Making Foreigners
Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000

This book connects the history of immigration with histories of Native Americans, African Americans, women, the poor, Latino/a Americans and Asian Americans.

Kunal M. Parker (Author)

9781107698512, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 31 August 2015

268 pages
23.1 x 15.3 x 1.5 cm, 0.38 kg

'Parker's work sheds light on the ways political and legal shifts have allowed the American state to incorporate outsiders, while also rendering insiders foreign … The expansive timeline and ambitious scope of Parker's argument provides a fresh and exhaustive overview of immigration and citizenship history. Highly Recommended.' Ashley Johnson Bavery, Reviews in American History

This book reconceptualizes the history of US immigration and citizenship law from the colonial period to the beginning of the twenty-first century by joining the histories of immigrants to those of Native Americans, African Americans, women, Asian Americans, Latino/a Americans and the poor. Parker argues that during the earliest stages of American history, being legally constructed as a foreigner, along with being subjected to restrictions on presence and movement, was not confined to those who sought to enter the country from the outside, but was also used against those on the inside. Insiders thus shared important legal disabilities with outsiders. It is only over the course of four centuries, with the spread of formal and substantive citizenship among the domestic population, a hardening distinction between citizen and alien, and the rise of a powerful centralized state, that the uniquely disabled legal subject we recognize today as the immigrant has emerged.

1. Introduction
2. Foreigners and borders in British North America
3. Logics of revolution
4. Blacks, Indians, and other aliens in antebellum America
5. The rise of the federal immigration order
6. Closing the gates in the early twentieth century
7. A rights revolution?
8. Conclusion and coda.

Subject Areas: Citizenship & nationality law [LNDA], Legal history [LAZ], History of the Americas [HBJK]