In Risking Immeasurable Harm, Benjamin Montoya examines the factors behind, and the response to, a campaign in the United States during the late 1920s and early 1930s to impose tough restrictions on Mexican immigration. Though measures enacted between 1917 and 1924 had significantly curtailed the flow of migrants to the United States from Europe and Asia, the national quotas introduced by this legislation did not apply to the countries of the Western Hemisphere. A concern over Mexican immigration in particular—fueled largely, as Montoya shows, by the view that Mexican migrants were racially inferior and unassimilable—prompted restrictionists to seek to remedy this omission. Calls by some legislators for an extension of the quota were opposed by the State Department, which argued that such a move would damage an improving relationship with Mexico's postrevolutionary government. In a bid to defuse congressional efforts to write new limits on Mexican immigration into law,...
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