. He explains the motives for each group's emigration, their interaction with each other in both Anatolia and the United States, and how their respective adaptations to their new settings differed. Balis also explains the changing nature of Turkish immigration to America since World War II. Nedim İpek and K. Tuncer Çağlayan place emigration from the Ottoman Empire to the United States and South America into the context of 19th- and early 20th-century internal and external population movements of Ottoman subjects. They explain motives for emigration and question the earlier American works on the topic, which, they think, puts too much emphasis on religious intolerance toward non-Muslims in the Ottoman domain as a motive for emigration. As counter evidence they mention intercommunal influences on emigration and the closeness of different Ottoman communities in the United States. Mehmet Uğur Ekinci explains Ottoman reactions to the first major wave of Muslim immigrants to America based on Ottoman official consulate documents. He points out that the majority of the first Muslim immigrants in the late 1880s and the 1890s concentrated in Worcester, Massachusetts, where Armenians had already formed an important community. Ekinci also indicates that the Ottoman government became interested in its Muslim subjects in the United States partly because of their close interaction there with Armenian revolutionaries. Işıl Acehan reads the Turkish and American sources critically and argues that although tensions in the Ottoman Empire at the time arising from the Balkan Wars, World War I, and the deportation of the Armenians created conflicts among the different Ottoman ethnic groups in the United States, Ottoman communities in Peabody, Massachusetts in general were interdependent, lived together, shared a common culture, and formed an Ottoman microcosm in the New World. Tracing the paths of two Turkish immigrants from Istanbul and Harput in the early 20th century, Emrah Şahin argues that their regions of origin and preimmigration experiences shaped the motives for and result of their immigration much more than their national identity or country of origin. He also argues that the history of Ottoman migration to America is better understood if the social, economic, and political contexts of the United States are taken into consideration.

The third part of the book covers recent migration. Mustafa Saatçi questions the traditional measures of assimilation, which correlate assimilation level with education, income, and duration of stay. A. R. Şenyürekli compares educational, occupational, and familial information of Turkish women immigrants with those of their contemporaries in Turkey and reaches the conclusion that Turkish women were a part of a “brain drain” into the United States after World War II. Lisa DiCarlo deals with the role of regional identity in the Turkish migration. She focuses on migration from Yuva, a subdistrict in the Black Sea region of Turkey, and shows how regional collective identity of Pontic Greeks and Muslim Turks of Yuva is sometimes more important than their religious or ethnic identities. She does not ignore the factors working against the power of shared regional identity. In his introduction to the book, Kemal Karpat identifies three waves of Turkish immigration: from 1860 to 1920, between 1950 and 1970, and from 1970 on. In his chapter in the third section he shows how social, political, and economic changes in Turkey affected the profile of immigrants to the United States. Further, Karpat compares the three waves of Turkish immigrants and explains the ability of third-wave immigrants to establish communities of their own. In reference to his research on local Turkish communities in the United States, he shows that third-wave immigrants, or “new Turks,” have successfully reconciled the secular vision of the Turkish Republic and their traditional Islamic values, and he indicates that regional identities played a more important role for them. Finally the book includes a 1971 conference presentation by the late Lloyd A. Fallers that elaborates what is called modernist Islam or Turkish Islam and further clarifies Karpat's argument.

Even though Fetullah Gulen's name and his community in the United States are mentioned several times in the book, deeper analysis of this modernist, Islamic Turkish community is missing. The community's expanding networks in the United States and attempts to reach out not only to Turks in America but also to Americans through charter schools and interfaith-dialogue organizations run by community members is a new phenomena for Turks living in the United States. Finally, I think readers would also like to know the impact on Turkish migration of the anti-Americanism that has swept the Middle East in recent decades. The book under review, based on a rich variety of sources and the product of different research methods, is an important contribution to the fields of international migration, American immigration history, and the history of the modern Middle East.