Kunal M. Parker

Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000 - New Histories of American Law Kunal M. Parker

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Review Quotes: "Kunal Parker has accomplished the remarkable feat of challenging us to think differently about concepts - what it is to belong, what it is to be alien - that once seemed simple. Untangling the complexities of immigration from the Pilgrims to the Dreamers with a brilliant clarity, [he] traces the way that changing meanings of citizenship have been accompanied by paradoxical redefinitions of what it is to be foreign. As we struggle in our own political moment to reform immigration law, Making Foreigners offers indispensable perspective." Linda K. Kerber, University of IowaReview Quotes: "In Making Foreigners, Kunal Parker shows how American law defined alienage and citizenship in ways that have confounded simple oppositions of insider and outsider. [He] provides a powerful analysis of how various groups 'native' to American territory have been constructed as 'foreigners' in both law and society. Making Foreigners is a tour de force that makes us rethink how the very notion of being 'foreign' has little to do with where one might stand in relation to territorial boundaries." Mae Ngai, Columbia UniversityReview Quotes: "In this breathtakingly sweeping, yet concise, 400-year history, Kunal Parker highlights how through much of American history both immigration and citizenship law rendered individuals and entire groups, from both inside and outside the territorial borders of the United States, 'foreign'. In doing so, he challenges the dichotomy between insiders and foreigners and opens to question the current immigration and deportation regime." Barbara Welke, University of MinnesotaTable of Contents: 1. Introduction; 2. Foreigners and borders in British North America; 3. Logics of revolution; 4. Blacks, Indians, and other aliens in antebellum America; 5. The rise of the federal immigration order; 6. Closing the gates in the early twentieth century; 7. A rights revolution?; 8. Conclusion and coda. Brief Description: Connects the history of immigration with histories of Native Americans, African Americans, women, the poor, Latino/a Americans and Asian Americans.

Contributor Bio:  Parker, Kunal M Kunal Parker is a Professor of Law and Dean's Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami School of Law. His first book, Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1790 1900: Legal Thought before Modernism was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011.