Historians of United States immigration commonly delineate the restriction and exclusion of Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth century as the origin of American immigration law. This includes the development of the illegal immigrant as a legal category and status, and Asian exclusion more widely. Recent scholarship has overturned this periodization, locating earlier precedents in state immigration laws. Historians of the early nineteenth century have outlined how state and local governments regulated their borders against international migrants even when slavery prevented the development of federal immigration law. They have also explored how histories of slavery shaped federal immigration.

This panel builds on this scholarship and places the origins of illegal immigration, the role of private actors on the development of state and federal immigration policy, and Asian restriction and exclusion within the contours of the history of slavery. Michael A. Schoeppner traces the development of the “illegal immigrant” to the state of Kentucky in the nineteenth century. Schoeppner argues that the rise of illegal immigration emerged not only in relation to international migration but state desires to control the movement of free Black persons. Katherine Carper explores how slavery created the economic and legal conditions that enabled private interests to shape immigration law. Carper contends that the absence of federal immigration law, resulting from tensions between free and slaveholding states, provided an opportunity for shipping merchants to craft state and federal immigration laws regulating the entry of immigrants into the United States. Hardeep Dhillon recasts the history of Asian restriction and exclusion within the long shadow of slavery. Dhillon insists that laws foregrounding free emigration that solidified in the wake of abolition are instrumental in reinterpreting the restriction of Asian immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Together, the papers highlight the importance of slavery to the development of state and federal immigration law, and challenge widely accepted historical narratives on the origins of American immigration law.