Where:
Massachusetts Historical Society
1154 Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02215
Admission:
FREE
Categories:
Date Idea, Lectures & Conferences
Event website:
https://www.masshist.org/calendar/event?event=2284
This groundbreaking work by Hidetaka Hirota reinterprets the origins of immigration restriction in the United States. Faced with the influx of impoverished Irish immigrants over the first half of the nineteenth century, nativists in Massachusetts and New York developed policies for prohibiting the landing of destitute foreigners and deporting those already resident to Europe, Canada, or other American states. These state-level policies laid the foundations for federal immigration law. By locating the roots of American immigration control in cultural and economic nativism against the Irish on the nineteenth-century Atlantic seaboard, Expelling the Poor fundamentally revises the history of American immigration policy.