Edgardo Meléndez's insightful, thought-provoking, and well-grounded work dwells on how the Puerto Rican government organized, promoted, and regulated the movement of people from the island to the US mainland between 1947 and 1960. The author analyzes how the colonial state formulated and implemented its own migration policy, as defined by Public Law 25 in 1947, which established “that it did not ‘encourage nor discourage’ the migration of Puerto Rican workers to the United States or any other country” (p. 69). Despite the law's laissez-faire rhetoric, the government adopted migration as a safety valve for the island's demographic and economic pressures in the two decades after World War II. More broadly, Meléndez demonstrates that Puerto Rico's peripheral position within the American empire facilitated the postwar displacement of a large share of its population, based on unrestricted access to the continental United States after Congress granted US citizenship to Puerto Ricans in...

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