Montoya on Immigration Restriction and U.S.-Mexican Diplomatic Relations, 1924–1932

The University of Nebraska Press has released Risking Immeasurable Harm: Immigration Restriction and U.S.-Mexican Diplomatic Relations, 1924–1932 (April 2020), by Benjamin C. Montoya (Schreiner University). A description from the Press: 

The debate over restricting the number of Mexican immigrants to the United States began early in the twentieth century, a time when U.S.-Mexican relations were still tenuous following the Mexican Revolution and when heated conflicts over mineral rights, primarily oil, were raging between the two nations. Though Mexico had economic reasons for curbing emigration, the racist tone of the quota debate taking place in the United States offended Mexicans’ national pride and played a large part in obstructing mutual support for immigration restriction between the United States and Mexico.

Risking Immeasurable Harm explains how the prospect of immigration restriction affects diplomatic relations by analyzing U.S. efforts to place a quota on immigration from Mexico during the late 1920s and early 1930s. The controversial quota raised important questions about how domestic immigration policy debates had international consequences, primarily how the racist justifications for immigration restriction threatened to undermine U.S. relations with Mexico.

Benjamin C. Montoya follows the quota debate from its origin in 1924, spurred by the passage of the Immigration Act, to its conclusion in 1932. He examines congressional policy debate and the U.S. State Department’s steady opposition to the quota scheme. Despite the concerns of American diplomats, in 1930 the Senate passed the Harris Bill, which singled out Mexico among all other Latin American nations for immigration restriction. The lingering effects of the quota debates continued to strain diplomatic relations between the United States and Mexico beyond the Great Depression.

Relevant to current debates about immigration and the role of restrictions in inter-American diplomacy, Risking Immeasurable Harm demonstrates the correlation of immigration restriction and diplomacy, the ways racism can affect diplomatic relations, and how domestic immigration policy can have international consequences.

A few blurbs:

“This carefully researched and elegantly crafted book provides timely lessons on the importance of building and sustaining bilateral diplomatic relationships across the Mexico-U.S. border. Montoya’s new analysis of early twentieth-century legislative practices reminds us that marginalized immigrants have always been central to the discourses and practices of state sovereignty and nation formation.”—Mark Overmyer-Velázquez

“Timely and pathbreaking. . . . With a focus on diplomacy and politics from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, Risking Immeasurable Harm sheds new light on U.S.-Mexican diplomatic developments as they relate to controversies over quotas, racism, sovereignty, and immigration restriction. This important book reveals how and why diplomacy factored centrally in the failure of congressional attempts to restrict Mexican migration, even as the United States implemented draconian cuts to overall immigration.”—Christopher McKnight Nichols

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words, a new exhibit at the Library of Congress, opens December 5.

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Donald M. Beaudette (Oxford College of Emory University) and Laura Weinstein (independent scholar) on "why a 1972 Northern Ireland murder matters so much to historians"; Margaret A. Nash (University of California, Riverside) on "The dark history of land-grant universities"; and more.

• The Law and Society Association has issued a call for applications for a Graduate Student & Early Career Workshop. It will be held May 26-27, 2020, in Denver, Colorado, immediately preceding the LSA Annual Meeting. More information here.

• Writing for JOTWELL's Criminal Law Section, Jonathan Simon (Berkeley Law) has posted an admiring review of Laura I. Appleman's "Deviancy, Dependency, and Disability: The Forgotten History of Eugenics and Mass Incarceration," which appeared in Volume 68 of the Duke Law Journal  (2018).

• The University of Chicago Law School celebrated Nelson Willis (LL.B. 1918), its first African American graduate.

• Megan Siu reviews Abortion: History, Politics, and Reproductive Justice after Morgentaler, ed. Shannon Stettner, Kristin Burnett & Travis Hay (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017).

• Check out "Radical Movements" by Christopher Szabla, a review essay in The New Rambler on Renisa Mawani's book, Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire. 

• Yesterday past-ASLH-president Constance Backhouse delivered the Shannon Lecture at Carleton University’s Department of History, Feminism and the Supreme Court: How the First Two Women Appointed to Our Top Court Widened Judicial Debates.

• Philip Girard, Osgoode Hall Law School, delivered the keynote address to the first conference of the Legal History Society of Nigeria.  More. 

• Victoria Woeste presented “Fake News: Antisemitic Propaganda from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the Era of Trump,” at the conference on Social Media and Antisemitism, Edge Hill University, England.

• Tulane Law celebrated the gift of a 200-year-old manuscript on Civil Law of Louisiana by Louis Moreau Lislet.

• New online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Litigants in the English “Court of Poor Men's Causes,” or Court of Requests, 1515–25, by Laura Flannigan, and The Strange Career of Gross Indecency: Race, Sex, and Law in Colonial Singapore, by J. Y. Chua.

• ICYMI: Adam Hochshild on the Palmer Raids in the New Yorker.  A New York lawyer discovers William Maxwell Evarts.  Dean Strang's radio interview on his new book, Keep the Wretches in Order, on prosecuting Wobblies during World War I.  Thanks a lot, Isaac Royall, Jr.: “Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne demanded that the university pay his country reparations 'for the gains Harvard enjoyed at the expense' of Antiguan slaves” (WaPo). Richard A. Epstein on How Bad Constitutional Law Leads to Bad Economic Regulations, in The Atlantic.  Henry Louis Gates on Redeemers in the NYT.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.   

Weekend Roundup

• Charles Evans Hughes and The Role of New York's Organized Bar at a Time of Crisis for the Rule of Law, the 55th Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Lecture, delivered by Henry F. Greenberg, president-elect of the New York State Bar Association, is now available.

• New in Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: “Plant Yourselves on its Primal Granite”: Slavery, History and the Antebellum Roots of Originalism, by Aaron R. Hall; and Disqualified Witnesses between Tannaitic Halakha and Roman Law: The Archeology of a Legal Institution, by Orit Malka.

• Have you registered for ASLH Boston yet? 

• Eric Rauchway will speak on his book, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal, on Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 7:00 p.m., in the Henry A. Wallace Center at the FDR Presidential Library and Home.   I recently read Winter War and learned a great deal from it.  In particular, I was struck by its depiction of Hoover as a person who, incapable of taking no for an answer on November 8, 1932, at once started laying the foundation for what he was certain would be his inevitable vindication.  But even this was to be denied him: when conservatives finally looked for an early twentieth-century president to exalt, they rejected Hoover (the Reconstruction Finance Corporation looked too much like the Troubled Asset Relief Program) in favor of Coolidge.  DRE

•  ICYMI: John Mikhail on Hammer v. Dagenhart, United States v. Darby, and the Tenth Amendment over at Balkinization.   Also at Balkinization, Mark Tushnet on Justice Gorsuch getting his history of the Schechter case from Amity Shlaes.  Sam Erman on how Isabel Gonzalez shows us that the Constitution is what we make of it in The Hill.

• And finally: check out the online database, England's Immigrants 1330-1550: Resident Aliens in the Late Middle Ages. It has entries on over 64,000 peoples, along with themed posts (under Background: Individual Studies).

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Two articles on Jewish law in French history

Back in 2017, Géraldine Gudefin (American University) published two articles on Jewish law in French history. We missed these earlier. Here are some details:

(1) "Creating Legal Difference: The Impossible Divorce of Russian Jews in Early Twentieth-Century France," Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues 31 (2017), 11-36

Abstract: Much of the scholarship on Jewish divorce assumes that civil marital laws are beneficial to Jews. This article complicates that assumption by focusing on a rarely acknowledged aspect of Jewish immigration in France. As France moved towards a stricter understanding of the separation of church and state, civil courts rejected the possibility of applying religious divorce laws to foreigners. Combined with the French practice of applying foreign law in cases involving immigrants, this shift resulted in Russian Jews being denied the right to civil divorce from 1905 to the 1920s. The confessional nature of Russian divorce thus continued to shape the lives of Russian Jews even after their immigration to France. The case of Russian Jewish divorce casts light on the shifting and contradictory understand-ings of the separation of church and state in France during the early years of the twentieth century.

(2) "Reforming Jewish Divorce: French Rabbis and Civil Divorce at the Turn of the Twentieth century (1884-1907" in Martine Gross, Sophie Nizard, and Yann Scioldo-Zurcher, eds., Gender, Families and Transmission in the Contemporary Jewish Context (2017)

Excerpt from introduction: "In the months and years following the passage of the law of 1884 [restoring civil divorce in France], rabbis in France became increasingly aware of the plight of Jewish women who were denied a religious divorce. Over the next two decades, French rabbis designed myriad proposals in an effort to reform Jewish marital laws and  prevent the problem of
agunot; these rabbinical proposals became widely  publicized in the French Jewish press. This article examines the manifold suggestions for reforming Jewish divorce between 1884 and 1907, focusing particularly on the conflicting pressures faced by French rabbis. On the one hand, Jewish communal leaders were extremely influenced by French debates about civil divorce, sharing similar ideas with reformers of civil divorce about the adaptive nature of the law and the need for more  balanced gender relations. On the other hand, owing to the transnational nature of Jewish law and life, the discussion about religious divorce transcended France's national borders, thus complicating attempts at reform."

Further information is available here.