Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth Century Origins of American Immigration Policy by Hidetaka Hirota

Abstract

Reviewed by: Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth Century Origins of American Immigration Policy by Hidetaka Hirota Francis M. Carroll Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth Century Origins of American Immigration Policy by Hidetaka Hirota. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 302. $34.95. Diaspora Studies and immigration are not neglected areas of Irish scholarship. Nevertheless, Hidetaka Hirota has opened up a fascinating discussion on a relatively unexplored element of the subject—the forced return of Irish paupers, vagrants, criminals, and lunatics. In doing so, Hirota has also revised the conventional wisdom about the impact of the so-called Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s and the origins of federal immigration legislation in the 1880s. The accelerating migration of Catholic Irish in the 1830s and 1840s is well understood. These were largely people a few steps up from the bottom rungs of the Irish social and economic ladder—people who chose to seek a better life in the United States or Canada, who could pay their own passage, and who may have had some contacts to help them get settled in the New World. Hirota focuses on assisted emigration arising out of the catastrophe of the Great Famine and continuing economic distress in Ireland. The crisis of the 1840s and 1850s drove large numbers of destitute people off the land and into workhouses, hospitals, prisons, and simply onto the roads. For simple economic reasons, it was more cost-effective for public authorities and large landowners to pay for the transatlantic passage of these people to get them out from under their responsibility. In the course of 1849–50, for example, the Cork workhouse sent almost 3,500 paupers to the United States. The following year the Kerry estates of Lord Lansdowne were cleared of some 1,500 distressed tenants who were sent to America. More were to follow. Drawing on the work of Kirby Miller and Gerard Moran, Hirota estimates that assisted emigration sent between 50,000 and 100,000 tenants and laborers to North America during the famine years. These people arrived destitute in the United States or [End Page 154] Canada. Many immediately went onto the streets begging, into almshouses, or into hospitals, becoming either a public nuisance or wards of the state. Not surprisingly, this situation inflamed the anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudices of the settled Protestant communities of the eastern seaboard, who believed that Ireland's and Britain's problems were being dumped on their communities. Hirota draws his evidence from several jurisdictions, but his focus is on Massachusetts and New York, the destination of the largest number of Irish immigrants. The response, of course, was the rise of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish nativism, taking its political form in the shape of the American Party, or the Know-Nothings, in the 1840s and 1850s. In these circumstances, Massachusetts and New York authorities turned back or deported immigrants on the strength of Poor Law legislation that had its origins in colonial times, when local authorities did not need to accept responsibility for people who were not natives of the locale. New York had legislation that simply authorized them to turn back arriving immigrants who were deemed likely to become a public charge. Massachusetts had similar powers but could also deport people who had lived and worked for some years before some personal or economic crisis drove them to seek public assistance. Injured workmen or widows or children born in the United States of Irish parents were no exceptions. Immigration authorities could order the deportation of these people, who had no recourse to appeal procedures or court intervention. By the 1880s, Massachusetts alone had deported as many as 50,000 people back to England or Ireland. (Hirota comments on the irony of the determination of the people of Massachusetts to deport hapless Irish immigrants while at the same time defying the federal Fugitive Slave Laws that required the return of runaway slaves to the southern states.) Assisted emigration was not discontinued by Irish and British authorities until the late 1880s. The Know-Nothing Party collapsed as a political movement in the mid-1850s, but the deportation policies of Massachusetts...