Free Emigration, Asia, and the Development of Immigration and Border Control

The legal foundations of modern immigration and border enforcement in the United States forged in the period of Asian restriction and exclusion are rarely imagined to originate from slavery or indentured servitude. Instead, slavery, indenture, and the expansion of federal immigration restriction are seen to represent three distinct historical conjunctures in US and imperial history. This paper challenges these historiographical distinctions and spotlights the impact of slavery and indenture on twentieth century immigration and border enforcement. It argues that federal immigration and border control in the United States developed in relation to ideas of freedom that caught wind across the world prior to and at the height of abolition. As empires across the world sought to bring an end to the slave trade and then to chattel slavery, they embraced various notions of freedom including ideas of free labor, free commerce, and free persons. They also embraced ideas of free emigration. In the late nineteenth century, the United States and empires in Asia legalized free emigration through treaties and imperial law with the hopes of distinguishing new forms of movement from slavery and equalizing the legal right to movement for various populations across the world. This paper underlines the conditions under which free emigration was stipulated into law across Asia and between Asian countries and the United States, and then negotiated as Asian immigrants were racialized and targeted for restriction and exclusion in the United States. More concretely, it contends that free emigration became central to the development of American and British immigration and border enforcement as these empires grappled with the right of individuals to move freely between Asia and the United States. As a result, this paper places the development of federal immigration control squarely within the long shadow of slavery.