Ulteriori informazioni
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.
Sommario
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.
Info autore
Kunal Parker is a Professor of Law and Dean's Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami School of Law. His first book, Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1790–1900: Legal Thought before Modernism was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011.
Riassunto
This book will interest the reader who wants to learn about the history of immigration and citizenship law. Covering the span of American history (1600–2000), it connects the history of immigrants with that of domestic subordinated groups and reveals the changing legal meanings of foreignness over the course of American history.
