The Role of Immigration in the Designing of the American Nation

In this comprehensive history of US immigration policy, Aristide Zolberg demonstrates how American political leaders have long devised immigration laws for the purpose of nation-building. Conceiving of inmigration as a social process by which they could fashion the future composition of the populace, policy elites battled over competing notions of what kind of immigration was desirable for economic growth and the attainment of political goals. In Zolberg’s account, political economic interests and identity politics shaped the policy stances of these actors, but the weight of national traditions and the conservative bias of political institutions continually constrained the forces pressing for policy change. Zolberg sets out to disentangle these many and varied factors affecting policy decisions and effects, with the aim of constructing a coherent account of how immigration policy and nation-building were intertwined.

The author’s research strategy blends historical narrative with social scientific analysis drawing from several disciplinary frameworks. In his historical investigations, Zolberg finds that American leaders forged a proactive immigration policy intended to control who would compose a national population-in-the-making from the starting point of the colonies’ relationship with England. This interpretation challenges much conventional wisdom in the immigration scholarship that US immigration policy was markedly laissez-faire until the late nineteenth century. It is true that there was little federal legislation on immigration in earlier periods, but Zolberg suggests that this was not for lack of interest but because national politics centered on states’ rights and slavery.

The early chapters offer the reader a fascinating account of the American founders’ view of immigration in the making of the early republic. The American leaders undercut the norms of the international state system by insisting on their right to take full advantage of their uniquely plentiful asset of arable land by appropriating labor power from the European monarchs, “marketing” the benefits of land “to all comers” abroad (59). Zolberg complements a cogent analysis of these economic arguments with a close study of philosophical and political arguments written by members of America’s founding elite. In several polemical essays written from 1751 on, for example, Benjamin Franklin constructed a detailed argument defending the right of individuals to leave their country of birth, grounding his views in the theory of natural rights. Zolberg’s analysis of Franklin’s writings and those of his contemporaries, including Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton, sheds new light on how these theorists thought of immigration and its social effects in the prerevolutionary period, as the colonies were beginning to become self-contained political communities.

Offering another fresh perspective on a period of American immigration history that has received too little attention, Zolberg examines the Passenger Act of 1819, which limited the number of persons that incoming ships could carry according to the tonnage of the vessels. The law is conventionally understood to be regulatory, but Zolberg shows that it effectively restricted immigration because it raised the price of passage. A federal enactment, the Passenger Act was an early building block of the legal system that would enable the national government to control immigration flows.

This study’s perspective on how boundaries of membership were drawn by the fledgling republic will be of interest to scholars who examine the history of American citizenship laws. Illustrating the central theme that America’s leaders pursued political and cultural goals in shaping the makeup of the nation, Zolberg describes two poles of calculated preference on how “safely homogeneous” or “unsafely diverse” (82) the political community should be at the time of the founding and several years afterwards. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited access to naturalization to free white persons of satisfactory character after two years of residence. The law thus affirmed the racial boundary of the nation-state, already formalized in the constitutional compromise by slave and non-slave states of counting slaves as “three-fifths of a man.” Zolberg underscores the significance of the...