Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 "Shovelling Out": Ireland and the Emigration of the
Poor
Chapter 2 Problems of Irish Poverty: The Rise of State Control on
the Atlantic Seaboard
Chapter 3 Different Paths: The Development of Immigration Policy in
Antebellum Coastal States
Chapter 4 Radical Nativism: The Know Nothing Movement and the
Citizenship of Paupers
Chapter 5 A New Birth of Poverty: Pauper Policy in the Age of the
Civil War and Reconstruction
Chapter 6 The Journey Continued: Post-Deportation Lives in Britain
and Ireland
Chapter 7 The Moment of Transition: State Officials, the Federal
Government, and the Formation of American Immigration Policy
Conclusion
Appendices
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Hidetaka Hirota is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at the City College of New York. He was formerly a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University.
"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
Ask a Question About this Product More... |