Immigration Article of the Day: Immigration Law’s Internal Dimension by Jacob Hamburger

Abstract

Immigration law is typically conceived as a body of law governing when noncitizens may enter the United States from abroad. But as the recent “migrant crisis” and ongoing battles over the status of undocumented immigrants in the states suggest, immigration law has much to say about not only who may cross the country’s borders, but also where people go within those borders. This Article contends that a complete account of immigration law requires understanding the ways in which it regulates the internal migration of noncitizens throughout the United States. This internal dimension of immigration law has a long history, as the first controls over entry from abroad emerged out of efforts to manage immigrant movement across city and state lines. Exploring this history reveals a wealth of alternative conceptions of how state and federal agencies might approach questions of internal migration. In particular, this Article provides an original analysis of a Progressive-era experiment with a federal immigrant labor “distribution” agency: the Division of Information, created within the Bureau of Immigration in 1907. Recovering this largely forgotten history suggests underutilized potential for cooperative interventions to align federal immigration law with economic, industrial, and labor policies at the national and local levels.

KJ