Expelling the Poor

Historians have long assumed that immigration to the United States was free from regulation until anti-Asian racism on the West Coast triggered the introduction of federal laws to restrict Chinese immigration in the 1880s. Studies of European immigration and government control on the East Coast have, meanwhile, focused on Ellis Island, which opened in 1892.

In this groundbreaking work, Hidetaka Hirota reinterprets the origins of immigration restriction in the United States, especially deportation policy, offering the first sustained study of immigration control conducted by states prior to the introduction of federal immigration law. Faced with the influx of impoverished Irish immigrants over the first half of the nineteenth century, nativists in New York and Massachusetts built upon colonial poor laws to develop policies for prohibiting the landing of destitute foreigners and deporting those already resident to Europe, Canada, or other American states. These policies laid the foundations for federal immigration law. By investigating state officials' practices of illegal removal, including the overseas deportation of citizens, this book reveals how the state-level treatment of destitute immigrants set precedents for the use of unrestricted power against undesirable aliens. It also traces the transnational lives of the migrants from their initial departure from Ireland and passage to North America through their expulsion from the United States and postdeportation lives in Europe, showing how American deportation policy operated as part of the broader exclusion of nonproducing members from societies in the Atlantic world.

By locating the roots of American immigration control in cultural prejudice against the Irish and, more essentially, economic concerns about their poverty in nineteenth-century New York and Massachusetts, Expelling the Poor fundamentally revises the history of American immigration policy.

"Expelling the Poor examines the origins of immigration restriction in the United States, especially deportation policy. Based on an analysis of immigration policies in major American coastal states, including New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Louisiana, and California, it provides the first sustained study of immigration control conducted by states prior to the introduction of federal immigration law in the late nineteenth century. The influx of impoverished Irish immigrants over the first half of the nineteenth century led nativists in New York and Massachusetts to develop policies for prohibiting the landing of destitute foreigners and deporting those already resident in the states to Europe, Canada, or other American states. No other coastal state engaged in immigration regulation with the same level of legislative effort and success as the two states. By locating the roots of American immigration control in cultural prejudice against the Irish and, more essentially, economic concerns about their poverty in nineteenth-century New York and Massachusetts, this book fundamentally revises the history of American immigration policy, which has largely focused on anti-Asian racism on the West Coast. By investigating state officials' practices of illegal removal, such as the overseas deportation of those who held American citizenship, this book reveals how the state-level treatment of destitute immigrants set precedents for the assertion by American officers of unrestricted power against undesirable aliens, which characterized later federal control, and demonstrates how American deportation policy operated as part of a broader legal culture of excluding non-producing members from societies in the north Atlantic world"--

A superbly disruptive new book ... Expelling the Poor helps explain the powerful federal system of subsequent centuries, but as a history of the nineteenth century, it illustrates localism and inconsistency. -- Alison Clark Efford, Journal of the Civil War Era

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. -- David T. Gleeson, Journal of American History

Expelling the Poor combines analysis of law-making with heart-wrenching social history of Irish deportee experiences. Through his careful attention to the lives of these unwanted outcasts, Hirota goes some way to restoring the dignity stripped from them in the course of multiple forced Atlantic crossings. -- Anne Rees, Australasian Journal of American History

[S]eminal....[P]resents a virtual treasure trove of research and analytical insights that will set the pace for ensuing scholarship on U.S. immigration.--Luke Ritter, Journal of American Ethnic History

In this important and very timely book, historian Hirota goes back to the beginnings of the debate over immigration to the US to look at the origin of formal immigration policy. He focuses on the many thousands of Irish, most desperately poor, who began arriving in ever-increasing numbers in the early 19th century....By including the story of those who were not allowed entry and deported, the author makes an important contribution to the study of Irish immigration. The book's great strength is as a pioneering study of immigration policy. It is very readable and will be accessible to anyone interested in the development of immigration policy, as well those primarily concerned with current policy.--CHOICE

Significant and innovative....A major book in the study of U.S. state immigration policy, the best in the field to date....Expelling the Poor raises timely questions about the ways immigration laws and their enforcement, in the nexus of ignorance and nativism, create and exacerbate poverty.--Torrie Hester, American Nineteenth Century History

Hirota has written a stunning and major book....His work [is] an impressive and path breaking study....Hirota's revelations carry forward to the present....In the last four years a record number of bills dealing with immigration have been introduced into state legislatures. Today's struggles are no longer about Irish paupers but the conflict over immigration, whether at the state or federal levels seems to have no end.--David Reimers, New York Irish History

Expelling the Poor shows how state authorities on the East Coast fashioned the first regulations designed either to prevent the landing of undesirable immigrants or to ensure their expulsion to 'whence they came.' Moreover, Hirota's painstaking research reveals that these nativist reactions to Irish immigration in Atlantic Seaboard states were actually instrumental to the development of what eventually became a restrictive federal immigration regime by the end of the nineteenth century. This pioneering book skillfully blends the insights of migration and legal history in a narrative that interlaces events on a local, state, national, and transnational scale. It will change the way we research and teach the development of American immigration policy.--David C. Atkinson, Diplomatic History

Hidetaka Hirota's finely written analysis of nineteenth-century immigration control provides a corrective to the long-held belief that immigration was unregulated before the late 1800s when federal immigration laws were passed restricting Chinese immigration....Hirota skillfully merges anti-Catholic Irish sentiments within a narrative of anti-poverty contempt....His exhaustive archival research in Ireland, England, Massachusetts, and New York provides heart-wrenching examples of what the Irish poor suffered in America as well as the degradation of deportation to a land that rejected them because of their poverty, only to start the cycle over again. Hirota persuasively demonstrates that the initial policies of New York and Massachusetts created a model for federal immigration laws that would nationalize denying entry to immigrants in poverty, a sad commentary of an American precedent established in the treatment of refugees and the poor.--Diane C. Vecchio, New England Quarterly

Expelling the Poor is the first book-length treatment of how antebellum immigration restriction emerged from centuries-old restrictions on the residence and mobility of the poor. In showing how indigent Irish migrants in the nineteenth century were shunted between the United States, Great Britain, and Ireland, Hirota contributes towards rethinking the historiography of immigration restriction in the United States, which has conventionally dated the beginnings of immigration restriction to the Chinese Exclusion laws of the 1880s. This is a major accomplishment.--Kunal Parker, author of Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600-2000

An essential contribution to the history of immigration law in the United States, Hirota's meticulously researched volume traces the evolution of municipal and state immigration policies and practices designed to exclude undesirable trans-Atlantic migrants, especially Irish Catholic paupers, from New York and Massachusetts, before and during the Civil War. Tackling a long understudied chapter in America's peopling, Hirota adeptly demonstrates how state restrictions designed to exclude those deemed potential public charges and culturally too alien for assimilation eventually became the foundation of the federal government's plenary power over immigration and later patterns of exclusion and deportation.--Alan M. Kraut, author of Silent Travelers, Germs, Genes, and the Immigrant Menace

Meticulously researched and compellingly written, Expelling the Poor traces the evolution of state and local immigration regulation on the Atlantic seaboard over the course of the nineteenth century. With his uniquely comprehensive analysis of this key formative period, Hidetaka Hirota offers an essential new perspective on how federal immigration law came to be what it is today.--Hiroshi Motomura, author of Americans in Waiting and Immigration Outside the Law

In Expelling the Poor, Hidetaka Hirota uncovers the forgotten story of the tens of thousands of Irish immigrants who were deported from the United States in the mid-nineteenth century solely because they were poor. It is a great book on a vitally important and timely subject.--Tyler Anbinder, author of City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York

Hidetaka Hirota's Expelling the Poor is an exceptional, deeply researched, and timely study that transforms our understanding of U.S. immigration history and of Irish American studies. Shockingly, Hirota demonstrates that in the mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts and New York officials, inspired by nativism, anti-Catholicism, and what would now be called neoliberalism, excluded and/or deported roughly 100,000 would-be immigrants to the United States: mostly Irish paupers, many of them helpless widows and orphans, often expelled in the cruelest and most autocratic manner. As Hirota also shows, these vicious state policies were later adopted on the federal level, and, indeed, they are implemented today against the immigrants and refugees that US economic and foreign policies have uprooted from their homes.--Kerby A. Miller, author of Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America