Kerry Abrams (University of Virginia School of Law) has posted The Hidden Dimension of Nineteenth-Century Immigration Law (Vanderbilt Law Review, Vol. 62, No. 5, pp. 1353-1418, October 2009) on SSRN.Here is the abstract:
-
This Article challenges the conventional wisdom that the law had little to say about immigration before 1875. Instead, it offers a reframing of immigration law history as including what scholars have previously thought of as “settlement history”: The immigration of whites to the western territories. The Article focuses on a particular group of immigrants-the so-called Mercer Girls-to explore both how the failure to invoke exclusionary immigration law and the presence of other kinds of laws (including homestead acts and anti-miscegenation statutes) functioned to shape the population of the nascent western territories. A close look at this type of immigration and this group of immigrants in particular facilitates a reconceptualization not only of narratives of American westward immigration, but also of the way immigration law actually works, both on its own and in tandem with other doctrinal schemes. The story of the Mercer immigrants can help us put exclusionary immigration law in context as part of a broad set of legal strategies used to produce, shape, and maintain populations. More importantly, it shows us that the study of restriction only tells part of the story of our country. To understand whether immigration policy is meeting its goals, we must look to see how the law fosters immigration as well as how the law restricts it.
And from the paper:
-
[T]he so-called “Mercer Girls” . . . were so named because their voyages were planned by a resident of Washington Territory named Asa Shinn Mercer.
In 1864 and 1866, Mercer traveled to Massachusetts and New York to bring back boats full of young women to Washington Territory. His explicit aims were to help civilize the fledgling territory by introducing into the community well-educated young women who could serve as teachers and moral exemplars, and to help populate the territory by bringing brides to the pioneers, who had begun to intermarry with Indian women to the detriment, Mercer believed, of the Territory’s future. The Mercer immigrants caused a sensation in the press across the country: newspaper articles and editorials commented on the immigration, discussing the potential gains from the importation of white women to the Pacific Northwest and warning of the possible calamities that might befall the travelers and the Territory.
The expeditions are especially useful for a legal history of westward immigration because they came so close to being regulated. Like a “teflon” politician, the Mercer Girls appeared to be vulnerable to exclusionary immigration law, but every attempt to regulate them faltered.
Very interesting & recommended!