The Privileges of Illegality: Unauthorized Italian Immigration to the United States and Adjustment of Status in the 20th Century

My research examines approximately five hundred legal files from a New York-based immigrant aid organization, the Italian Welfare League (IWL), to study cases of Italian immigrants who came to the United States illegally in the first half of the twentieth century and who subsequently adjusted their status to legal immigrant. I use those records to call attention to the ubiquity of unauthorized European immigration to the United States in the twentieth century and to perform a qualitative analysis of data that cannot be found in annual statistics on unauthorized immigration gathered from government agencies. I use IWL immigration case files to explore a variety of subjects. As noted by historians, the ability to adjust one’s status from illegal to legal immigrant was a white privilege throughout much of the twentieth century. This work builds off that argument by testing the case of Italian migrants and exploring the mechanisms through which the state facilitated the normalization of certain migrants and not others. My research also builds off of existing scholarship to look at disparities found in the opportunities (or lack thereof) for male versus female migrants. IWL case files also provide windows into the mechanisms of community policing and also the transnational commercial networks that migrants used to gain entry into the United States. This paper will examine how the state, ethnic communities, and migrants’ own legal, economic, social, and cultural networks determined who crossed the threshold from an “illegal” to “legal” body in the United States at mid-century.