Great to be here this morning with you all. A decision from the Supreme Court on whether Trump can alter the Constitution’s birthright citizenship provision by Executive Order is imminent this week. I’m Dr. Anna Law and my new book Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship is a legal and policy history of US migration from the colonial period to 1888. I am a trained as a political scientist and also do very historical research on US migration and constitutional legal and policy history. <Cracks knuckles> AMA.
That is the arc of time is when the colonies, then the states, almost exclusively managed international and interstate migration until the federal government took over immigration controls after the Civil War. The contribution of the book is to bring together in one study US voluntary migration, African American, and Native American histories. These are academic literatures that are usually read in isolation of each other. I put them together because federal court cases in the 19th century showed that the politicians and jurists of the period thought of voluntary European migration, enslaved forced migration, and the ability of Native people to stay on their ancestral lands as relational and zero sum. In the 1830s in the southeast for example, slave states goaded the federal government into violently deporting 80,000 Native Americans to clear the land for white families and the expansion of cotton growing and slavery.
The US government’s official story on migration is that there were functionally open borders until the federal government started enforcing immigration laws in the late 19th century. My book counters that ahistorical claim and presents the colonial, early republic, and antebellum migration and citizenship laws and how it was experienced by politically unwanted groups. One big reason why deportation and exclusion are not fully controlled by the federal government until 1888 is because of slavery. Slave states found the idea of a federal deportation power frightening because of the possibility that the US government could deport enslaved people. Thus, control over international and interstate migration was at the colonial and state level until the Civil War politically disentangled slavery from voluntary migration. So, the location of the dividing line between federal and state control over migration has always been politically determined.
To learn more about me, you can visit my website. To order Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship, click the hyperlink. You can follow me on BlueSky at u/unlawfulentries.bsky.social If you really cannot get enough and need more inside-baseball discussion of US migration and citizenship history, listen to my recent 2 Complicated 4 History podcast and see its detailed show notes that include more sources about the topic.
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