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[...] American capital’s dependence on immigrant labor in the nineteenth century is unique among industrializing countries, in that the process of colonization and settlement had resulted in patterns of yeoman farming, rather than feudal agriculture, and thus lacked the reserves of surplus agricult…

t came to him that he didn’t want to see the boy, after all. He was shocked by this realization and for a moment felt diminished by the meanness of it. He shook his head. In a lifetime of foolish actions, this trip was possibly the most foolish thing he’d ever done. But the fact was, he really had …

Immigration policy in the US can be very broadly broken down into two eras, demarcated roughly by the turn of the twentieth century, and distinguished by the state’s orientation towards immigration restriction. The first period, which stretches back to the colonial era, oversaw a generally open reg…

[...] whatever native workers may fear about the intensified competition from new entrants to the labor market, with regard to the rights of the immigrants who enter the US, all workers benefit when those new workers are protected from employer despotism. Defending the rights of labor depends on la…

To properly assess how capital’s structural interests impact immigration policy, we need to begin with a conceptual distinction between questions of the immigration flow and questions of immigrants’ rights.6 There is, of course, a significant overlap and interaction between these two phenomena — th…