While immigration restriction - keeping undesired migrants out - is the most visible and controversial paradigm of migration politics today, this has not always held. Political and economic elites have often sought to promote immigration to support favored industries or economic systems, settle and secure contested borderlands, or alter political demographics; alternatively, they have sought to obstruct emigration in order to retain precious human capital, seeing in subjects' departures a threat to state power or to particular systems of economic extraction.

This geographically and temporally broad panel explores the interplay of migration policy and political-economic strategy across the modern era, with a focus on promotive (and retentive) politics. In examining how various polities sought to intervene in immigration or emigration to pursue their greater developmental goals, and how subalterns perceived and resisted these efforts, the panelists highlight a tremendous diversity of aims, methods, and outcomes – but also important shared premises and common dynamics.

Beginning in the eighteenth century, Tim Olin shows how Habsburg efforts to settle German colonists on their border with the Ottoman Empire were informed simultaneously by cameralist theory, practical geostrategy, and the attribution of favored traits to German-speaking Catholics. Crossing the Atlantic, Cody Nager likewise highlights the intertwining of the theoretical and the concrete, examining how early U.S. migration policies connected migration with broader commercial paradigms, particularly the regulation of imports, and exploring how debates over the slave trade shaped Americans’ understanding of migration as a form of economic and demographic control. Moving into the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Roraig Finney frames immigration promotion in Alabama as a conflicted elite project simultaneously to accelerate and manage agricultural and industrial development – and shows how the developmental agonies of white farmers and proletarians primed them to support immigration restriction. Finally, crossing back across the Atlantic, Rosemary Akpan elaborates an even deeper connection between elite developmental designs and popular resistance in twentieth-century British Kenya. On the one hand, she examines how British colonial authorities restructured African workers’ mobility in the service of an agricultural and industrial wage labor economy; on the other, she shows how migration became a nexus for anti-colonial resistance.

Ultimately, the panel shows that efforts to promote, restrain, or control migration have long been a part of various elites’ political-economic “toolkit” – but that the apparent uses of the migration “tool” are always shaped and limited by a broader conceptual and political universe. While migration policy always involves questions of settlement, labor, and commerce, the actual project of seeking people and keeping people (where you want them) is equally shaped by political theory, commercial practice, intra-elite conflict, ethnoracial ascriptions, and subaltern agency.

This panel should be of interest to immigration historians, labor historians, historians of capitalism, historians of empire, historians of race, and historians of the state.