Shippers and Immigration Policy in the 19th-Century United States

Recent scholarship investigating the intersection of slavery and immigration policy has foregrounded how the existence of slavery prevented the development of a cohesive federal policy regulating immigrant entry into the United States. While the federal government regulated passenger movement on ships, state governments regulated passengers upon arrival in the United States. This paper explores how this context created an opening for private actors to influence immigration policy. This paper argues that the existence of slavery created the economic and legal conditions in which shipping merchants meaningfully crafted local, state, and federal immigration policy in the nineteenth century. This paper examines how slavery and the 1808 abolition of the slave trade provided an opening for a new trade in “free” migration to develop and flourish. Liverpool, a major Atlantic trading port, transformed from a center for the Atlantic slave trade to a hub for the free migrant business in the 1820s and 1830s. By the onset of mass immigration in the 1840s, the passenger trade had become a transatlantic enterprise, firmly linking Liverpool and New York ports. The migration business that developed between Liverpool and New York raised logistical questions concerning how governments regulated and processed passengers. These questions fell under the purview of states because states invested in upholding slavery undermined support for a federal immigration regime. In practice, however, it was shipping merchants engaged in the passenger trade who came up with answers to these questions. Shippers campaigned against state-instituted passenger fees and created the immigrant processing infrastructure that formed the basis of New York state immigration law in the 1850s and federal immigration laws in the 1880s. In effect, the context of slavery enabled shippers to take an active role in the creation of American immigration law in the nineteenth century.