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Subjectship, Citizenship, and the Long History of Immigration Regulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Extract

Kunal Parker's “State, Citizenship, and Territory” can be read in at least two ways. Read one way, it tells an important story about how regulation of the poor was driven upward in Massachusetts during the nineteenth century, from the localities to the state. In the seventeenth century, Massachusetts had imposed primary responsibility for care of the poor on its towns. But during the eighteenth century, with the growth of a landless, wandering population, town poor relief budgets came under increasing pressure. The towns responded by lobbying the Massachusetts legislature to pass a series of statutes that made it more and more difficult to acquire a town settlement. People who fell into need in Massachusetts but who had not acquired a town settlement became state paupers for whom the state, rather than any town, was fiscally responsible. As it became more and more difficult to acquire a town settlement, the number of state paupers increased, shifting a portion of the fiscal burden of poor relief from the towns onto the state.

Type
Forum: Comment
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2001

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References

1 Baseler, Marilyn, “Asylum For Mankind”: America, 1607–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 7172.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., 72–73.

3 Ibid., 84.

4 Ibid., 197.

5 Ibid., 212 (economie effects), 218 (alien real property disability).

6 Ibid., 234.

7 Ibid., 267.

8 Quoted in ibid., 270. Emphasis in original.

9 Ibid., 309.

10 Parker, Kunal, “State, Citizenship, and Territory: The Legal Construction of Immigrants in Antebellum Massachusetts,” Law and History Review 19 (2001): 634.CrossRefGoogle Scholar