The Migration Business and the Shift from State to Federal Immigration Regulation

The US Supreme Court’s decision in Henderson v. Mayor of New York (1876), which transferred control over the admission of immigrants from the states to the federal government, marked the culmination of a fifty-year effort by shippers to abolish state passenger fees that made conducting the transatlantic migration business more expensive. It was also a departure from merchants’ more recent efforts to work within state governments to influence immigration law. This article investigates how shipping merchants involved in the migration business created, and then dismantled, a New York State law regulating the admission of immigrants. After taking control of immigrant processing at the state level in the 1840s and 1850s, shipping merchants lost economic and political influence during the Civil War. This disruption galvanized merchants to reassert their control over immigration policy in the decade following the Civil War. The result of these efforts, the Henderson decision, shifted control over the passenger trade to the federal government and put the migration business in a position to influence immigration law at the federal level.