In Borderline Citizens, Robert McGreevy explores the tenuous nature of Puerto Ricans’ claims to citizenship during the first three decades of United States colonial rule. The cases examined by McGreevy showcase intense debates that centered on two key questions: were Puerto Ricans foreigners or citizens, and what were Puerto Ricans’ rights as migrants and as laborers, as a result? Given that Puerto Ricans had been under United States dominion since 1898 and were designated citizens in 1917, McGreevy shows how inclusion in the United States nation-state was far from a given and how the status of Puerto Ricans was constantly contested despite legal forms of inclusion. Throughout the book, McGreevy turns to Puerto Ricans’ encounters with the colonial state to tell a story about the ways that citizenship is imposed, constructed, negotiated, and challenged, which is of great value to historians interested in how race, empire, and labor shape understandings of rights and who gets to be considered “American.”

McGreevy's narrative covers some familiar territory such as the notorious Insular Cases, which declared Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans to be foreign in a domestic sense. However, he injects new and exciting analysis into these discussions by focusing on how labor and migration shaped perspectives on Puerto Ricans’ citizenship. For McGreevy, laborers, unions, and employers played an underanalyzed but significant role in the struggle to define Puerto Ricans’ citizenship status.

During the first two decades of colonial rule, Puerto Ricans were increasingly recruited to the United States to work on contract. Puerto Ricans were defined as nationals as opposed to citizens during this period, which allowed them to move freely throughout United States territories and states but limited their legal rights. Racial nationalists, concerned about the effects of colonial migration on the United States, worked to stem the flow of migrants from the colonies. Organized labor in particular attempted to limit the importation of “cheap” colonial labor from Puerto Rico and the Philippines during this period, which, despite its nativist underpinnings, had the unintended consequence of speeding up the imposition of United States citizenship on Puerto Ricans in 1917 under the Jones Act. McGreevey traces the pivotal role played by laborers and unions in the decision to extend citizenship to Puerto Rico, a history that is often ignored in favor of a focus on the role of capital and the state in shaping both labor migration and citizenship. This is where McGreevey's analysis shines, as he upsets commonsense historical narratives around how and why Puerto Ricans were granted citizenship.

McGreevey shows how Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor (AFL), in an attempt to keep Puerto Ricans from competing with white Americans for jobs, worked to improve conditions in the archipelago in order to halt colonial migration to the mainland United States. Gompers and the AFL lobbied for citizenship for Puerto Ricans, which would improve conditions for labor, while demanding that Congress pass restrictive immigration laws, which would circumscribe the movement of Puerto Ricans. The stateside lobbying of organized labor, along with the work of Puerto Rican laborers to organize island-wide strikes and citizenship petition drives helped to influence United States policy makers’ thinking on the benefits of citizenship for Puerto Ricans. Thus, rather than merely granting citizenship to Puerto Ricans so that they could be drafted as cannon fodder in World War I (as has been the dominant thinking on the matter), United States policymakers advocated extending citizenship rights to Puerto Ricans in order to quell labor rebellion in the colony, appease organized labor at home, and show the international community that the United States was a guarantor of democracy around the globe.

Drawing on a rich historical archive, McGreevey challenges us to take seriously the role of laborers and their claims on the right of movement as being one of the biggest factors that led to the legal redefinition of Puerto Ricans’ citizenship under United States rule during the early twentieth century. McGreevey challenges top-down narratives of colonial rule and citizenship, demonstrating that colonized people were central protagonists in efforts to improve their conditions under colonial rule, as opposed to passive observers. As he notes, Puerto Ricans challenged colonial rule and its effects on their lives “both in the very act of migrating and in their vigorous contestations of colonial status, which forced debate and change in colonial law” (5). Although citizenship was in many ways a colonial imposition because of Congress's plenary power over Puerto Rico, McGreevey presents a complicated story in which Puerto Rican laborers in an effort to secure basic rights, the right to mobility, and political representation played a pivotal role in the passage of the Jones Act. Overall, McGreevey's book helps us to sharpen our analysis of the ever-shifting boundaries of citizenship at a time when we are witnessing a resurgence of the kinds of public debates around fitness that we saw at the turn of the twentieth century, and which are powerfully captured in Borderline Citizens.