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The Origins of US Immigration Regulation in Nineteenth-Century New York

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The Origins of US Immigration Regulation in Nineteenth-Century New York City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 5-2015 Protecting the Stranger: The Origins of US Immigration Regulation in Nineteenth-Century New York Brendan P. O'Malley Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1079 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] PROTECTING THE STRANGER: THE ORIGINS OF US IMMIGRATION REGULATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW YORK by BRENDAN P. O’MALLEY A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2015 i © 2015 BRENDAN P. O’MALLEY All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in History in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy DAVID NASAW __________________ ________________________________ Date Chair of the Examining Committee HELENA ROSENBLATT __________________ ________________________________ Date Executive Officer THOMAS KESSNER GERALD MARKOWITZ ANNA O. LAW JOHN TORPEY Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract PROTECTING THE STRANGER: THE ORIGINS OF US IMMIGRATION REGULATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW YORK by BRENDAN P. O’MALLEY From 1847 to 1890, a state authority—not a federal one—oversaw the entry of most immigrants arriving in the United States. The New York State Board of the Commissioners of Emigration supervised the landing of over eight million newcomers in nation’s busiest entry point, the Port of New York, during the second half of the nineteenth century. Most were processed at the Board’s Castle Garden Emigrant Depot in Battery Park, which opened in 1855. This study demonstrates why and how New York State developed a complex regulatory regime well before the federalization of immigration authority in 1882. The establishment of this state immigration agency marked a watershed in governmental practices surrounding immigrants, but one that had little to do with exclusion. Many historians of immigration regulation have depicted the development of exclusionary capacities as the hallmark of modern regulation. The Emigration Board, however, points to other possibilities. It developed many of the administrative practices and capacities that would be taken up by the succeeding federal regime, but at the same time, it operated upon a very different vision of government's role vis a vis immigration: not one of restriction, but of aid and support. The Board sought to alleviate anxieties that immigrants would become public burdens, it rationalized the system of immigrant transportation into the interior, and it successfully combated the rampant exploitation of newcomers in the Port of New York. By shedding light on this more inclusive model of iv immigration regulation from the American past, this study destabilizes the long-held idea that restriction served as the foundation upon which modern immigration control in the US was built. v CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: CREATING THE COMMISSIONERS 15 CHAPTER TWO: THE STRUGGLE FOR LEGITIMACY 50 CHAPTER THREE: CASTLE GARDEN AND CONSOLIDATION 110 CHAPTER FOUR: THE COMMISSIONERS’ CIVIL WAR 157 CHAPTER FIVE: THE DISASTROUS DECADE 197 EPILOGUE 248 BIBLIOGRAPHY 270 vi vii INTRODUCTION What are the origins of government authority over immigration in the United States? When and how did “immigrants” become an administrative category singled out by government officials for special consideration? What issues were early immigration policies intended to address? To answer these questions, we first must grapple with a definition of “regulation.” Many twentieth-century historical studies of immigration regulation equated regulation with restriction, thereby presenting a straightforward narrative of relatively free and open immigration before 1882, when Congress enacted both federal control Over the past twenty-five years, historical scholarship has dismantled the long- accepted belief that antebellum Americans took a laissez-faire approach to immigration. Some scholars had labeled the era before the 1882 as one of an “open door” since Congress federalized immigration regulation that year and passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, implying that no meaningful regulation existed before that time.1 Legal historians like Gerald L. Neuman and William J. Novak have shown that robust local and state-level mechanisms exercised considerable control over newcomers. Almost all seaboard states had quarantine laws that delayed the landing of passengers from vessels on which contagious disease was present, while some excluded convicts, paupers, and free blacks. New York and Massachusetts, two of the biggest receivers of immigrants, had systems that required shippers to post bonds or pay a fee in lieu of a bond for each newcomer. Bonding was not exclusionary in the sense of forbidding entry to a specific class of 1 For example, political scientist Michael C. LeMay still labels the period between 1820 and 1880 the “Open-Door Cycle.” See his study Guarding the Gates: Immigration and National Security (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006), pp. 33-66. 1 people outright, but it nonetheless shaped the flow of immigration by penalizing shippers who introduced individuals who became public charges. The bonding system treated passengers as little more than articles of commerce, not as human beings who could be trusted to ensure their own self-support.2 The recovery of what Neuman has dubbed “The Lost Century of American Immigration Law,” from 1776 to 1875, has become a veritable cottage industry since the publication of his article of that name in 1993. This effusion of scholarship has recovered many state and local practices that policed entry and regulated aliens once inside state or municipal borders, developing a much more nuanced understanding of immigration regulation as it existed before 1882. In addition, this research has yielded numerous insights into antebellum assumptions about citizenship and the formation of the American state. Government practices surrounding immigration were a key component in what William Novak has called a transition from “[n]ineteenth-century traditions of local citizenship and self-governance” to the contemporary “liberal state” that features “a modern approach to positive statecraft, individual rights, and social welfare.” 3 Curiously, scholars interested in the development of the American state only recently have begun to pay attention to pre-1882 immigration regulation. 2 For extensive elaborations of all of pre-federal immigration laws and regulatory mechanisms in the U.S., see Gerald L. Neuman, “The Lost Century of American Immigration Law (1776-1875),” Columbia Law Review, Vol. 93, No. 8 (Dec. 1993), pp. 1833-1901; and Anna O. Law, “Lunatics, Idiots, Paupers, and Negro Seamen—Immigration Federalism and the Early American State,” Studies in American Political Development, Vol. 28 (October 2014), Table I: Varieties of State and Federal Restriction on Migration, p. 8. On maritime quarantine laws as they applied to immigrants, see William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law & Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 204-211. Shippers also used bonds to facilitate certain transactions with inanimate cargo, such as with customs bonds for goods on which a duty had yet to be paid. 3 William J. Novak, “The Legal Origins of the Modern American State,” in Austin Serat, Bryant G. Garth & Robert A. Kagan, eds., Looking Back at Law’s Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 249. 2 Political scientist Aristide Zolberg’s A Nation by Design (2006), a masterful synthesis of much of the revisionist literature, argues that American immigration policy and the machinery of state that evolved around it was exclusionary from the beginning. Zolberg portrays even the federal Steerage Act of 1819, long seen as a humanitarian measure to improve steerage conditions, as the first example of “remote control,” pushing restriction offshore. He convincingly argues that legislators behind the bill attempted to raise the cost of passage by imposing space requirements on vessels carrying steerage passengers, thereby making fares affordable only to Europeans of the middling skilled classes.4 I do not contest that restrictionist motivations existed within such measures instituted on the federal, state, and local levels during the early republic and antebellum period, but they were not the only considerations. While I in no way wish to denigrate the value of the this scholarship, I do think its focus on exclusion may have distorted our view of early American governmental practices surrounding immigration, placing the emphasis on the exceptions rather than the rule, especially in the case of New York’s regulatory regime. New York’s immigration authorities unquestionably were more inclusive and supportive of immigrants than those of other states, but developments in New York must be given special weight since it was the portal through which the vast majority of immigrants entered the United States in the century between 1820 and 1920. Even in Massachusetts, the most restrictive state regime
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