Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy by Hidetaka Hirota

Author:Hidetaka Hirota
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.2: “The Ignorant Vote—Honors Are Easy,” Harper’s Weekly, December 9, 1876.

Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Such a view originated from cultural prejudice and racism against the intellectual capacity of the Irish and blacks, but the economic consideration—their undeserving poverty as the antithesis of American freedom and independence—also contributed to doubts about their fitness for the American polity. Reconstruction’s incorporation of previously neglected people into American citizenry remained in many ways contingent on their ability to support themselves and their commitment to wage contract obligations. State immigration policy played its part in the exclusion of unqualified people, such as foreign-born paupers and vagrants, by literally removing them from the nation, and New York and Massachusetts pursued this policy more intensively than any other state.

State-level immigration control faced a formidable challenge to its constitutionality from the United States Supreme Court, which invalidated state exclusion laws in 1876. This prompted New York and Massachusetts officials to campaign for federal immigration legislation. Their leadership in the process hardly appears random, given the record of immigration control that the two states had built. New York and Massachusetts officials’ ongoing struggle with pauper immigration provided decisive momentum to this move toward federal immigration regulation.

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