Historian Michael Schoeppner sets the stage. He argues that the many state and local laws that regulated the mobility of free Black people in the antebellum period were a kind of racial immigration control. America’s first “illegal immigrants” were Black.
“Free Black people faced border regulation and migration bans across the antebellum United States,” he writes. Laws restricting their movement were so ubiquitous that
they approached a national immigration regime […] And while the antebellum Supreme Court struck down some state-level immigration regulations of transatlantic European migrants in 1849, it never heard a case on Black exclusion laws, and state supreme courts uniformly upheld the laws until Reconstruction.
Even free states had such laws: Illinois’s Act to Prevent the Immigration of Free Negroes Into This State was enacted in 1853, a few years after Illinois’s constitution ended slavery in the state. The act would be upheld by the state’s highest court in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War. The plaintiff in the case, named Nelson, was condemned to forced labor for entering Illinois by crossing the Mississippi River from Missouri.
The enslaved had, by legal definition, no freedom of movement. Pro-slavers like SCOTUS Chief Justice Roger B. Taney opposed federal control of immigration precisely because they thought such control would supersede local regulation of Black people’s movement, including the internal slave trade itself.
The Civil War’s dismemberment of slavery meant that antislavery became the dominant ideology shaping post-war immigration policy. This played out in ironic ways, as historian Kevin Kenny shows by highlighting two federal laws that paved the way to immigration control by federal authority.
In 1862, the US prohibited American involvement in the “Coolie Trade,” meaning the transportation of Chinese contract workers. The argument was that coolies, as they were typically called, were akin to slaves and that shipping them was a transpacific variation of the Atlantic slave trade. The law did not, however, ban the importation of Chinese workers into the country, where they were still defined as free workers. But the law did inspire those working against Chinese immigration to the US to argue that all coolies should be excluded on antislavery grounds. These forces got their wish with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first federal law preventing a specific people from immigrating to the US.