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In light of recent debates over immigration reform in the United States, Carolyn Wong's analysis of the three most recent immigration bills is especially timely. In Lobbying for Inclusion, Wong provides the historical context and an examination of congressional voting patterns for the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), the 1990 Immigration Act, and the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). She argues that the existence of a pro-immigration coalition of cultural and economic interests best explains the pattern of immigration policy in the United States.

Wong opens her book with a question-why, given that a majority of Americans consistently say they want legal immigration decreased, have the three most recent immigration reforms undertaken by Congress resulted in increases in legal immigration? She argues that this is for two reasons. First, American employer associations made up of businesses that rely heavily on immigrant labor were very effective at lobbying lawmakers to provide them with access to permanent and temporary foreign workers. Second, Latino and Asian-American ethnic organizations were able to influence policy outcomes even before their constituencies gained political clout in the voting booth. They did so by framing the immigration debate as a matter of universal rights and by forming alliances with other civil rights and humanitarian organizations. As a result these organizations were highly successful, especially with regard to the maintenance of family reunification visas outside the regular "caps" on legal migrants. Wong claims that these ethnic organizations have framed the immigration question as one of family values, making it difficult for conservative representatives to oppose their position, at least publicly. Thus, when strong economic interests, such as the CATO institute and business associations, and the interests of the Latino and Asian American advocacy organizations coincided, this coalition was able to expand legal and temporary worker immigration to the United States. As Wong points out, few Congressional scholars have looked at the effects of nonprofit advocacy in Congress. Her analysis shows that these kinds of organizations, both alone and in coalition with other groups, have had an important impact on the making of public policy in the United States.

To support her argument, Wong provides a detailed description of the players, context, and politics surrounding the passage of these three bills. As any followers of Congress know, the final bill is often the result of numerous, often unexpected, twists and turns in the legislative process. Wong provides these insights for these three important bills, making her book required reading for students of immigration policy and for scholars interested in the politics underlying recent immigration legislation.

For each of the bills, Wong conducts a quantitative voting analysis, exploring member voting patterns in each instance. She also provides the probabilities for the effect the foreign-born population in a district has on member voting patterns, particularly among those members representing districts in the southwest. She finds that the percentage of foreign-born constituents does affect member voting patterns, especially when the district has a large Latino population. But, her main finding is that ideology and party have the strongest explanatory power when looking at voting on immigration. Although she does not emphasize it, for me this is Wong's most interesting finding. Congressional scholars are well aware of the importance of party control and party discipline in legislative behavior, particularly in the House of Representatives. Yet, because of the presence of "strange bedfellow" kinds of immigration coalition partners, as Wong points out, such as the CATO institute and National Council of La Raza, immigration is often considered an issue that crosses party lines and where symbolism and passion rule the day more than straight ideology. Wong's analysis shows us that this is not the case and that party matters for voting on immigration in much the same way as it does in other public policy areas. That finding in and of itself is an important contribution to our understanding of legislative behavior in relation to immigration policy.

As with any work, there are aspects of the analysis that could have been strengthened. Wong never really addresses the differences between immigration reform and other kinds of public policy. There are important historical and symbolic issues at play in this debate that do not really get discussed here. Wong claims that ethnic organizations pursue a "cultural" agenda without ever really explaining what that term means, how that meaning may change over time, and how it affects their ability to affect public policy, particularly with regard to immigration. Her choice of variables in her models, for example Mexican and Cuban as the two "Hispanic" foreign-born populations to explore, seems odd given that these are national origin groups with very different migration experiences and therefore very different interests in terms of immigration policy. Given her finding that party matters, her story would have been strengthened had it included more information about the respective positions the political parties were taking with regard to these pieces of legislation and how those positions evolved over time. Finally, Wong's work suffers from a problem present in many voting studies-determining causal direction. She talks about the percentage of foreign born in a district affecting the member's votes on immigration, with the implicit assumption that it is the district demographics that are driving voting patterns. It could just as easily be that a district with a high foreign-born population, particularly in the south-west, is likely to be a majority-minority Latino district and therefore have a high probability of being represented by a liberal Democrat. In this case party, again, may be driving members' voting patterns, rather than the foreign born population per se.

That said, Wong's book enhances our understanding of the politics underlying the passage of three significant pieces of immigration legislation and engages an important contemporary political debate. Lobbying for Inclusion adds to our understanding of the complexity that underlies the development of immigration policy in the United States and as such will be of great use to students and scholars of immigration, Congress, and public policy.

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