Biotic Borders is the long-awaited monograph that expands upon Jeannie N. Shinozuka's 2013 essay in American Quarterly, “Deadly Perils: Japanese Beetles and the Pestilential Immigrant, 1920s–1930s,” with which many readers are no doubt familiar and (perhaps like this reviewer) may have assigned in their courses on immigration and Asian American history. The book goes both wider and deeper, covering a broader range of species (San José scale, chestnut blight, citrus canker, Mexican cotton boll weevil, white termite) in more diverse settings (Mexico, Philadelphia, Hawai‘i). Together, they service Shinozuka's central argument that “the origins of foreign species and their categorization as either invasive or native served to advance the larger goals of an emergent US empire” (p. 208) and its immigration regime. Biotic Borders explains why and how animus against and exclusion of Asian bodies as well as plants and insects from Asia came of age concurrently in the late...
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