Making foreigners
Subtitle: immigration and citizenship law in America, 1600-2000
By: Kunal M. Parker, Professor of Law, University of Miami School of Law
Series: New histories of American law; New histories of American law
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 259
ISBN-13: 9781107030213; 9781107698512
Subjects: Emigration and immigration law; Citizenship; History
Description: "This book reconceptualizes the history of U.S. 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, blacks, women, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, and the poor. Kunal 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. This book advances new ways of understanding the relationship between foreignness and subordination over the long span of American history"--Page i.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-243) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: Foreigners and borders in British North America; title: Logics of revolution; title: Blacks, Indians, and other aliens in Antebellum America; title: The rise of the federal immigration order; title: Closing the gates in the early twentieth century; title: A rights revolution?; title: Conclusion and coda.