Hidden Histories of Unauthorized Migrations from Europe to the United States
Cloth: 05/13/2025
About the Book
Often depicted as the nation’s iconic legal immigrant, unauthorized European migrants are often overlooked by scholars, policymakers, and the media. This volume tells the stories of European migrants who adopted irregular migration strategies to enter and remain in the United States throughout the twentieth century. Contributors explore facets of this history with essays on migration patterns from Russia, Italy, Ireland, the Ottoman Empire, and Poland. They also offer important arguments about the treatment of unauthorized European migrants by states and societies on both sides of the Atlantic and how the reception of undocumented immigrants has been and continues to be impacted by the dynamics of racial, class, and gender constructions in the United States and abroad. As the contributors show, the reception accorded unauthorized European migrants frequently obscured and even normalized their irregular migration strategies, easing their access to American citizenship.Revealing and insightful, Hidden Histories of Unauthorized Migrations from Europe to the United States sheds new light on our intertwined notions of race, legality, and immigration.
Contributors: Danielle Battisti, Ashley Johnson Bavery, Mary Patrice Erdmans, Polina Ermoshkina, Torsten Feys, Carly Goodman, S. Deborah Kang, E. Kyle Romero, Randa Tawil, and Joanna Wojdon
About the Author
Danielle Battisti is an associate professor of history at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. She is the author of Whom We Shall Welcome: Italian Americans and Immigration Reform, 1945–1965. S. Deborah Kang is John L. Nau III Associate Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917–1954.Reviews
Blurbs
“The discussion of immigration in the United States today often assumes that earlier European immigrants were lawfully admitted, presenting unauthorized entry as a new problem committed by recent immigrants from Latin America and Asia. By revealing that numerous Europeans entered the country through unauthorized channels, this volume challenges the myth of European legality in U.S. immigration history.”--Hidetaka Hirota, author of Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy
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