Audience members interested in migration, borderlands, and the state will engage with panelists who are experts in policy and political history and who examine migration through the lenses of gender, policing, and surveillance studies. The regulatory history of Italy and the United States offers new ways of thinking about the gendered and racial dimensions of migration, and the role legal migration restrictions played in the expansion of transnational surveillance technologies. The panelists on this roundtable, who are chapter contributors and editors of the new anthology Managing Migration in Italy and the United States (DeGruyter, 2024), will explore the understudied links between the history of immigration regulation and state surveillance. They will ask the audience to think hard about the ways in which the history of migration regulations in the United States and Italy is inextricably linked to the expansion of surveillance systems as laws requiring visas, passports, medical checkpoints, medical inspections, and quarantines all transformed migration into a critical site of surveillance. Requirements for new kinds of documentation generated a transnational legion of medical experts, steamship captains, immigration officials, diplomats, police, and neighbors enlisted in attesting to who had the right to travel while the widening of state surveillance mechanisms reified gender and racial norms. Given the ways in which surveillance is inextricably linked to the disciplining of the social body and the construction of social hierarchies, the panelists on this roundtable seek to open new ways of thinking about how restrictive legislation transformed mobile bodies into social threats, requiring ever more comprehensive systems of surveillance that mark law-abiding bodies from the transgressive ones.