Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States & the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy

This groundbreaking work reinterprets the origins of immigration restriction in the U.S. Faced with the influx of Irish immigrants over the first half of the 19th century, nativists in Massachusetts and New York developed policies for prohibiting the landing of destitute foreigners and deporting those already resident. These state-level policies laid the foundations for federal immigration law. Expelling the Poor fundamentally revises the history of American immigration policy by locating the roots of immigration control in cultural and economic nativism against the Irish on the 19th-century Atlantic seaboard.