The Regulation of Immigration, Economic Structures and Definitions of the Poor in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract

In the eighteenth century, parish officers used the laws of settlement to regulate the immigration of the poor to their parishes. Their regulation went well beyond ridding their parishes of indigent immigrants. Parish officers monitored the immigration of the non-indigent poor; they insured that their parishes acquired the documents which guaranteed that a poor immigrant would not become the responsibility of the parish to which he had immigrated; and they even removed non-indigent immigrants from their parishes, using their parishes' funds to pay for sending these immigrants back to the parishes which were legally responsible for their welfare.1 To the modern observer, such regulation of migration from one parish to another may seem odd, so odd that some historians have assumed that this regulatory activity did not occur.2 Obviously, then, the parishes' regulation of immigration was part of a world now lost. Regulation of immigration by parish officers disappeared in 1795, when parliament abolished the legal foundations for this practice.3 In detective stories, discovery of the circumstances and implications of a disappearance reveals the structure of the world in which it occurred. So may it be with the regulation of immigration.