Using Foreign Relations Sources to Contextualize Immigration History

AMERICAN IMMIGRATION and ethnic history is international in origin, but helping students understand the complexity of how the international system affects the migrant experience can pose difficulties for instructors following trends in the scholarship for a more international or transnational approach. Students more familiar with a nationalistic narrative of unidirectional movement, pulled by opportunity, might otherwise fail to consider the role that the relationship between the homeland and the United States has on migrant lives. Luckily, the history of transnational migration itself offers a potential source of documents for these students to engage and consider. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, migration began to be controlled through bilateral agreements or treaties and later unilateral immigration laws, and the increasing rigidity of the system helped to universalize the use of visas by the receiving governments. In the United States, the State Department both as a negotiating power and as the consular gatekeeper abroad has played a central role in determining who migrated, when, and how. Moreover, migrations often invoked negotiations between sending and receiving governments; issues such as changes in immigration laws, the governance of remittances, the creation of refugee policy, the deportation or repatriation of nationals, and the exchange of non-immigrant visitors all have necessitated extensive discussion between the U.S. foreign policy apparatus and its counterparts abroad. As a result, it is possible to learn a great deal about the international context of migration, including how it affected and was affected by international relations, by working through historical documents published by the U.S. Department of State in a series entitled Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS). Doing so gives students a unique and readily accessible source of documents that unlocks the foreign relations implications of migrations while creating opportunities for students to build skills in searching databases and evaluating primary sources. FRUS volumes are thematic collections of documents on U.S. foreign relations, broadly defined, that have been selected, organized, annotated

Context (archaeology · Deportation · Diplomacy · Foreign national · Foreign policy · Homeland · Immigration · Immigration law · Negotiation · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Repatriation · Scholarship · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Race, History, and American Society