Week 2: Migration, Mobility & Borders: Reading Response

Allison Brown HIST 5400: Migration, Mobility & Borders Dr. Hampton September 8, 2022 Reading Response - Week 2 Hirota’s Expelling the Poor (2017) centers around the experiences and laws surround Irish immigration in New York and Massachusetts in the nineteenth-century. Drawing from different periods and historical contexts, Hirota crafts an argument about the unique role state governments and individual policies played, when impacted primarily by anti-Irish nativism and the economic status of these 1 immigrants “laid the foundations for American immigration policy.” Hirota’s argument further defines itself around the impact state policies had on developing the federal Immigration Act of2 1882. To start, it’s interesting to briefly compare this text and the notions of how class and religion in the case of Irish immigration counters some points made by Welke’s Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States (2010). Critical to her argument, Welke doesn’t include 3 religion and class as primary drivers of her “borders of belonging”. However, through Hirota’s work it is evident that the religious background of Irish immigrants as well as their economic class were motivating factors in the development of anti-Irish nativism, “the poverty of the Catholic Irish, along with their religious faith, stimulated anti-Irish nativism and played a critical role in the development of immigration control policy. This marked the initial phase in the circular migration of those who would eventually be 4 deported from the US to Ireland under American immigration policy” Poverty combined with ideals about Irish Catholicism indicate that religion and class indeed did play a role in defining the “borders of belonging” for Irish immigrants in New York, Massachusetts, and across the U.S. The role of economics and the role that the state plays in supporting immigrants is a common theme across Hirota’s work framed by what he defines as the “economic impetus” of immigration at this 1 Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the 19th-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2017), pg. 3 2 pgs. 4-5 3 Barbara Young Welke, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States (Cambridge University Press, 2010) pgs. 11-12 4 Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the 19th-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2017), pg. 17 time, “What lay behind aversion to Irish paupers and the aggressive enforcement of restrictive laws was 5 the question of who deserved to be American in the nineteenth century.” This question of belonging primarily was economically based, with the questions of who deserved to be an American citizen not only influenced by religion or race, but how that group would fit into economic society without straining the “American” population. Hirota details Irish immigrants as being portrayed by some during the nineteenth century as “dependent on public charity and living outside the world of contract wage labor, Irish paupers appeared to destabilize the integrity of American free labor ideology … state immigration policy functioned as a vanguard of these visions and determined who deserved to belong to America in the most 6 literal sense by physically removing from the nation those deemed undeserving.” This question of being “deserving” of American citizenship recurs throughout both state and national immigration policies, and belonging in this way is defined by economic resources and an immigrant’s ability not to be a “drain” on the American population. This notion of economic access for immigrants is also evident in “head money” which included in the passenger fare for immigrants to “... bear the expense of those institutions and to refuse admission to those who could not do so. The essential objective of Massachusetts deportation policy was to physically eliminate Irish paupers, the source of financial drain, from the7 state.” Hirota argues that states, specifically New York and Massachusetts, in the nineteenth-century independently carried out their own immigration policies with a lack of federal immigration policy 8 besides the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. In the vacuum of relevant federal immigration policy, these states “had some measures for immigrant exclusion or deportation since colonial times, but immigration regulation in these states became firmly institutionalized under the command of state immigration agencies.”9 With the rise of anti-Irish nativism and the Know-Nothings political party, it became increasingly clear that the authority which states possessed over immigrants “[resulted] in the coercive and abusive treatment of undesirable foreigners and the practices of unlawful removal [and] a period of 5 pg. 209 6 pgs. 102, 209 7 pgs. 157, 208 8 pg. 181 9 pg. 99 militant nativism when all paupers of Irish descent, regardless of citizenship status, became subject to 10 overseas banishment.” Hirota throughout the text also describes the unique role which individuals, be that state immigration agencies or agents, were able to illegally, unilaterally act without any meaningful federal immigration laws, “principles of immigration policy were fashioned not only by laws and court opinions 11 but also through the actions of people who carried out border control.” As there were no federal checks on unlawful deportations of Irish immigrants, even U.S. citizens at times, “state exclusion and deportation laws equipped enforcing officials with tremendous power over the fates of alliances. When this legal power was combined with officials’ own nativist sentiment, the implementation of immigration policy 12 became exceedingly coercive.” The coupling of nativist sentiments and unilateral authority of immigration policy was incredibly problematic and would lay the groundwork for how states address immigration policies in the nineteenth century and beyond with the further development of legal immigration frameworks with the Page Act of 1875 and the Federal Immigration Act of131882. 10 pg. 99 11 pg. 6 12 pg. 69 13 pgs. 181, 7 Discussion Questions 1. Hirota writes, “As seen in New York authorities’ apparent dismissal of the under portability of foreigners under state law and the Massachusetts commissioners’ expulsion of Irish American citizens, state official developed and acted on the conviction that they could practically do anything with aliens, or people whom the officials deemed aliens, if their action was the exercise of police power to protect Americans from economic, moral, and public health threats” (pg. 128). a. In what ways do we see the militarization of immigration policy, or the precursors of it in this work? b. What is Hirota referring to with “public health threats” at this time specifically with European immigration in the nineteenth-century? 2. In what ways as political movements does anti-Irish nativism and the “Know-Nothing” movement shape immigration policy? How do public sentiments about these issues impact state or federal policy, or is it the inverse? 3. Hirota concludes his work with,Landing “ stations established after the 1880s and run under federal supervision, such as Ellis Island and Angel Island, have now come to symbolize the tradition of immigration control in the US. Yet Atlantic seaboard states’ earlier efforts to reduce foreign pauperism reveal that restriction was an integral part of the American immigration experience long before the building of these gateways to America” (pg. 211). a. Do you agree or disagree with the underlined statement? Why/why not? b. How does the development of these “gateways” reinforce preexisting borders and barriers to entry for immigrants to the United States?