After They Closed the Gates

At various times in American history, Irish, Italians, Chinese, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and more have been seen--and then, gradually, not seen--as emblems of the unwanted. After They Closed the Gates extends this story to Eastern European Jews after restrictive immigration laws went into effect in the early 1920s. While the quota laws mostly worked as intended, Garland makes it clear that we must pay more attention to how people continued to get through, around, or under the border and to what "makes” illegal aliens. She reveals the chaotic, transnational underground of illegal immigration: migrants who sailed into the port of New York with fake German passports; others who came into Florida from Cuba, hidden with Greeks and Chinese in the holds of boats loaded with contraband liquor; and still others who came into Vermont from Canada by car. She explores the responses that government officials, journalists, Jewish organizations, alien smugglers, and migrants themselves had to this new, unsanctioned flow of people over American borders. And she ultimately shows the ways that Jews, by defying simple racial classification, posed challenges for the quota laws and actively worked to dissociate themselves from the specter of "the illegal alien.”