With Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882–1965, Maddalena Marinari has crafted a well-researched and thoughtful narrative that explores Italian and Jewish antirestrictionist groups who fought nativist efforts to restrict immigration. Marinari pays close attention both to those working for and those working against immigration restriction. As she details, restrictionists worried about the effects of unchecked entry of new immigrants into the United States, while Jewish and Italian advocacy groups promoted liberal immigration policies so that other Jews and Italians could access the same opportunities to migrate to the United States as those who had came before them. During the more than six decades under consideration in this book, coalitions among immigration reform groups were forged and broken. Their tactics underwent many changes. Antirestrictionist groups were disadvantaged during the early years of this study because they did not have the same established political networks as their restrictionist counterparts. But Jewish and Italian advocacy groups quickly built relationships and coalitions and, through the decades, sought sympathetic allies outside of their groups to defeat or circumvent racist immigration laws and policies.

Over six chapters, Marinari examines key policy debates over immigration reform from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries to evaluate the effectiveness of pro-immigrant groups as they sought to defeat, or at least blunt, nativist legislative efforts. She begins by focusing on the decades-old issue of literacy tests, which nativists had long wanted as a way to weed out undesirable immigrants. Not until anti-immigrant sentiment increased during World War I did this issue gain enough traction to enable the passage of the 1917 Immigration Act, which included literacy tests as a means of immigration control. Immigrant groups’ failure to thwart the law convinced them of the importance of crafting interethnic coalitions, taking moderate stances, and focusing more narrowly on specific aspects of legislation.

In her examination of the 1924 Immigration Act, which greatly restricted immigration through annual quota limits for various countries, Marinari details how antirestrictionist tactics evolved and activists came together to create coalitions to fight the proposed legislation. Despite this new unity, the strength of nativist groups convinced antirestrictionists that they could not defeat restriction entirely. They decided instead to focus on blunting its effects on Jewish and Italian immigrants. While this tactic offered more possibilities for a narrower success, it did little to block the larger issue of exclusion in immigration policy.

The five years between the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act and its implementation in 1929 saw antirestrictionists working feverishly to influence how quotas would be allocated to limit their impact on Jewish and Italian immigration. Once the National Origins Act went into effect, immigration activists began to focus on family reunification as a means to circumvent the quota limitations. Such changes in tactics illustrate the breakdown of unity as individual groups sought to help themselves at the expense of others.

The spike in refugees caused by World War II and the Cold War provided reform advocates opportunities to alter U.S. immigration policy. Nativist resistance to immigration did not lessen during this period, but, after emerging from World War II as a global superpower, the United States needed to maintain a particular image. This period spurred greater cooperation among those seeking to reform immigration laws, but diverging priorities highlighted fractures that could be exploited by those who wished for more restrictive policies. Antirestrictionists had success in specific areas, such as the passage of the 1943 Magnuson Act, which repealed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act as well as the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, which allowed for the settlement of European refugees, but, divided in their priorities, they could not achieve broad policy change. The passage of the restrictive 1952 McCarran-Walter Act and the debates around it demonstrated that reform advocates, while achieving limited goals, could not eliminate the racist, exclusionary foundations of American immigration law.

In the 1950s, reformers shifted tactics yet again and began utilizing the methods of their adversaries: they identified individual issues that appealed to legislators. Coalitions between groups were no longer as important or as useful as individual groups seeking like-minded legislators to achieve their own limited reform goals. This pragmatic approach, again, did little to challenge the racial status quo of U.S. immigration policy.

Not until 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act, could immigration advocates celebrate a significant victory in their fight for reform. The act replaced the national origins quota system with a policy that, while still based on location (allowing 120,000 visas annually for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere and 170,000 for those from the Eastern), was far more inclusive. Each country had the same cap: 20,000 visas annually. As with previous legislation, family reunification was prioritized, as were skilled workers and refugees. Marinari concludes that while Jewish and Italian groups succeeded in many specific instances during their struggle against immigration restriction, it was not until 1965 that reformers were able to reframe immigration debates away from a starting point in which white Protestants were the preferred immigrants under U.S. immigration law.

While the legislative backdrop of Unwanted is familiar to historians of immigration, Marinari nevertheless expands our understanding of events by mapping the efforts of Jewish and Italian groups as they sought to influence immigration policies for their own benefit. This study enriches the field by providing detailed analyses of immigration policy through the perspective of those who sought to shape it and by assessing their success and failures in fighting the racist underpinnings of immigration law. Unwanted should be required reading for anyone working in the fields of U.S. immigration history, ethnic studies, or even current immigration policy.