Fenianism, Expatriation, and the International Politics of Citizenship

Abstract

Speaking in the aftermath of diplomatic tensions with Japan in July 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt observed the close relationship between American foreign relations and immigration. Roosevelt reflected on the scale and diversity of immigration to the United States in a speech before the Naval War College and concluded that “in consequence there are points of friction between this country and other countries such as exist in no other nation.”1 Such public circumspection was rare in a century dominated by the conviction that immigration policy was domestic policy and therefore impervious to the interference of foreign governments or their migrants. Two decades of scholarship has annihilated that conceit. Thanks to this rich body of work, there can be no doubt that migration actually constitutes “an important, continuous, and contentious relationship between the United States and the rest of the world,” as Donna Gabaccia argues.2 Migration scholars like Gabaccia have been instrumental in elucidating this relationship, drawing on their field’s transnational and racial turns along with new emphases on anti-colonialism, the Cold War, and the conflicts they inspired. Historians of American foreign relations have also contributed much to this discussion of course, leaving no doubt that migration histories and foreign relations histories are inextricably entwined.3