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Expelling the Poor argues that immigration policies in nineteenth-century New York and Massachusetts, driven by cultural prejudice against the Irish and more fundamentally by economic concerns about their poverty, laid the foundations for American immigration control.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 "Shovelling Out": Ireland and the Emigration of the Poor
- Chapter 2 Problems of Irish Poverty: The Rise of State Control on the Atlantic Seaboard
- Chapter 3 Different Paths: The Development of Immigration Policy in Antebellum Coastal States
- Chapter 4 Radical Nativism: The Know Nothing Movement and the Citizenship of Paupers
- Chapter 5 A New Birth of Poverty: Pauper Policy in the Age of the Civil War and Reconstruction
- Chapter 6 The Journey Continued: Post-Deportation Lives in Britain and Ireland
- Chapter 7 The Moment of Transition: State Officials, the Federal Government, and the Formation of American Immigration Policy
- Conclusion
- Appendices
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Hidetaka Hirota is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at the City College of New York. He was formerly a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University.
Summary
Expelling the Poor argues that immigration policies in nineteenth-century New York and Massachusetts, driven by cultural prejudice against the Irish and more fundamentally by economic concerns about their poverty, laid the foundations for American immigration control.
Additional text
Hidetaka Hirota's Expelling the Poor is an exceptional, deeply researched, and timely study that transforms our understanding of U.S. immigration history and of Irish American studies. Shockingly, Hirota demonstrates that in the mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts and New York officials, inspired by nativism, anti-Catholicism, and what would now be called neoliberalism, excluded and/or deported roughly 100,000 would-be immigrants to the United States: mostly Irish paupers, many of them helpless widows and orphans, often expelled in the cruelest and most autocratic manner. As Hirota also shows, these vicious state policies were later adopted on the federal level, and, indeed, they are implemented today against the immigrants and refugees that US economic and foreign policies have uprooted from their homes.
