Until the Civil War, the admission of foreigners into the United States was a local affair, as was the regulation of the movement of both free and enslaved Black people. Such matters were considered to fall under the police powers of individual states. There was no national immigration policy. In a special issue of the Journal of Civil War Era, historians explore how this situation changed, leading to Henderson v. Mayor of New York (1876), in which the Supreme Court affirmed federal control over immigration policy.
Historian Michael Schoeppner sets the stage, arguing that the many state and local laws restricting the mobility of free Black people in the antebellum period constituted a kind of racial immigration control. In this view, America’s first ‘illegal immigrants’ were Black. Free Black people faced border regulation and migration bans across the antebellum United States,” he writes.
“Laws restricting their movement were so ubiquitous that they approached a national immigration regime. Yet, while the antebellum Supreme Court struck down some state-level immigration regulations of transatlantic European migrants in 1849, it never heard a case on Black exclusion laws. State supreme courts uniformly upheld these laws until Reconstruction.
Michael Schoeppner
The enslaved, by legal definition, had no freedom of movement. Pro-slavery figures like SCOTUS Chief Justice Roger B. Taney opposed federal control of immigration precisely because they feared it would supersede local regulation of Black people’s movement, including the internal slave trade itself.
“The Civil War’s dismantling of slavery dramatically shifted the ideological landscape, and antislavery sentiment became the dominant force shaping post-war immigration policy. Historian Kevin Kenny highlights the irony of this shift by uncovering two federal laws that laid the groundwork for federal control over immigration.
In 1862, the US prohibited American involvement in the ‘Coolie Trade,’ the transportation of Chinese contract workers. Critics argued that the conditions of coolies resembled slavery, making their transport a transpacific echo of the Atlantic slave trade. While the law didn’t ban the entry of Chinese workers (who were still classified as free), it emboldened anti-Chinese immigration activists to push for total exclusion on antislavery grounds. This culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first federal law barring a specific nationality from immigrating to the US.
Kenny also highlights the 1864 Act to Encourage Immigration, which sanctioned the importation of European contract laborers. However, opposition to contract labor, fueled by antislavery rhetoric, culminated in the Foran Act of 1885, banning such agreements. Kenny asserts that a stark contrast emerged: Chinese laborers were perceived as inherently unfree, while European laborers, now ‘liberated from the shackles of contract,’ became America’s archetypal immigrants.
In the absence of a comprehensive antebellum immigration policy, individual states crafted their own regulations. This made state lawmakers targets of intense lobbying from the lucrative migrant passenger trade, particularly in key port cities like New York.
Historian Katherine Carper traces the migration industry’s decades-long campaign to shape state immigration laws, particularly its efforts to abolish passenger fees that hampered profits. In New York, they captured control of the immigration process before the Civil War, only to see their power diminished during the conflict. Afterwards, the industry sought to reassert itself, but found multi-state lobbying too complex. Instead, they pushed for federalizing immigration control, concentrating their influence in Washington, DC. Ironically, the very New York law the industry helped create became its target, and the Supreme Court sided with them, overturning New York’s rules and transferring immigration control to the national government.
As these historians reveal, this period established a troubling pattern: population control based on race, the categorization of migrants into desirable and undesirable classes, and policies shaped by powerful interests profiting from migrant labor.
Edited By Brajabandhu Mahanta
Reference: The Migration Business and the Shift from State to Federal Immigration Regulation
