New from Oxford University Press--and a book that this blogger has been eagerly anticipating:
Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (January 2017), by
Hidetaka Hirota (City College of New York). A description from the Press:
Historians have long assumed that immigration to the United States was
free from regulation until anti-Asian racism on the West Coast triggered
the introduction of federal laws to restrict Chinese immigration in the
1880s. Studies of European immigration and government control on the
East Coast have, meanwhile, focused on Ellis Island, which opened in
1892.
In this groundbreaking work, Hidetaka Hirota reinterprets
the origins of immigration restriction in the United States, especially
deportation policy, offering the first sustained study of immigration
control conducted by states prior to the introduction of federal
immigration law. Faced with the influx of impoverished Irish immigrants
over the first half of the nineteenth century, nativists in New York and
Massachusetts built upon colonial poor laws to develop policies for
prohibiting the landing of destitute foreigners and deporting those
already resident to Europe, Canada, or other American states. These
policies laid the foundations for federal immigration law. By
investigating state officials' practices of illegal removal, including
the overseas deportation of citizens, this book reveals how the
state-level treatment of destitute immigrants set precedents for the use
of unrestricted power against undesirable aliens. It also traces the
transnational lives of the migrants from their initial departure from
Ireland and passage to North America through their expulsion from the
United States and postdeportation lives in Europe, showing how American
deportation policy operated as part of the broader exclusion of
nonproducing members from societies in the Atlantic world.
By
locating the roots of American immigration control in cultural prejudice
against the Irish and, more essentially, economic concerns about their
poverty in nineteenth-century New York and Massachusetts, Expelling the Poor fundamentally revises the history of American immigration policy.
A few blurbs:
"Expelling the Poor is the first book-length treatment of
how antebellum immigration restriction emerged from centuries-old
restrictions on the residence and mobility of the poor. In showing how
indigent Irish migrants in the nineteenth century were shunted between
the United States, Great Britain, and Ireland, Hirota contributes
towards rethinking the historiography of immigration restriction in the
United States, which has conventionally dated the beginnings of
immigration restriction to the Chinese Exclusion laws of the 1880s. This
is a major accomplishment." --Kunal Parker
"An essential contribution to the history of immigration law
in the United States, Hirota's meticulously researched volume traces
the evolution of municipal and state immigration policies and practices
designed to exclude undesirable trans-Atlantic migrants, especially
Irish Catholic paupers, from New York and Massachusetts, before and
during the Civil War. Tackling a long understudied chapter in America's
peopling, Hirota adeptly demonstrates how state restrictions designed to
exclude those deemed potential public charges and culturally too alien
for assimilation eventually became the foundation of the federal
government's plenary power over immigration and later patterns of
exclusion and deportation." --Alan M. Kraut
More information is available
here.
