Hidden Histories of Unauthorized Migrations from Europe to the United States

Hidden Histories of Unauthorized Migrations from Europe to the United States presents the latest scholarship on the illicit and irregular crossings of European migrants into the United States. Prepared by historians and sociologists based in the United States and Europe, the volume unsettles scholarly and popular characterizations of European immigrants as the nation’s quintessential legal immigrants by exposing the ignored and forgotten histories of European illegality from the late nineteenth century to the present. The anthology further demonstrates how the very erasure of illegality from mainstream accounts of European migration constitutes an essential feature of the history of European illegality. The various legal, social, and cultural mechanisms created to forgive and forget the phenomenon of European illegality conferred one of the many advantages that European migrants and their descendants experienced due to their legal and social status as white persons.

Deportation · Immigration · Mainstream · Phenomenon · Scholarship · White (mutation) · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Decadence, Literature, and Society · European history and politics