Robert C. McGreevey. Borderline Citizens

Borderline Citizens: The United States, Puerto Rico, and the Politics of Colonial Migration is a study of emigration to the United States from Puerto Rico, following the island’s annexation in 1898. Robert C. McGreevey traces the history of Puerto Rican immigration in the Hawaiian Islands, California, New York, and other states over the three-plus decades since the occupation of Puerto Rico under U.S. forces and General Nelson Miles. Despite the annexation, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1904 decision to recognize Puerto Ricans as American “nationals,” and despite Puerto Ricans being conferred as U.S. citizens in 1917, Puerto Rican immigrants were discriminated against, were paid less than other Americans, were treated worse than other U.S. citizens (and sometimes foreigners), and were otherwise refused their due as U.S. nationals and then citizens. Borderline Citizens reappraises the relationships between immigration and imperial history and between imperial law and colonial migration. Immigrants, as the author points out, are often not from a world apart. Puerto Ricans emigrated to the United States not as “others,” then, but as nationals or citizens who became immigrants by virtue of U.S. imperial authority. The fact that Puerto Rico was part of an American empire offered Puerto Ricans an opportunity to emigrate in pursuit of a better life and, at the same time, induced many to emigrate from the island as a result of worsened conditions—some of which were the result of the United States’ actions as the governing authority. By extension this same phenomenon applies to emigrants to Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and other metropoles from their respective overseas possessions.

Annexation · Colonialism · Economic history · Emigration · Empire · Ethnology · Immigration · Immigration law · Political science · Politics · Supreme court · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies