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Anna O. Law, "Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants" (Oxford UP, 2026)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Anna Law about her book, just published in 2026 by Oxford University Press, titled Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship, African Americans, Native Americans and Immigrants, which, as the title suggests, combines a whole bunch of different groups that maybe sometimes are thought about as different groups when it comes to questions of migration and questions of citizenship. But this book helpfully helps us understand that these are all perhaps more entwined legal histories, cultural histories, political histories than we might think. So there's obviously a federal government aspect to this. There's a lot of other things going on there, too. So we have a lot to discuss. Anna, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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A
Thanks so much, Miranda, for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
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B
Well, I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What kinds of questions did you want to investigate with this project?
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A
Hi. Yes. So I am a political scientist. I teach at City University of New York Brooklyn College, and I'm trained as a political scientist. This book is not, probably not, what your readers think of when they think political science. It is a brand of political science that has a lot in common with historians. And how I got to writing this book was there was this question nagging at me that I couldn't find the answer to. And the question was, well, the United States had voluntary migration, but there's also a long history of slavery. Did slave and slave migration affect voluntary migration? And if it did, how?
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B
I mean, those sound like straightforward questions to ask, but of course they're not easy ones to answer. So thank you for laying them out to start off our conversation. And hopefully over the course of our discussion, we'll get at least a sense of how you figured out answers to those questions. Obviously, the book has loads more detail for people who want that it is there. But let's get into what kind of some of these questions look like, at least in the, you know, I don't have 12 hours here to interrogate you. So thinking then about these questions of migration before, I suppose we focus on any one group, I mean, there's the kind of bigger question of like, how does any sort of colonial government, how do any of the US Colonies, for instance, think about migration in general? What were some of the ways you found that migration was either encouraged or discouraged. Obviously, we're talking about a few different governments going on. Right. The colonies are not all doing the same thing. So what were some of the levers that you came across?
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A
So one of the things I should start with is the official history of the United States state's immigration policy is on the government's website currently. And right now, the department of homeland security website says that the US government didn't really start enforcing borders until the late 19th century. And before that, it was functionally open borders, and most people could come. But you go back to the colonial period, that far back, and one realizes the borders were never really open to everyone. So colonial governments had some very specific goals. Each of the colonies were put in charge of making their own migration recruitment policy. All the colonies wanted warm bodies because they needed to work the land into a sustain a place that someone could live and grow crops on and survive. They had to. There had to be numbers of people on the ground to fight with native Americans whose land they were invading. So this land was contested, and for occupation purposes, you needed people. So there's incentives that colonies offer to get people to voluntary go, go there. And the biggest of the many incentives, the biggest one was the offer of free land, that if you went, or if you were wealthy enough to bring other people with you, family members or indentured servants, if you could pay for them to go, you would get 50 acres, 100 acres of land just by going there. But the colonies didn't want just any warm bodies. So they also had restrictions of unwanted, undesirable people. The largest group of undesirable people. Undesirable people were convicts. Other undesirable people were disabled people, sickly people, people who the term was likely to become a public charge, meaning they couldn't financially take care of themselves. And at a time when there's no government safety net programs, the colonies wanted to screen these type of people out because they would be an economic and social burden.
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B
And so how would they screen people out? Like, what kinds of mechanisms were used to say, yes, come, no, don't come? Like, it's one thing to kind of say that's what the goal is, but how did they make that happen?
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A
So the mechanisms of how this work. There are no passports at this point. So it's very rudimentary. It's. Colonial officials would board ships that were landing, let's say, in New York harbor or Boston, and they would require the ship captain to produce a manifest, which was not just a list of who the passengers were, but their Ages, their gender and their physical description. Is someone deaf, is someone blind, is someone limping? Someone? That it, that it may indicate that they cannot financially take care of themselves. So it's through physical inspection of who might be sickly and who might not be able to work. The mechanism is also that instead of taxing and turning away people who are unwanted, the tax was put on the ship captain. So the entity that brought the objectionable migrants would be taxed for every person that was discovered to be in these categories. And that money, it's so the person was in, in rare instances are they turned back and sent back to where they came from, but the persons are not. They're usually admitted if the ship captain pays a head tax or a bond. So to discourage the, the wrong type of people from coming, there would be these taxes and bonds on objectionable people. And I should add, so this process of, of taxing and penalizing the ship captain instead of the individual migrants, that procedure carries over to the early Republic and the 19th century in the United States.
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B
Okay, so that's quite an enduring legacy then. In terms of this decision making, it sounds like there's a lot that kind of individual sort of officials at these harbors get to decide what. But questions of taxes famously are contested between what colonial governments decide and what Parliament in London decides. So like, were these decisions about who got to go where, was that fully up to the colonial government? I mean, after independence, was it just up to the states? Like how did that tension, I suppose, between different levels of decision making work?
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A
Right, so the colonies have an imperial federalist system where as you pointed out, it's the, the it on paper, theoretically the Crown and Parliament, they have the last say. So what happened during the colonial period is for the most of the colonial period, the people in the Metropole Parliament and the Crown said, okay, you know what? You guys are too far away. You guys, each of the, each of you colonies, you make your own policies. And there was very little interference from the metropole around 1680, because all this stuff happening with internal politics in Great Britain, that changes and the central authorities decide to interfere more. Instead of being laissez faire, which is mostly what they did throughout the colonial period. Toward the, the late, around 1680, the Crown and Parliament decide they want to crack down, for example, on naturalizations that are happening in the colonies. The colonies were using naturalization as a recruitment tool for non English, non British people. If you made them legally British citizens, they could bequeath property. And so it was a valuable incentive. But then England said, no, you can't do that anymore. You know, it's too loosey goosey in the colonies. And people, they. They wanted control. So fights broke out between the colonies that had enjoyed decades of laissez faire decision making at their level. And then all of a sudden, the crown is invalidating and disallowing all these laws that the colonies were passing, passing. And the colony's view was, we always did it this way. What are you doing? And you guys are too far away in England to tell us what to do. And you don't know the local conditions. So the fighting over who gets to control migration and naturalization policy end up as line items in the Declaration of Independence, where the colonies are extremely angry that the central authorities are trying to, in their view, impermissibly horn in on the area of policy that they historically had control over.
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B
And what does that mean then, when the US Becomes independent, like, those tensions, obviously with Parliament go away. But is there still a similar issue between kind of what states think they should be allowed to do versus the federal government?
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A
Yes. So because the United States creates a federal system, it's not the same central authority anymore, but there are power over migration. And any other policy area is divided now between the national government and the states. But the United States Constitution doesn't tell us, okay, so where is the. Where's the location of the dividing line between national and state authority over migration? So the Constitution's text doesn't say anything about that. And in each period, the location of the line is decided by politics. So the same sort of tensions that characterize the colonies, fighting with the imperial government over who should have control over the entry and exit of people. That's the same sort of fights that the early American states and the states all the way up to the Civil War were having with the national government. It's a turf battle between, okay, who controls migration? No, you do. No, we do, the feds would argue. And arguably today, that same fight is going on. What. Where's the end of federal authority and where's the beginning of state authority on how to treat immigrants today?
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B
And so what did that mean for people within these newly created US Borders, sort of in this period between independence and civil war? So we're not talking necessarily about immigrants, but what about people already there who. There are questions raised about belonging. So, for example, African American populations or Native American populations? Like, was that a question for the federal government? Was that a question for state governments? Like, how is that kind of question of belonging determined?
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A
So in this period before the passage of the 14th Amendment, which has the birthright citizenship clause, how you are treated by the US Government and by the public, what rights you have don't derive from your legal citizenship status. It instead derives from your social class, your race, whether you're indigenous or not. And for people. People who study U.S. immigration law and policy don't usually study slavery and Native Americans in the same academic study and for good reason. It's because enslaved people's migration, it's not immigration by any means, because immigration implies consent. Native Americans are not even migrants. They are the official owners and occupants of the land. So they have a completely different relationship to state and federal governments. But before the Civil War, the mobility, the international and interstate travel of free black people and enslaved people was controlled at the state level. Meanwhile, the ability. So Native Americans, they don't want mobility. They want respect for their tribal sovereignty, which includes staying on their ancestral lands. But the US Government is in charge of whether Native Americans can stay on their ancestral lands. So different levels of government are in charge of the mobility and the right to remain of different groups of people.
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B
And again, how is this sort of practically enforced? Like are there border patrols of international borders, of state borders? Like how does that work?
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A
So on the ground, I mean, so the, the intent of the laws is one thing. And as you, as you note, there's a, there's sometimes a gap between the laws on the books might be aspirational. And it's. So with the control of enslaved and free black Americans, there are of course, all sorts a crazy quilt patchwork of laws by states. Free black people have to leave the state. If they are manumitted, they can't. There's a deadline to leave. If they don't leave, then they can be enslaved or re enslaved. There are past systems that were originally applied to European indentured servants that are then applied to all black people where any black person can be stopped by any white person and their papers, demand, demanded so that they show they are enslaved and you know, on business for their, their enslavers or why they are going around town. There is no state capacity. So as you said there, as you suggested, there's no. The state of Virginia doesn't have State of Virginia border patrol. The state of Virginia, even if it has laws on the books that they don't want free African Americans moving into the state, they cannot ring their borders with Virginia State Border patrol. There's no such thing. What happens instead is that the laws on the books about African Americans having to carry paper passes and not being able to go into certain areas and having to show passes and to register if they move to a new town. Those laws on the books provided pretext for all white people to monitor and surveil and racially profile and harass African Americans. That's the mechanism for how these laws are administered on the ground. For Native Americans, it is the US government in the 1830s in the southeast, funding, carrying out and staffing the violent deportation of 80,000 Native people, resulting in thousands of deaths.
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B
Yeah, I mean, those are very heavily enforced mechanisms. Even if they might seem like, oh, but that's not Border Patrol. It's like, yeah, that's not the mechanism, but there's definitely enforcement going on. And of course, this is about, as we've been discussing, sort of migration movement, whether into the United States or out or between different parts of the US you also talk about in the book laws and enforcement around staying. So say you've been allowed to move from Virginia to Maryland. There's kind of, in some ways a separate question of once you get to Maryland, are you allowed to stay there? Right. So how were those kinds of decisions made about who could be in which sorts of places?
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A
So the concept of the right to remain, which is which I build on and borrow from historian Samantha Seeley, who has a very excellent book on that topic. As I was beginning my book, a historian friend who is reading a draft chapter, he said, right to remain. This is so clunky. Why can't you just put that under the freedom of mobility? I said the fact that right to remain or ability to remain sounds to our ears today in 2026 as very strange. It's because we've lost that concept. But in the 19th century and earlier, the right to go into a geographical area did not then also mean that you had the right to stay there for at least a period of time. It means that now. But back then, those were two separate policies. Mobility was one policy. Right to stay or settle. There was a different policy. Both policies for African Americans were controlled at the state level. For Native Americans, it's only about the right to remain and their mobility. To the extent that they are migrants, they are forced migrants and subject to state power, state sponsored power to make them go to somewhere that they don't want to go to.
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And that was decided by states, by the federal government.
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The federal government decided the right to remain for Native people. But the federal government was goaded into the mass deportation of 80,000 Native people by the states in the Southeast. So these state Governments which were slave states in the 1930s, they greedily eyed native land because the price of cotton worldwide has shot through the roof. Right. So they're eyeing all this prime land. And once they have the US government to deport 80,000 people, they clear the land to expand the growth of cotton and to expand slavery. So what Native Americans are doing in my book about voluntary migration is not that they're migrants, although they're subject to forced migration, is because. The ability of one group to stay where they want and another group wanting to occupy the same space is tied to each other.
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B
Yeah, they're definitely intertwined there. Now, in a bunch of the things you've just been telling us, we've both, I think, been careful to clarify. We mean before the US Civil War, there's a reason for that. How did the Civil War and Reconstruction afterwards change all of these processes of movement and remaining that we've been discussing?
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A
So before the Civil War, each region of the country had their own definitions of what kinds of migrants they don't want. And for the northeastern states, they didn't want disabled, sickly people who couldn't financially take care of themselves. For the slave states, the group they feared the most were free black people, especially free black sailors who were going, who were coming from international and domestic ships. And so each region of the country has their own reasons preserving migration controls for themselves. That only changes with the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments because after the Civil War, the slave states stop fighting the federal government so hard for control over migration because there's no slavery anymore. So slavery is politically off the table. Which means the objection from this block of states to the consolidation of migration immigration controls at the federal level is finally able to happen. And the federal government and the Supreme Court finally starts invalidating state level laws that they had previously upheld, including those laws from New York and Massachusetts that penalized ship captains and had head taxes for people they didn't want. Suddenly after the Civil War, all these laws become invalidated because the Supreme Court is able to then overruled those laws. Whereas before the Civil War, the slave states would have found any finding of federal migration power very threatening. So after the Civil War on the Reconstruction Amendments, the timing of when the federal government assumes full control over entry exit is after the Civil War for that reason, because different regions of the country stop fighting about preserving migration controls for themselves.
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B
Okay, right. So it essentially resolves that tension you were telling us about earlier. Right. Okay. So that's definitely a big change and begins to kind of make this sound More familiar that the federal government is in charge of these things, that the Supreme Court is involved. Are there any other key changes we should understand around this time period in terms of questions of citizenship and belonging
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to citizenship is very important. The Reconstruction amendments, the 14th amendment in particular, before those Reconstruction Amendments are passed. Okay, enslaved people and their legal status, that's the easy question. If you treat people as human property, they have no legal citizenship status because they are property. And property. Property has no rights. But the harder question before the Civil War was what to do? What's the legal citizenship status of free black Americans? Some states treated them as state citizens. Northeastern states, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York. But even in those states, if they considered, say, an African American man a citizen of Massachusetts, what's the relationship of that? Was he also a US Citizen? And if he was a US Citizen, what's the relationship from US Citizenship to state citizenship? Is one more important and hierarchically more important than the other? Because before the Civil War, African Americans were applying for passports, and the U.S. state Department turned them down, saying, you are not U.S. citizens. So the reconstruction amendments, the 14th amendment defines very clearly, once and for all African Americans are US Citizens. In fact, anyone born on US Soil is a US Citizen with very narrow exceptions. So the Reconstruction Amendments and the Civil War not only transition migration controls to the federal level, they define US Citizenship very clearly for the first time to say who's in and who's out. And they create individual rights that now the federal government is in charge of enforcing that come with the package of rights of being a U.S. citizen.
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B
Yeah, that's a very important change. So thank you for helping us understand that sort of before and after. Are there any other key things then that you're hoping listeners and readers take from this history?
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A
This history. The reason, I mean, so I have the misfortune of working for 16 years on what I thought was a very historical book. This book covers the colonial period to 1888 and when the book came out. Left and right, friends and acquaintances are telling me this book is so timely. Belief may no one who wrote a book about slavery, native dispossession and Chinese exclusion wants to be timely. The relevance to today where immigration and immigrants are legal and undocumented immigrants are under attack in the United States as the Trump administration is trying to strip birthright citizenship from the Constitution is. I want readers to know. You need to know that past history because you need to know what states, why states wanted control over migration, and what happened to people when their citizenship status was not clear for free. Black people, they were subject to all sorts of discrimination, including their restrictions on their right of mobility because their citizenship was not clear. And for Native Americans, the citizenship question is extremely complicated because we cannot assume that every Native American and every Tribal Nation wanted U.S. citizenship because most did not. Some did, but not everyone. Because for Native Americans, they prioritized their native sovereignty, which was self determination. So they don't want your citizenship or US Citizenship. They want their Native sovereignty respected, not citizenship and rights.
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B
And as you said, these are this is a historical book, but unfortunately with some very timely messages. So I wonder what you might be working on now that the book is out in the world. Anything related to this, anything unrelated? What, what sneak preview can you give us?
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A
So as I was, you know, off, I got the idea for this book that I just wrote from when I was writing the first book. And so as I was researching and writing this Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship, I got, I got really annoyed at why does everyone know Ellis Island? Ellis island, the Statue of Liberty is world famous. Why does no one know angel island, which is off the coast of San Francisco? It's a small island where Chinese were incarcerated after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. And even fewer people know Gadsden's wharf in Charleston, South Carolina. And that's where over 200 ships of enslaved people, where people were disembarked. So why didn't, why don't people know no other American gateway cities? And what does that tell us about the way we define our national identity, the way we make constitutional arguments? So the third book, once I recover from this second book, is to look at American gateway cities, the other American gateway cities beyond Ellis island, and to do the same thing, to approach migration policy history the same way by weaving together African American and Native American history with US Immigration history. That's the goal of the third book.
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B
Well, love a clear and ambitious goal. So thank you for telling us about that. And of course, while you well, recover from this effort and start to work on that one, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship, African Americans, Native Americans and Immigrants, published by Oxford University Press in 2026. Anna, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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A
Miranda, thank you so much for having me on. This was great.
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