And one of the most important powers that the states reserve is the power to control their own borders. You could say that immigration, as we understand it-as a mass phenomenon-really isn’t the issue on their mind, because everybody in the new United States was either a foreigner or a descendant of a foreigner, with the exception, obviously, of the native indigenous population.īut this is a federal system of government, one in which the states reserve very important powers. Now, it’s notoriously difficult for us to understand what was in the mind of the framers of the Constitution. Why was this not addressed in any meaningful way until after the Civil War? “Strangely for a country that attracted so many immigrants, the Constitution says nothing about their admission, exclusion, or expulsion,” you write in The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic. With immigration and migration becoming increasingly significant as both a domestic and global matter-nearly 900 million people worldwide sought to migrate in 2021, according to a Gallup poll- NYU News spoke with Kenny about what the Constitution says on these matters and how a “twisted reading” of one of its amendments had been used to exclude the entry of some to this country. This question of what I call ‘immigration federalism,’ with power divided between the center and the localities, is still playing out today.” “But states, towns, and cities can adopt policies regulating the lives of immigrants after they get here. “No state can determine, anymore, who can enter the United States and who can be excluded,” explains Kenny, author of the newly released The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic (Oxford) and director of NYU’s Glucksman Ireland House. And, like many of today’s thorniest political issues, the debate about immigration policy has connections to the nation’s initial commitment to the institution of slavery.

Over the past year, US cities and states have taken action against migrants in ways that have been described by some pundits as “ un-American”-from legislation that would ban those who are citizens of certain countries from purchasing property in Texas to buying bus tickets and chartering planes to move migrants to other locations.īut as NYU historian Kevin Kenny notes, the foundation for these maneuvers, which have been both criticized as “dehumanizing” and defended as necessary, was, in fact, made in America-back in the 18th and 19th centuries, with the adoption of the Constitution and its later amendments.

Becoming abolitionists