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First of all, contrary to the popular and scholarly myth that American borders were open (meaning anybody could enter the US) until the introduction of federal Chinese exclusion law in the 1880s, American borders were NEVER legally open even before that. 2/
Before the federal government started regulating immigration during the 1880s, the administration of immigration largely fell upon local and state governments. 3/
During the colonial period, the British introduced to the American colonies their home country’s poor laws, which included provisions for banishing transient beggars and prohibiting the landing of paupers. 4/
These poor laws eventually developed into state laws for regulating foreign immigration after the independence. 5/
During the first several decades of the 19th century, thus, immigration regulation operated at the local and state levels. Most Atlantic seaboard states had some laws for restricting the landing of destitute immigrants and those appearing likely to become public charges. 6/
An 1848 Massachusetts law provided that no “lunatic, idiot, maimed, aged, or inform person, incompetent . . . to maintain themselves” or pauper was allowed to land unless the shipmaster provided a special bond for such a passenger. 7/ 
While most seaboard states had immigrant exclusion laws of this kind, Massachusetts also had laws for deporting destitute foreigners already resident in the US back to their countries of origin. In other words, the Bay State had “post-entry” deportation laws. 8/
These state immigration laws in the antebellum US were largely targeted against the Irish poor. The origins of American immigration policy lay in anti-Irish sentiment and more fundamentally economic concerns about their poverty. 9/
The state immigration laws, especially those in New York and Massachusetts, eventually developed into the first federal law to regulate general immigration (foreigners other than the Chinese) during the 1880s. 10/
The federal Immigration Act of 1882 banned the admission of paupers, the mentally ill, and criminals. Meanwhile the Chinese Restriction Act of 1882 excluded Chinese laborers, making deportable those who entered the US in violation of the law. 11/
Thus, it is not historically accurate to say that “there was no immigration law in the US” or “the US had open borders” before Chinese exclusion. 12/
But at the same time, “my Irish ancestors came to the US legally, unlike today’s undocumented immigrants, and therefore my legal immigrant folks from Ireland were more ideal and worthy residents than those law breakers from Latin America” is NOT an effective argument. 13/
1) because the volume of immigration was simply too large for state officials to implement the law, 2) because state officials neglected to enforce the law, or they were not interested in enforcing the law in the first place, 14/
or 3) because state officials were more interested in accommodating those Europeans—destitute for the moment but future citizens—than in rejecting them. 15/
In Massachusetts, technically all foreign-born inmates at public almshouses—immigrant recipients of public relief—were deportable. But only a tiny portion of them were actually deported. 16/
In other words, the deportable immigrants were in the end ALLOWED to stay in the country, even though they were supposed to be expelled. 17/
If your ancestor from famine-stricken Ireland could enter and settle in the US, that was most likely thanks to the officials’ inability or unwillingness to enforce the immigration law. 18/
The point is Europeans in the 19th century did very little, if any, on their own to make them worthy of admission. They were admitted, not necessarily because they followed the law or “came legally.” The officials simply let them in and they settled whatever the law said. 19/
Moreover, remember once again, many of the European immigrants who were deportable under the law were ALLOWED to stay in the country and become part of US society. 20/
Those who claim that undocumented immigrants today should come to the US legally as their European ancestors did in the 19th century should just stop attaching moral and legal virtues to their admission and settlement in ways that vilify immigrants today. 21/
The history of state-level immigration control is important, nevertheless. It shows the roots of US immigration policy, especially the significance of economic considerations in the rise of federal immigration policy. 22/
It also shows that anti-Irish nativism was not just a matter of prejudice. It had concrete legal consequences at the level of immigration law and policy. 23/
Also, it’s important to know the enforcement of state deportation law, when it was enforced, could be extremely harsh. 24/
During the Know Nothing movement of the 1850s, nativist officials in Massachusetts deported the Irish in pretty aggressive ways, even banishing abroad native-born and naturalized citizens of Irish descent. We can find the predecessors of ICE in antebellum Massachusetts. 25/
If you want to learn further about the origins of US immigration policy, read my book #ExpellingthePoor. 26/26 global.oup.com/academic/produ…
