SOMETHING ABOUT THE FALL OF WESTERN EUROPE to the Nazis in mid-1940 convinced many Americans that their state was not protecting them sufficiently from immigrants. “The dangers to national safety that might result from acts of espionage and sabotage, by adherents of foreign governments illegally in this country, cannot be minimized,” the Washington Post editorialized.1 It was both strange and unsurprising that attention would seize on “aliens” as the critical threat. It was odd because the “fifth columns” blamed for Germany’s successful advance had consisted not only of conspiring foreigners but of native-born sympathizers; tighter boundary controls, however comforting, were powerless against homegrown fascists. But it was fully comprehensible in light of Americans’ persistent association of political turmoil with externalized others and their recent history of state restriction and repression of alien “subversives.”
Hoping to meet the perceived crisis, on May 22, 1940, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed a dramatic shift in immigration policy enforcement: the transfer of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which regulated immigration, from the Department of Labor, where it had resided for nearly thirty years, to the Department of Justice. “The startling sequence of international events which has occurred since then has necessitated a review of the measures required for the nation’s safety,” he told Congress. Reassigning immigration to the Justice Department would “afford more effective control over aliens” and allow the state “to deal quickly with those aliens who conduct themselves in a manner that conflicts with the public interest.”2 Coming at a moment of heightened anxiety, and what one newspaper called a “wave of anti-alien ordinances” at the state and municipal level, the proposal garnered wide support in Congress.3 But not everyone was onboard. “There is an alien hysteria in the country today,” warned Representative Samuel Dickstein, a New York Democrat. “The alien is being blamed for everything that is happening all over the world.”4 In order to identify and capture foreign spies and saboteurs, new procedures were quickly instituted, with the goal of adapting U.S. boundary controls and the state’s relationship to non-citizen residents to new and troubling geopolitical realities. On June 29 Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, which required the estimated 3.6 million non-citizens living in the United States to register with the federal government and be fingerprinted.5 Within a week, Congress had appropriated funds to support the near-doubling of the ranks of the Border Patrol.6 At the ceremonies marking the INS transfer, Attorney General Robert H. Jackson announced what many observers understood to be a sudden shift in a longstanding overall policy orientation. “The doctrine that any person may come to this country unless it is shown that he is a menace,” he said, “must at least temporarily yield to the policy that none shall be admitted unless it affirmatively appears to be for the American interest.”7 Reflecting on the INS transfer, the Washington Post noted insightfully that it indicated “a changed conception of the nature of the alien problem.” Whereas immigration policies had previously been formulated “primarily with a view to their effect upon the domestic labor situation,” the emphasis now was on “considerations of national safety.”8 Not for the first time—or the last—massive changes in the U.S. state’s control of immigration had been initiated in response to forces from the “outside.”9
Yet the Post was only partly right. While often treated as a “domestic” matter, U.S. immigration policy has always intersected with more global concerns about the status, extension, and maintenance of the United States’ power in the world. From mercantilist visions that located the strength of the fledgling republic in its rapidly growing population to contemporary efforts to promote the migration of highly skilled workers, immigration has played a critical role in Americans’ visions of and struggles over the United States’ global power, even as its international position, prospects, and projects have fundamentally shaped its approach to migrants and migration. As a growing scholarship is demonstrating, the nation’s alliances, rivalries, campaigns, and conflicts have all been imprinted on the ways in which it maintains its boundaries visa`-vis migrants. Conversely, the United States’ changing place in the world has shaped Americans’ perceptions and treatment of foreigners in their midst. Shifting patterns of interstate alliance and enmity, for example, have recast the lived realities of neighborhood, community, and social membership in ways that are subtle and dramatic, hopeful and terrifying. As the United States’ global engagements intensified, newcomers came to be interpreted through dynamics of peace and war, power and weakness, safety and danger that were no longer far away, and which some feared they brought to American shores. Periods of confident American global power have often overlapped with the practices and imagery of immigrant inclusion; when the limits of American economic, military, and political power have been most visible, immigration has often been ideologically mobilized as the cause and index of decline. The early1940s notion of immigrants as actual or potential fifth columnists and the reconfiguration of the state’s immigration-control mechanisms to suit changing international realities were thus exemplary rather than exceptional.10
These themes can be usefully explored through the concept of a geopolitics of mobility: the ways in which global structures and processes have shaped large-scale population movements and the roles that migration has played in states’ attempts to secure and organize power in a globalized arena. For present purposes, I define geopolitics as contestations over the organization of political power, economic relations, and social life that take the globe as both their scale and their object. A full accounting of migration’s geopolitics in the U.S. case would require discussion of a broader range of phenomena than is possible here: for example, traveling Americans’ negotiation of other states’ boundary regimes and the U.S. state’s role in securing their safety and mobility, beginning with the Euro-American colonization of native-controlled space in North America; U.S. diplomatic pressure on and cooperation with other governments over migration, including whether to prevent out-migration (as with early-twentieth-century Japan) or to insist on it (as with the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century); and efforts by migrants and their descendants to shape politics at “home,” as well as the United States’ diplomatic relations with those societies. Fundamentally, there is the centrality of migration control to the larger geopolitics of “civilization”: assessments of a state’s capacity to properly regulate its borders and to protect migrants’ rights, safety, and property in accordance with “Western” standards were central to its status with the “family of nations,” its claims to participation in international society generally, and its right to exercise “sovereignty” over political space.11
The Geopolitics of Mobility
My goal here is to advance an imperial history of migration policy in the U.S. case, by focusing on one critical element of this wider story: the uses of immigration policy as an instrument of U.S. global power. In exploring this theme, I weave together and also remap a rich, diverse body of scholarship. There are histories that explore connections between immigrants, immigration, and state-to-state diplomacy—“foreign relations” in its traditional sense. This emphasis has traditionally been strongest in U.S.–East Asian historiography, as well as in social-scientific and historical scholarship on migrant communities’ attempts to affect U.S. relations with their home countries.12 A more recent literature, often marching under the banner of transnationalism, has provided new accounts of migrants’ multidirectional movements and dynamic linkages with host and home societies, on the one hand, and the racial solidarities and sharing of restriction technologies between mobile experts and nativist activists within boundary-making states, on the other.13 There is a body of work that treats migration between the United States’ overseas colonial spaces, especially Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and the U.S. mainland, reconceived as a metropole. This scholarship has raised crucial questions about the legal, political, and moral status of the United States’ overseas colonial subjects and the key role that migrants and migration have played in shaping the boundaries of belonging in an expansive U.S.-centered domain.14 There are histories that consider how broader transnational power dynamics have defined who deserves refuge in the United States and which states count as oppressive.15 Finally, there is work that stresses the political economy of migration, especially how capitalist politicaleconomic relations have disrupted local societies and impelled out-migration, the often exploitative business of migrant transport, employers’ insistence on access to low-wage migrant labor, and the structuring of segmented labor markets as part of a divideand-rule strategy for maintaining capitalist hegemony.16
Taken together, this literature has successfully connected the “foreign” and the “domestic” politics of immigration. Until relatively recently, histories of U.S. immigration control, even when they have included actors, themes, and processes located outside the United States, have tended to use migration controls as a lens through which to view American identity, U.S. legal regimes, and processes of institutional political change “within” the United States. This new scholarship asks what histories of U.S. immigration policy might tell scholars about American power in the world, and what might be learned from making international questions—including but not limited to “foreign policy”—a central object of inquiry. In important ways, it has begun turning the history of U.S. immigration policy “outward.”17
Joining this broader enterprise, I bring a number of new emphases to bear here. To complement a longstanding emphasis on the state’s role as an institution of restriction, exclusion, and expulsion, my interpretation attends to the geopolitical cultivation of migration. Although the study of closure is essential to historians’ understanding of U.S. state-building, one byproduct of this longstanding emphasis has been a sense of the state’s predominant role as enforcer of exclusionary boundaries. This assumption came naturally to scholars writing during or about the mid-twentieth-century U.S. policy based on national-origins quotas, whether they saw restriction as anomalous to American nationalism or as foundational to it. It also resonated with longstanding alliances in immigration politics: throughout the twentieth century, the struggle between pro-immigration coalitions of employers and immigrant advocates and antiimmigration forces drawing largely from nativist and labor groups promoted dichotomies of exclusion and inclusion. Since the last years of the twentieth century, this spatial conceptualization has reverberated strongly with broader scholarly and popular mappings of globalization, with their polarizing opposition of national-territorial states and transnational flows.
But global power is also made manifest in boundary openings and the cultivation of movement. Intertwined with the restrictive state, one can meaningfully speak of a magnetic state, an institutional matrix that has sought to streamline migration in the interests of state and corporate power through active recruitment, sponsorship, visa policies, and transport infrastructure. In this sense, modern state boundaries are best imagined not as walls but as filters, usually seeking less to block human movement entirely than to select, channel, and discipline it. Ronen Shamir calls this shifting interplay of conveyors and barricades a “mobility regime”: such policy frameworks aim at structuring migration even as they shape and are shaped by intranational and international political dynamics.18 To the extent that U.S. geopolitical interests promoted boundary policies meant to encourage in-migration, the United States was not only a gated nation but an empire of immigrants.
Additionally, my approach problematizes relationships of hierarchy and inequality between states and societies, as well as the fissures that exclusionary boundary making has carved in nationalized civil societies. Immigration historiography has been animated by a critique of exclusionist politics, especially its noxious, aggressive, and overtly racist aspects; in this way, immigration historians have played a pivotal role in historicizing racial inequality in the United States generally.19 I add a crucial dimension to this scholarship by foregrounding the role of transnational inequalities in the making of immigration politics and its associated regimes of racialized difference. While scholars of U.S. immigration policy have, to the extent that they have discussed international questions, tended to approach this domain as a fairly static context, backdrop, or resource mobilized by “domestic” political actors, the international domain is more usefully viewed as a complex, dynamic field of power, with asymmetries that have profoundly shaped the way that migration controls were established, enforced, fought over, and transformed. As I have argued elsewhere, the concept of empire, long used productively among scholars of colonial migration and the political economy of migration, is useful for subjecting transnational hierarchies to critical inquiry, particularly when it is enlisted to describe an approach rather than a coherent entity: a way of seeing rather than an object of study.20