Expelling the Poor

Hidetaka Hirota has written one of the most important recent books on the history of immigration to the United States. He breaks important new ground with his study but has also produced a work that, though focused on the nineteenth century, still speaks to current debates on immigration. He highlights more continuity in the story of immigration regulation than has been traditionally recognized. The book covers the Atlantic Seaboard states, the primary entry ports for early and mid-nineteenth-century immigration, but ultimately focuses on New York and Massachusetts, which had the most extensive and restrictive immigration laws in the antebellum and Civil War eras. Hirota begins, however, with the domestic and transatlantic antecedents of this regulation. Colonial governments replicated English vagrancy laws to remove nonlocal poor from their areas. This long tradition of expelling the poor laid the basis for removing immigrant paupers. Exacerbating this fear of the poor was the fact that the largest immigrant population coming to America in the antebellum era was Irish. The famous Massachusetts abolitionist Theodore Parker, for example, saw the Irish poor as the worst because: “The Irishman has three bad things—bad habits, bad religion, and worse of all, a bad nature” (p. 124). No surprise then that the Bay State had the most restrictive regulation. State officials, under both Know-Nothing and Republican administrations, deported the largest number of Irish paupers back across the Atlantic Ocean, including some American-born children of deportees, and, on occasion, naturalized immigrants

Economic history · Immigration · Irish · Political science · Population · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · Surprise · Demography · History · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Race, History, and American Society

• Historical Immigration Policies

  Open Access•Mary Eleanor Peters, Frida Boräng et al.•International Studies Quarterly•2024

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