University of Virginia School of Law

The Hidden Dimension of Nineteenth-Century Immigration Law
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1504147
Abrams' article challenges the conventional wisdom that the law had little to
say about immigration before 1875. Instead, it offers a reframing of
immigration law history as including what scholars have previously
thought of as “sett...lement history”: The immigration of whites to the
western territories. The article focuses on a particular group of
immigrants—the so-called Mercer Girls—to explore both how the failure
to invoke exclusionary immigration law and the presence of other kinds
of laws (including homestead acts and anti-miscegenation statutes)
functioned to shape the population of the nascent western territories.Read More