Historians have long assumed that immigration to the United States was free from regulation until anti-Asian racism on the West Coast triggered the introduction of federal laws to restrict Chinese immigration in the 1880s. Studies of European immigration and government control on the East Coast have; meanwhile; focused on Ellis Island; which opened in 1892. In this groundbreaking work; Hidetaka Hirota reinterprets the origins of immigration restriction in the United States; especially deportation policy; offering the first sustained study of immigration control conducted by states prior to the introduction of federal immigration law. Faced with the influx of impoverished Irish immigrants over the first half of the nineteenth century; nativists in New York and Massachusetts built upon colonial poor laws to develop policies for prohibiting the landing of destitute foreigners and deporting those already resident to Europe; Canada; or other American states. These policies laid the foundations for federal immigration law. By investigating state officials' practices of illegal removal; including the overseas deportation of citizens; this book reveals how the state-level treatment of destitute immigrants set precedents for the use of unrestricted power against undesirable aliens. It also traces the transnational lives of the migrants from their initial departure from Ireland and passage to North America through their expulsion from the United States and postdeportation lives in Europe; showing how American deportation policy operated as part of the broader exclusion of nonproducing members from societies in the Atlantic world.By locating the roots of American immigration control in cultural prejudice against the Irish and; more essentially; economic concerns about their poverty in nineteenth-century New York and Massachusetts; Expelling the Poor fundamentally revises the history of American immigration policy.
#730532 in Books Hirota Hidetaka 2017-01-24Original language:English 6.40 x 1.20 x 9.50l; .0 #File Name: 019061921X320 pagesExpelling the Poor Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth Century Origins of American Immigration Policy
Review
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. New Research in a Previously Ignored Area of Immigration HistoryBy Patrick YoungExpelling the Poor:Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy by Hidetaka Hirota; proves that one of my long-standing beliefs was wrong. I thought that before the 1880s; almost no one was deported from the United States. I had accepted the idea that repressive immigration laws had only come in with the racially motivated exclusion of the Chinese in the 1880s. As this book makes clear; deportations really began with antagonism towards the Irish in Massachusetts and New York.The author; Hidetaka Hirota; writes that; “During the first half of the nineteenth century; New York and Massachusetts received a growing influx of poor Catholic Irish immigrants. The newcomers’ religion triggered an outburst of anti-Irish nativism in these states; but so too did the immigrants’ poverty. Impoverished at home and sickened during the transatlantic passage; a “significant portion of the Irish arrived in the United States without the physical strength and financial resources to support themselves and thus had to enter almshouses.†The almshouses were the 19th Century’s welfare aid program for the poor.13Between the 1830s and the 1880s; approximately 50;000 people; mostly Irish; were removed from Massachusetts alone. While the absolute number is large; about 1;000 people per year; it was not a large percentage of total immigrants. Still; the book contains a depressing recitation of American prejudices against the sorts of poor people that Famine Era Ireland was sending to America – the starving; the grief stricken; and the infirm. Although New York was never as harsh as Massachusetts; it was second in the number of state-ordered deportations.Even more distressing is the treatment of those who were deported. In some cases; the deportees were Irish who had lived and worked productively for decades in the United States; but who were then deported when; later in life; they developed what we would recognize as dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease. The immigrants were then shipped back to Liverpool or Ireland with little concern for whether these mentally disabled people made it alive.
