Black Migrants and Border Regulation in the Early United States

This article frames the dozens of state-level laws regulating the mobility of free Black people during the antebellum era as part of the history of American immigration law. While historians have shown the importance of antebellum antecedents to postbellum federal immigration law, they have primarily focused on the handful of laws regulating European migrants. But it was free Black migrants, both African American and foreign born, who faced closed or regulated borders from Florida to Oregon. Whether to protect slavery, to eliminate Black labor competition, or simply for racism’s sake, lawmakers across the country and in Congress legislated against Black mobility and criminalized these “illegal immigrants” from the 1780s to the 1860s. Enforcement of the laws may have been uneven, but their effects were profound. In their ideological origins and effects on migrants, border regulations targeting Black people formed an important opening chapter in the history of American immigration law.