Deported Citizens, Divided Nation: The Forcible Removal of Internal Migrants during the Depression and the Limits of the New Deal

In the 1930s, the federal structure of the United States encouraged state and local actors to treat internal migrants like alien immigrants. State legislatures passed laws that not only authorized the forcible removal of poor aliens and citizens, but also required all in-migrants to be fingerprinted and registered, and criminalized the transportation of indigent aliens and citizens into states.  The enforcement of these new restrictive laws varied, but removal—whether voluntary, coerced, or forced—was commonplace. Chamber of commerce executives, mayors, and social service volunteers told poor migrants looking for work to go back “where they belonged,” since relief was only available to “citizens.” For these state and local authorities, local citizenship determined belonging, and in-migrants, even if they were born in the United States, by definition lacked local citizenship.  Migrants and their advocates in civil liberties associations and social welfare organizations contested these laws regulating internal migration, condemning policies that treated citizens like aliens and demanding that the federal government recognize and enforce more robust rights of national citizenship.  In 1940 the New Deal Supreme Court heard the demands of migrants, and in a landmark decision affirmed the right of citizens to travel between the states.  But the continued power of individual states left migrants’ rights uncertain in the years to come.