Overview
Historians have well described how US immigration policy increasingly fell under the purview of federal law and national politics in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. It is far less understood that the rights of noncitizen immigrants in the country remained primarily contested in the realms of state politics and law until the mid-to-late twentieth century. Such state-level political debates often centered on whether noncitizen immigrants should vote, count as part of the polity for the purposes of state legislative representation, work in public and publicly funded employment, or obtain professional licensure. Enacted state alienage laws were rarely self-executing, and immigrants and their allies regularly challenged nativist restrictions in court, on the job, by appealing to lawmakers and the public, and even via diplomacy. Battles over the passage, implementation, and constitutionality of such policies at times aligned with and sometimes clashed against contemporaneous efforts to expand rights to marginalized Americans, particularly US-born women. Often considered separately or treated as topics of marginal importance, Disparate Regimes underscores the centrality of nativist state politics and alienage policies to the history of American immigration and citizenship from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. It argues that the proliferation of these debates and laws produced veritable disparate regimes of citizenship rights in the American political economy on a state-by-state basis. It further illustrates how nativist state politics and alienage policies helped to invent and concretize the idea that citizenship rights meant citizen-only rights in law, practice, and popular perception in the United States.
Full Product Details
Author: Brendan A. Shanahan (Associate Research Scholar, Associate Research Scholar, MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University)
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:
Width: 15.60cm
, Height: 23.50cm
, Length: 2.20cm
Weight: 0.550kg
ISBN: 9780197660539
ISBN 10: 0197660533
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 28 May 2025
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
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Reviews
'Disparate Regimes provides important new insights into neglected aspects of citizenship history. Rejecting the binary framework for understanding U.S. citizenship in contrast to alien immigrants with no rights, Shanahan's book shows in fine detail how American citizenship by turns stretched and retracted for over a century to cover some groups in certain parts of the country while excluding others from meaningful citizen rights. From the decline of the franchise for non-citizens to the struggle over counting immigrants in the apportionment of electoral districts, the work presents a rich history of long neglected topics. Disparate Regimes fills an important gap in the history of U.S. citizenship and its changing impact on national politics.' Dorothee Schneider, Teaching Professor Emerita, University of Illinois. Author of Crossing Borders: Migration and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century United States 'In Disparate Regimes, canvassing the period from 1865 to 1965, Brendan Shanahan traces the shifting, complex, and contradictory politics through which rights associated with citizenship became rights for citizens only. In so doing, Shanahan fills an important gap in the history of U.S. immigration and citizenship law and adds a crucial dimension to our understanding of American citizenship.' Kunal Parker, University of Miami. Author of Making Foreigners 'In the fight for power in America in the nineteenth century, defining and redefining ""the people"" in each state built a crazy quilt of policies allocating political representation, voting rights, and good jobs. Shanahan explains how state-level politics in the twentieth century drove a turn toward a more uniform system across the country, one that assigned some basic rights to citizens alone. This deeply researched, impressively capacious book reveals how nativist and anti-immigrant politics indelibly shaped a national system of well-defined, exclusive, and consequential citizenship rights: it will prove itself a timeless book on a very timely topic.' Dan Bouk, author of Democracy's Data In this much-needed contribution to the literature, Shanahan (history, Yale Univ.) expertly provides a study of the state/local level of immigration. * G. Donato, Choice *
'Disparate Regimes provides important new insights into neglected aspects of citizenship history. Rejecting the binary framework for understanding U.S. citizenship in contrast to alien immigrants with no rights, Shanahan's book shows in fine detail how American citizenship by turns stretched and retracted for over a century to cover some groups in certain parts of the country while excluding others from meaningful citizen rights. From the decline of the franchise for non-citizens to the struggle over counting immigrants in the apportionment of electoral districts, the work presents a rich history of long neglected topics. Disparate Regimes fills an important gap in the history of U.S. citizenship and its changing impact on national politics.' Dorothee Schneider, Teaching Professor Emerita, University of Illinois. Author of Crossing Borders: Migration and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century United States 'In Disparate Regimes, canvassing the period from 1865 to 1965, Brendan Shanahan traces the shifting, complex, and contradictory politics through which rights associated with citizenship became rights for citizens only. In so doing, Shanahan fills an important gap in the history of U.S. immigration and citizenship law and adds a crucial dimension to our understanding of American citizenship.' Kunal Parker, University of Miami. Author of Making Foreigners 'In the fight for power in America in the nineteenth century, defining and redefining ""the people"" in each state built a crazy quilt of policies allocating political representation, voting rights, and good jobs. Shanahan explains how state-level politics in the twentieth century drove a turn toward a more uniform system across the country, one that assigned some basic rights to citizens alone. This deeply researched, impressively capacious book reveals how nativist and anti-immigrant politics indelibly shaped a national system of well-defined, exclusive, and consequential citizenship rights: it will prove itself a timeless book on a very timely topic.' Dan Bouk, author of Democracy's Data
Author Information
Brendan A. Shanahan is a Lecturer in the Department of History and an Associate Research Scholar at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. He teaches courses on (North) American immigration and citizenship policy and comparative US and Canadian political and legal history. He served as a postdoctoral associate at Yale's Center for the Study of Representative Institutions, earned his PhD and MA from the University of California, Berkeley, and received his BA from McGill University. His work has appeared in The Catholic Historical Review, Law and History Review, and the Washington Post, among other publications.
