The stories Pfaelzer tells deserve our attention, and yet this is not a particularly well-written or well-organized book. In the end, her tireless and thorough research — sifting through 19th-century newspapers, pursuing diaries and memoirs from local historical societies, seeking out court documents, tracking diplomatic correspondence — has left her with a nearly impossible problem. How is a writer to make an artful narrative out of tales in which the same miserable events unfold over and over again? Cataloging the harassment of the Chinese in the 1880s, Pfaelzer finally resorts to assembling, in white type on 35 black pages, what she calls a “litany of hate”: “a topical and chronological register of acts of ethnic cleansing.” This is, in other words, the literary genre the rest of us call a list.

With a topic of this seriousness, it may seem petty to dwell on cryptic sentences or the lack of a uniting theme in paragraphs held together by intellectual duct tape of weakened stickiness. But the uneven quality of the writing has consequence. It gives the reader an unintended relief from an otherwise unrelenting confrontation with human cruelty. One more round of revisions, with sharper phrasing, clearer narrative and more thorough analysis, and Pfaelzer could have sealed off the reader’s route of emotional escape.

In her introduction, Pfaelzer makes an ambitious, though brief, effort to place the Chinese expulsions in a broad planetary history, remembering her “own family’s diaspora” in flight from Nazi Germany and referring to the “millions of refugees in Nigeria, Eritrea, Iraq and Darfur” today. She also notes that “thousands of immigrants, thousands of people born in the United States to parents born abroad, and thousands of others are marching through the streets of Los Angeles, Houston and New York, refusing to be temporary people, transients, braceros, guests or sojourners.”

Could a reckoning with the unhappy history Pfaelzer documents bring some clarity and wisdom to contemporary debates on immigration? When we ask it to guide our decisions in the present, history has a way of speaking more like a sphinx than like the author of a how-to manual. And yet, in this particular territory, historical perspective surrenders some of its habitual obliqueness and subtlety. First, like many other important works in this field, Pfaelzer’s book makes an irrefutable case that immigration played a crucial role in building the economic well-being of the United States. Second, we must acknowledge that nothing has immunized us against the unhappy effect that economic disappointment works on the soul, or against the temptation to find scapegoats to hold responsible for deeper problems.

In 1876, commenting on violence against the Chinese in nearby Truckee, Calif., The Reno Evening Gazette in Nevada declared that one attack, in which vigilantes set two cabins on fire and shot at the occupants as they fled, represented a “phase of human depravity and cupidity that would cast a gloom over the dark shades of hell.” You might dismiss that phrasing as melodramatic and overwrought. But contemplate the stories brought together in this book, and the writers at that newspaper will seem simply to have stated the truth.