Sovereignty’s Edges: U. S. Immigration Control and the Boundaries of American Power in the Long 20th Century

By Paul A. Kramer 

Friday, November 30, 4-6 pm

Glucksman Ireland House, 1 Washington Mews

This talk, adapted from a book in progress, explores struggles over the degree to which migration control should be a sovereign prerogative of the U. S. national state, from the mid-19th century through the “war on terror.” Despite the commonplace that immigration control is an inherent and defining feature of national sovereignty, in the United States as elsewhere, the sovereign control of immigration was a political invention, with a contentious and contingent history worth reconstructing. Even as national institutions increasingly monopolized immigration control across the 20th century, the process was shot through with tensions and contradictions, shaped by both global and domestic political constraints, and bound by limitations that generated intense unease among nationalists fronting an unconquerable world.

Paul Kramer will explore five aspects of this history: the shift from bilateral, treaty-based immigration policy to Congressional policy-making; federalist tensions between state and national jurisdiction over immigration policy; the role of war in intensifying sovereign control; challenges to sovereignty posed by the advent of multilateral institutions; and the question of whether and how international refugee policy would be incorporated into U. S. law. In each of these processes, struggles over the sovereign control of immigration were inseparably entangled with and structured by racial, religious, gendered, economic and imperial hierarchies, and played profound and understudied roles in the building of U. S. national institutions and nationalist ideologies.

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