Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship by Anna O. Law (Oxford University Press 2026)

Publisher's Summary

Since the late nineteenth century, the U.S. federal government has enjoyed exclusive authority to decide whether someone has the ability to enter and stay in U.S. territory. But freedom of movement was not guaranteed in the British colonies or early U.S. By contrast, voluntary migrants were met with a crazy quilt of laws and policies created by colonies and states, which denied free mobility and settlement in their territories to unwanted populations.

Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship presents a story of constitutional development that traces the confluence of the logics of slavery and settler colonialism in historical legal rulings and public policy about migration and citizenship. The book examines the division of labor between the national and state governments that endured for over a century, reasons why that arrangement changed in the late nineteenth century, and what the transformation meant for people subject to those regimes of control. Drawing into one study the migration policy histories of groups of people that are usually studied separately, and combining the methodologies of political science, history, and law, Anna O. Law reveals the unmistakable effects of slavery and Native American dispossession in modern U.S. immigration policy.