“To Properly and Humanely Enforce the Laws”: US Immigration Policy and the Associational State, 1882–1941 

Justin Broubalow

Advisor: Sam Lebovic, PhD, Department of History and Art History

Committee Members: Zachary Schrag, Justin Gest

Horizon Hall, #3225
January 22, 2025, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Abstract:

This dissertation examines how federal immigration officials attempted to implement increasingly numerous and restrictive immigration laws in the early years of federal border control without the funds, manpower, or expertise to do so. While many histories on US immigration policy in this era focus on processes of lawmaking, this dissertation puts the problem of administration at the center of the story. Using this analytical framework, I argue that, from the dawn of federal immigration control in the late nineteenth century, American immigration officials frequently engaged in the creation of associational relationships with groups and individuals outside the federal immigration apparatus in an attempt to supplement the administrative capacity available to the immigration bureaucracy alone. 

These attempted associational relationships took many forms, including agreements with transportation companies, foreign governments, local law enforcement, and international non-governmental organizations, and they relied on the initiative of officials at multiple levels from secretaries of labor down to individual inspectors and consuls in faraway places. When immigration officials found partners willing to cooperate and meet the needs of the federal government, these outside entities generally did so with their own interests in mind. This mode of administration continued until 1924 when reforms in both immigration law and bureaucratic administration made unilateral federal migration control more realistic. By focusing on the administration of immigration law rather than the creation of it, we see clearly that neat chronologies of state development are inadequate; indeed, the development of the administrative state was non-linear and characterized by fits and starts.