Expelling the Poor

Deportation has reached a crisis point in the United States during the Trump Administration, though the number of deported immigrants had already begun its dramatic increase in the Obama era. Several US historians publishing on this topic in the past decade trace the origins of a comprehensive federal immigration policy to 1882, with dual legislative measures: one designed to exclude most Chinese immigrants from the United States and the other to establish the architecture for a comprehensive federal system of immigration control. In his excellent new book, Hidetaka Hirota challenges us to recalibrate that standard chronology by exploring the roots of current immigration debates and policy, including deportation or removal, in English law, American colonial policies and state-level policies in the Early National and antebellum periods. His analysis focuses particularly on New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania before 1876, when the Supreme Court invalidated state-based exclusion laws, asserting that deportation constituted a federal prerogative

Administration (probate law · Deportation · Economic history · Immigration · Immigration law · Immigration policy · Legislature · Political science · Politics · Prerogative · State (computer science · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Race, History, and American Society