Editor’s Note: In March 2026, Oxford University Press published Anna O. Law’s long-awaited book Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship. It sold out its first run and The Docket staff was able to catch up with Anna now that the second is hitting shelves.
The Docket [TD]: You were thinking about and working on what became Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship for quite some time. Can you explain for our readers the origins of the book? And how does it fit within your own trajectory as a scholar?
Anna O. Law [AL]: It is an honor and delight to talk with you all at the Law and History Review. Thank you for having me here.
I got the idea for Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship when writing my first book The Immigration Battle in American Courts, which was about the role of the federal judiciary in US immigration policy. For that book, I read, or at least skimmed, all the Supreme Court and three U.S. Courts of Appeals, totalling about 3,000 immigration cases, from 1891 to 2001.
As I was reading all those opinions, I had a question that drove Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship, “In a federal system of government, where is the location of the dividing line between central power and colonial/state power?” The inquiry seemed very straightforward. I had no idea it would take me 16 years to answer that question and to convey the information to readers in an understandable way. It turns out that where the dividing line between centralized and local control over migration moves across US history and the location is determined by politics, not the US Constitution, or legal precedent. And the politics of each era of course is a moving picture, although there are continuities.
After publishing the first article which Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship grew out of, “Lunatics, Idiots, Paupers, and Negro Seamen–Immigration Federalism and the Early American State”, I quickly realized answering that question required me knowing about slavery. Halfway through the book, since I was covering the colonial period to 1888, I realized I also had to learn at least some Native American history and federal Indian law. Since my PhD is in political science, not history, I had to read a ton in order to lay down basic information. Unfortunately (for me), there is only one standard for historical accuracy and “(S)he can be a little bit wrong because she’s not trained as a historian” is not a thing! From book one to book two, I continue historically grounded research on aspects of the legal and policy history of US immigration.
[TD]: A striking feature of this book is its self-consciously interdisciplinary identity. Can you discuss some of the promises and challenges of bridging multiple approaches, including historical methodology and American Political Development?
[AL]: Aside from my two books that are both about immigration law and policy history, the throughline is the methodology of American Political Development (APD). APD is both a set of methodologies and a subfield in political science. Very similar to what historians do, APD scholars are sensitive to temporality because we knowwhy something happens is often explained by when it happens, and by what else was going on in US politics at the time. Thus, APD is necessarily interdisciplinary, and readers will see I blend historical, doctrinal, and political analysis. APD promises to deliver a richer account of legal and political history. Whether it does or not, readers can judge.
Distinct from historians who also study US immigration and federal courts, APD political scientists focus on power. As a historical institutionalist, I’m trained to analyze how institutions like the federal courts, and institutional arrangements like the federal system, manifest as sets of rules and norms. We focus on how these rules and norms shape and channel political power. One example from Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship is that the existence of the federal system which allows policies and laws to be made by multiple layers of government had two effects. For example, before immigration controls were federalized and nationalized at the level of the US government in the late nineteenth century, colonies and then state exclusively ran international and interstate migration. Massachusetts deported poor, sickly, and disabled people to Europe, other states, or Canada. South Carolina confined free Black sailors from foreign and domestic vessels to their ships for the duration of their stay in Charleston harbor. During this long period of sub-national management of migration, the US federal system multiplied the kinds of state-level laws restricting international and internal migration.
One of the challenges for those of us who do legal historical research is to convey that although law and legal precedent constrain judicial and political outcomes, politics and historical context are also essential to accounting for when legal doctrines arise, how long they are viable, and when they are replaced by other lines of precedent. I couldn’t have told this story with just political science or history methodology or doctrinalism alone—I needed all three to make sense of what was happening. APD is a powerful methodology and analytical approach, but it requires juggling many balls in the air at the same time.
I don’t think historical methods or APD methods are superior. I think that both groups of scholars are looking at similar legal history questions and doing so from different vantage points. It’s like when you were a kid and you had a kaleidoscope. You turned it one way and one pattern would appear, twist it again, and a different pattern emerges.
[TD]: This is a sweeping book that includes a remarkably expansive cast of characters. Readers might be surprised in chapter four, for example, to see that enslaved people are studied and discussed so extensively in a book about migration and the regulation of migration. Can you discuss your main findings here and how you think this changes the way we should understand the regulation of slavery?
[AL]: I know readers are not expecting to see enslaved people or Native Americans in a book that is about voluntary migration and citizenship. I wasn’t trying to be novel. The evidence required this approach. The reason why I put all these groups together is the Supreme Court and circuit court cases from the nineteenth century contain all three groups in single opinions. Take for example Mayor of NY v Miln (1837). This is a case about a New York City shipping company suing the state and refusing to comply with New York’s law requiring ship captains to convey the passenger manifest to state authorities upon landing. In that opinion, the justices discuss at length the consequences to slave states’ ability to restrict the internal and international migration of free Black people.
The main effect of slavery on voluntary migration laws is that slavery politically prevents any migration controls from being federalized for almost a century. Before the Civil War, slavery and voluntary migration laws were intertwined; changes to one set of laws would mean changes in the other. I most definitely am not saying enslaved migration is “immigration”. That latter term implies consent which was thoroughly absent from the forced importation and lifetime of labor of enslaved people. However, I present multiple examples of the existence of the institution of slavery altering the content and trajectory of voluntary migration laws, including delaying the transition of immigration controls to the federal level until 1888. Slave states viewed the possibility of a federal deportation power as extremely threatening. What if the President deported all their enslaved people?
Similarly, I am not saying Native Americans as original occupants and landowners are “migrants.” States and the federal government, though, in the early republic and antebellum period, used subsidized “public” land that was often coerced or stolen from Indigenous people as an incentive for voluntary European migration. Also, the US government violently deported 80,000 Native people in the 1830s at the behest of the slave states so that those states could expand cotton growing and slavery. While Native Americans are not migrants, the US government made them forcibly migrate from their ancestral lands.
Arguments about slavery show up in federal court cases about voluntary migration. The emergence of the plenary power doctrine, first in US v Kagama (1886), a case about federal power over Native Americans, is followed by the doctrine’s first invocation in Chae Chan Ping v US (1889). A precedent that first arose in federal Indian law was carried over to immigration law 3 years later. These legal opinions, pieces of historical evidence, illustrate that although today we conceive of Native Americans, voluntary migrants, and enslaved/free Black people as unrelated, the people of earlier eras saw groups’ migration and settlement as relational and zero-sum.
[TD]: In the book’s final chapter, you discuss the Reconstruction Amendments. How does your interpretation about the origins of the Fourteenth Amendment speak to contemporary debates about the nature and significance of the birthright citizenship clause?
[AL]: Friends and strangers alike have remarked on how “timely” Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship is. I am horrified that at this writing, we are under a week and a half away from the Supreme Court ruling on the merits of Trump’s birthright citizenship Executive Order in Trump v Barbara. No one who wrote a legal history of slavery, settler colonial dispossession, and Chinese exclusion wishes their history book to be relevant to current politics.
People who know the history of US citizenship understand that before the Reconstruction Amendments ended slavery, created individual rights, and put the US government in charge of enforcement of the rights deriving from US citizenship, the legal citizenship of free Black Americans was unclear. That undefined nature of free Black people’s legal citizenship enabled rampant discrimination in many policy areas, including state-level legal restrictions on all African Americans’ mobility and ability to stay in certain places. African Americans applying for passports were denied by the State Department who claimed that before the birthright citizenship clause, Black people may be state citizens, but were not US citizens before the Reconstruction Amendments.
It is essential to understand why the birthright citizenship clause is there. The clause is to counter the long history of state-level discrimination against African Americans. Today, in advance of Trump v Barbara, I see ahistorical accounts of events purporting to be originalism. These takes project contemporary political concerns about “illegal aliens” back in time when the political priorities of the 14th Amendment framers and the division of labor over immigration enforcement were completely different.
In legal briefs about today’s debates over birthright citizenship, I’ve read tortured attempts to use federal Indian law to argue that “subject to the jurisdiction” excludes the children born to undocumented migrants. Native Americans’ relationship to citizenship has a complex history that is separate from the legal citizenship of immigrants and African Americans since Indigenous people mostly wanted self-determination via respect for Native sovereignty and not the individual rights of US citizenship. Claiming that Native Americans not being “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US and comparing them to the children born to undocumented people is a misleading comparison because the two groups do not have the same historic relationship to the land or to the US polity.
[TD]: We know you’ve just finished this book, but our readers will want to know: what is Anna O. Law up to next?
[AL]: First, I have to recover from the 16-year epic saga of Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship, which, since I’m a foodie, will involve excellent food and Portuguese and Spanish wine.
As I was writing Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship, it made me angry that everyone knows about Ellis Island, but very few people know Gadsden’s Wharf in Charleston, South Carolina (where a substantial number of enslaved people were imported), or Angel Island off of San Francisco where mostly Chinese would-be immigrants were detained and interrogated after the Chinese Exclusion of 1882. Why do people not know about these other American gateway cities? I choose in the rest of my career to continue to address US immigration history with African American and Native American histories. I hope many others will join me in this approach.
I allude to the power of constitutional memory; that is how we marshal historical evidence to argue about constitutional meaning. My third book will more directly take on the relationship of US immigration historiography and constitutional memory. Hopefully I can manage to write that book in, er, under 10 years.