"Kenny brings a fresh and insightful look at changing 19th-century immigration law in this crisp legal history. Based on a close reading of key immigration law cases and other primary sources, this erudite study sheds light on the long and complicated history of immigration law." -- Library Journal"One can't fully understand the origins of US immigration policy without knowing the history of slavery and Native American removal. In this beautifully written book, Kevin Kenny shows how these painful histories laid the groundwork for the barring, policing, detaining, and expelling of immigrants and shaped American understandings of federal plenary power, citizenship, and sovereignty. This book shows why Kenny is one of the most insightful historians of the nineteenth-century United States." -- María Cristina García, author of State of Disaster: The Failure of US Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change"From Kevin Kenny, eminent scholar in immigration history, comes a timely reminder that slavery once touched every aspect of American life, including border control. He makes a powerful case that today's immigration policies still bear the scars of the slaveholding republic." -- Beth Lew-Williams, author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America"In a bold and sweeping reinterpretation, Kenny convincingly places slavery and its legacy at the heart of the US immigration history.
The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic is a must read for students of either field." -- Sam Erman, author of Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire"The most comprehensive and penetrating analysis of nineteenth-century US immigration policy that I have read. Kevin Kenny's brilliant reconstruction of the intersecting efforts to police the movement of enslaved, immigrant, and indigenous populations will change the way we think about the history--and the current state--of America's immigration regime." -- Gary Gerstle, University of Cambridge"Kenny makes an invaluable contribution to the study of immigration and racial formation in the nineteenth-century United States. His work is at the forefront of attempts to connect the history of slavery to the history of immigration, and its long narrative arc provides a useful framework for thinking about those histories, which have been pivotal to the United States. It simultaneously points to new areas for research that scholars should take up.
" -- Scott Heerman, Journal of Southern History"Based on a close reading of archival sources and some of the landmark immigration law cases, this book makes for an exciting read. A crisp legal history, Kenny's erudite work throws light on the long and tangled history of American immigration laws. By unveiling the complicated origins of incarceration, border control, and deportation, Kenny seeks to remind his readers that slavery at one time touched every aspect of American life, including the mobility of immigrants. The book makes a strong case that the contemporary immigration policy still bears the scars of the slaveholding republic. Given that the book is written in a coherent manner, and for more than one type of audience, it will be of interest to the specialists of the subject as well as non-specialists." -- Amol Saghar, World History Encyclopedia"Kenny's insights are welcome because it is still all too easy to see slavery and immigration as separate areas of inquiry, divided temporally by the Civil War. In a standard survey of the field, slavery dominates before 1865 and federal immigration restrictions after it.the long arc of The Problem of Immigration connecting these conversations across the nineteenth century is an exciting intervention in the field.
" -- Journal of the Early Republic.