"The history of immigration law and politics in the nineteenth century is, in an important respect, a history of repeated and progressively sharper clashes between the regenerative model of assimilation and the seismic social and economic transformations of the industrial era: the concentration of population and industry; the emergence of a permanent, "dependent" wage-earning class; and, finally, the shifting origin of America's immigrants. In the eight decades between the nation's founding and the Civil War, Americans' relative confidence in the transformative power of immigration and in immigrants' capacity for moral and political regeneration directly shaped both the political construction of immigrants and their legal identity as objects of regulation. During that period, the perceived viability of the regenerative theory of immigration served as a referendum on the vitality of American republicanism itself. As went immigration, so went the Republic."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
p.763
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_States
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Immigration to the United States
279 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Immigration to the United States →
Related Quotes
"As part of its commitment to human rights, the United States offers asylum to foreign nation-als who flee to its shor…"
"Over the first half of the nineteenth century, even as Americans developed progressively sharper critiques of immigra…"
"Immigrants were legally reconstructed as foreigners only in the final decades of the nineteenth century, as Europeans…"
"Human judgment can never be eliminated from any system of justice. But we believe that the outcome of a refugee’s que…"
"If the adoption of the Alien Friends Act represented a dramatic short-term political triumph for the Federalist Party…"
"The narrative of immigration as regeneration imagined the republican system itself, as well the economic arrangements…"
"Although the fact that the Constitution vests the authority to enact naturalization laws in Congress suggests that so…"
"Collectively, asylum officers, immigration judges, members of the Board of Immigration Appeals, and judges of U.S. co…"
"In crafting a naturalization law, prudence thus counseled that immigrants undergo a period of probation before being …"
"Americans' confidence in assimilation suffered its first significant, though by no means fatal, shock during the wave…"