About the Book
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.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Sovereign States
Chapter 1: Foundations
Chapter 2: Police Power and Commerce Power
Chapter 3: The Threat to Slavery
Chapter 4: The Boundaries of Political Community
Part Two: Immigration in the Age of Emancipation
Chapter 5: The Antislavery Origins of Immigration Policy
Chapter 6: Reconstruction
Chapter 7: Immigration and National Sovereignty
Epilogue
Chronology
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Kevin Kenny is Glucksman Professor of History and director of Glucksman Ireland House at New York University. He is the author of Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013), The American Irish: A History, and Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (OUP, 1998), among other books. President of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, Kenny came to the United States as an immigrant in the 1980s.
Review :
Kenny brings a fresh and insightful look at changing 19th-century immigration law in this crisp legal history... Based on a close reading of key immigration law cases and other primary sources, this erudite study sheds light on the long and complicated history of immigration law.
One can't fully understand the origins of US immigration policy without knowing the history of slavery and Native American removal. In this beautifully written book, Kevin Kenny shows how these painful histories laid the groundwork for the barring, policing, detaining, and expelling of immigrants and shaped American understandings of federal plenary power, citizenship, and sovereignty. This book shows why Kenny is one of the most insightful historians of the nineteenth-century United States.
From Kevin Kenny, eminent scholar in immigration history, comes a timely reminder that slavery once touched every aspect of American life, including border control. He makes a powerful case that today's immigration policies still bear the scars of the slaveholding republic.
In a bold and sweeping reinterpretation, Kenny convincingly places slavery and its legacy at the heart of the US immigration history. The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic is a must read for students of either field.
The most comprehensive and penetrating analysis of nineteenth-century US immigration policy that I have read. Kevin Kenny's brilliant reconstruction of the intersecting efforts to police the movement of enslaved, immigrant, and indigenous populations will change the way we think about the history—and the current state—of America's immigration regime.
Kenny makes an invaluable contribution to the study of immigration and racial formation in the nineteenth-century United States. His work is at the forefront of attempts to connect the history of slavery to the history of immigration, and its long narrative arc provides a useful framework for thinking about those histories, which have been pivotal to the United States. It simultaneously points to new areas for research that scholars should take up.
Based on a close reading of archival sources and some of the landmark immigration law cases, this book makes for an exciting read. A crisp legal history, Kenny's erudite work throws light on the long and tangled history of American immigration laws. By unveiling the complicated origins of incarceration, border control, and deportation, Kenny seeks to remind his readers that slavery at one time touched every aspect of American life, including the mobility of immigrants. The book makes a strong case that the contemporary immigration policy still bears the scars of the slaveholding republic. Given that the book is written in a coherent manner, and for more than one type of audience, it will be of interest to the specialists of the subject as well as non-specialists.
Kenny's insights are welcome because it is still all too easy to see slavery and immigration as separate areas of inquiry, divided temporally by the Civil War. In a standard survey of the field, slavery dominates before 1865 and federal immigration restrictions after it. ...the long arc of The Problem of Immigration connecting these conversations across the nineteenth century is an exciting intervention in the field.
