Auf ein Miniaturbild klicken, um zu Google Books zu gelangen.
Lädt ... Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policyvon Hidetaka Hirota
Keine Lädt ...
Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. Almost everything bad in our immigration policy had an initial life in New York and Massachusetts state policy towards Irish immigrants, before the feds took over responsibility (and took cues from those states on how to exclude and deport poor immigrants). Highlights: Deporting women and their native-born American kids, as well as elderly people who’d lived forty years in the US and had no contacts in Ireland. Ignoring rights, including sometimes naturalized citizenship. Dumping deportees with no resources in places they could well die. Condemning people as natural paupers because of their appearance when they tried to enter the US, often suffering from tragedy at home and a terrible journey regardless of their capacities when encouraged to thrive. No farce here, only tragedy. Zeige 2 von 2 keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
Auszeichnungen
"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"-- Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
Aktuelle DiskussionenKeine
Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)325.7309Social sciences Political Science International migration and colonization North America United StatesKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
Bist das du?Werde ein LibraryThing-Autor. |
I didn’t see too much in the book that surprised me, since we’d talked about a lot of it before. Hirota’s argument that modern US immigration regulations stemmed from state immigration regulation systems, and primarily from those of Massachusetts and New York, which in turn were built on the previous town-level “warning out” system, is well made. I wasn’t really left with any doubt about that progression by the end of the book. It was also interesting that state officials basically just switched hats and became the federal officials over immigration.
My biggest issue with the book is style. There is a lot of repetition and overlap. The chapters read as though they were intended to be 7 stand-alone essays that were bound together into one book. The same ground is covered multiple times. Some of this is probably my lingering impressions from reading the introduction, then chapter introductions, chapter conclusions, and then the conclusion. That’s pretty standard in academic history books, but it makes for hard reading if you’re going cover to cover.
What came first? Anti-Irish racism or economic concerns? In the conclusion, Hirota says that racism was the primary driving factor in creating anti-Irish pauper immigration, but throughout the book, the documents and people he quoted and the narrative he wrote gave me the impression that, while people didn’t overly care for the Irish, it wasn’t until they saw their cities and states being overrun by assisted pauper immigration and destitute, insane, criminal, starving Irish fleeing the famine that the rhetoric and restrictions kicked up a notch.
Anyway, it’s definitely worth taking a look at if you’re interested in American immigration history or Irish immigration to the US. I also found it interesting in terms of how it explored the shifting balance of power between local, state, and the federal governments.
( )