A powerful analysis of how regulation of the movement of enslaved
and free black people produced a national immigration policy in the
period between the American Revolution and the end of
Reconstruction. Today the United States considers immigration a
federal matter. Yet, despite America's reputation as a "nation of
immigrants," the Constitution is silent on the admission,
exclusion, and expulsion of foreigners. Before the Civil War, the
federal government played virtually no role in regulating
immigration, and states set their own terms for regulating the
movement of immigrants, free blacks, and enslaved people. Insisting
that it was their right and their obligation to protect the public
health and safety, states passed their own laws prohibiting the
arrival of foreign convicts, requiring shipmasters to post bonds or
pay taxes for passengers who might become public charges, ordering
the deportation of immigrant paupers, quarantining passengers who
carried contagious diseases, excluding or expelling free blacks,
and imprisoning black sailors. To the extent that these laws
affected foreigners, they comprised the immigration policy of the
United States. Offering an original interpretation of
nineteenth-century America, The Problem of Immigration in a
Slaveholding Republic argues that the existence, abolition, and
legacies of slavery were central to the emergence of a national
immigration policy. In the century after the American Revolution,
states controlled mobility within and across their borders and set
their own rules for community membership. Throughout the antebellum
era, defenders of slavery feared that, if Congress gained control
over immigration, it could also regulate the movement of free black
people and the interstate slave trade. The Civil War and the
abolition of slavery removed the political and constitutional
obstacles to a national immigration policy, which was first
directed at Chinese immigrants. Admission remained the norm for
Europeans, but Chinese laborers were excluded through techniques of
registration, punishment, and deportation first used against free
black people in the antebellum South. To justify these measures,
the Supreme Court ruled that immigration authority was inherent in
national sovereignty and required no constitutional justification.
The federal government continues to control admissions and
exclusions today, while some states monitor and punish immigrants,
and others offer sanctuary and refuse to act as agents of federal
law enforcement. By revealing the tangled origins of border
control, incarceration, and deportation, distinguished historian
Kevin Kenny sheds light on the history of race and belonging in
America, as well as the ongoing tensions between state and federal
authority over immigration.
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