Skip to Main Content

The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Online ISBN:
9780197580110
Print ISBN:
9780197580080
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Kevin Kenny
Kevin Kenny
Glucksman Professor of History and Director of Glucksman Ireland House, New York University
Find on
Published online:
18 May 2023
Published in print:
25 July 2023
Online ISBN:
9780197580110
Print ISBN:
9780197580080
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Immigration presented a constitutional and political problem in the nineteenth-century United States. Until the 1870s, the federal government played a very limited role in regulating immigration. The states controlled mobility within and across their borders and set the rules for community membership. This book demonstrates how the existence, abolition, and legacies of slavery shaped immigration policy as it moved from the local to the national level. Throughout the antebellum era, defenders of slavery feared that if Congress controlled immigration, it could also regulate the movement of free black people and the interstate slave trade. The Civil War removed the political and constitutional obstacles to a national immigration policy. Admission remained the norm for European immigrants until the 1920s, but Chinese immigrants fell into a different category. Starting in the 1870s, the federal government excluded Chinese laborers, deploying 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 authority over immigration was inherent in national sovereignty and required no constitutional justification. The federal government continues to control admissions and exclusions today, while the states play a role in regulating immigrants’ lives, varying by politics and location. Some monitor and punish immigrants; others offer sanctuary and refuse to act as agents of federal law enforcement. By examining the history of immigration in a slaveholding republic, this book reveals the tangled origins of border control, incarceration, deportation, and ongoing tensions between local and federal authority in the United States.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close