The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Kevin Kenny (review)

Reviewed by: The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Kevin Kenny Cory James Young (bio) The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States. By Kevin Kenny. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. 344. Cloth, 29. 95. ) One problem that immigration posed for politicians in the antebellum United States was that nobody was entirely sure just whose problem it was. Where was the authority to police borders located in a federal republic? "The power exists somewhere, " the U. S. Congressional Committee End Page 259 on Foreign Affairs offered helpfully in the summer of 1856, "either in the States, or in the general government, or in both of them" (119). Another problem was that this ill-defined power seemed to be the same kind of power that lawmakers could wield to regulate slavery. It is the history of this thorny constitutional question that Kevin Kenny addresses in his thoughtful new study. The book is divided into two parts. The first, "Sovereign States, " examines the efforts of state and federal authorities to regulate the importation of enslaved people, the interstate migration of free Black people, and the arrival of European immigrants before the Civil War. By analyzing the relevant statute and case law together, Kenny shows how the politics of slavery infused other antebellum policing considerations. For instance, opponents of the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 1790s fretted that if Congress possessed the power to deport noncitizens, so too could it deport the enslaved. Supreme Court decisions ostensibly not about slavery, such as Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) and the Passenger Cases (1849), raised questions about the future of human bondage by asserting federal commercial and police power. Kenny's contrasting of efforts in Massachusetts and New York to regulate the disembarkation of white passengers at ports of entry with South Carolina's Negro Seamen Acts jailing free Black mariners is particularly instructive: when it came to matters of white immigration and Black migration, there was always a "fear that congressional authority over the first might entail authority over the second" (112). Part 2, "Immigration in the Age of Emancipation, " offers a genealogy of arguments for and against Chinese exclusion. Kenny triumphs here by tracing how anti-Black policies informed later racist and xenophobic considerations. In the late 1850s, for example, California officials unsuccessfully defended a statute that levied a lofty head tax on Chinese immigrants by citing the long-acknowledged right of states to proscribe free Black migration. Opponents of the 1866 Civil Rights Act fretted that birthright citizenship would preclude them from regulating the racial composition of their states, with one Indiana Democrat declaring that his constituency would become "substantially Africanized, Mexicanized or Coolyized" (165–66). When the federal government asserted in 1884 that national sovereignty permitted it to tax immigrants on arrival, Kenny notes it offered "a virtually identical argument with regard to state power" (207), as South Carolina had six decades earlier when defending the Negro Seamen Acts. The road to Chinese exclusion followed a well-trodden, anti-Black path. One of the strengths of this book is its explanation of how antislavery arguments were weaponized after the Civil War to regulate other racial End Page 260 minorities. "Federal regulations, " Kenny observes, "produced the categories of the free and unfree immigrant through racial classification" (205). The Supreme Court's opinion in the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases, known primarily for weakening Fourteenth Amendment protections for Black Americans during Reconstruction, also interpreted the Thirteenth Amendment to prohibit "Mexican peonage, " including Indigenous captivity practices in the Southwest, and "the Chinese coolie trade when they amount to slavery or involuntary servitude" (183). Lawmakers wasted little time conflating "coolies" with all Chinese in order to severely curtail their ability to enter the United States under the guise of honoring the spirit of emancipation. As with state and federal police power, this racist iteration of antislavery principles also had an anti-Black precedent. Although Kenny briefly discusses the movement to colonize Black Americans abroad in chapter 2, the topic does not resurface in part 2. Did antislavery advocates of Chinese exclusion ever make this comparison in order. . .