The Origins of American Immigration Policy w/ Hidetaka Hirota
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 16 May 2022
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Hidetaka Hirota joins Bob and Ben for a conversation about the history of immigration law in the United States and the ways that government officials have decided who could and could not enter the United States. Hidetaka discusses the creation of Federal immigration law and the ways that looking at state immigration policies in the early to mid-19th century can help us understand the Immigration and Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882.
Dr. Hidetaka Hirota is Associate Professor of History at the University of California Berkeley who specializes in the history of US immigration. His book Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) has won multiple awards.
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This is a rebroadcast of RTN #126 which originally aired on April 8, 2019. This rebroadcast was edited by Ben Sawyer.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer and this is the road to now. |
| 0:09.2 | Today's topic is immigration and our guest is Heidi Takah Heroda. |
| 0:14.0 | This was an episode that we originally recorded in 2019. |
| 0:17.4 | At the time, immigration and what was going on at the border was in the headlines. |
| 0:21.6 | A lot of people were talking about it. |
| 0:23.6 | And in thinking about this week's episode and choosing which one to re-air, |
| 0:27.6 | it struck me that not only was this a fantastic episode, worthy of re-air, |
| 0:32.6 | because I incorporated parts of this and of Heidi Tucker's book book expelling the poor into my lectures, |
| 0:38.7 | actually at MTSU, but also because you guys remember when we were talking about immigration |
| 0:42.8 | all the time? Now it's on the back burner and I don't think it was ever really fixed. |
| 0:50.7 | It's something we should keep on our minds more regularly than whenever there's something in the news cycle. |
| 0:55.7 | Our immigration system in this country has had problems for a long time, but it seems like it only gets a push whenever the politics are there. |
| 1:03.3 | And so today I wanted to go back both to share this amazing origin story that Adi Taka tells here. |
| 1:13.0 | Just to keep this in our minds, just to remember that immigration is, you know, it formed this country. This country is a group of people |
| 1:19.3 | largely who came from other parts of the world, but that it's something that makes us who we are. |
| 1:25.1 | And yeah, I don't know what to tell you you i realize there's so much more in the news |
| 1:29.3 | right now and that there are pressing issues but this persists and again i just can't help but feel like |
| 1:35.5 | sometimes we give it attention when it's politically useful for some people but then we put it on |
| 1:41.0 | the back burner when it's not so i hope by sharing this amazing history of early American immigration, and by the way, if you haven't heard this episode before, and this is why we're sharing it, it'll blow your mind. So many Americans have no clue how immigration worked here. So I hope you guys learn something from this, and then I hope it puts that seed in your mind that we got things to |
| 2:01.1 | fix. I know. I know you're thinking, yeah, we got plenty of. Okay, okay, okay. I'm not trying to |
| 2:06.3 | pile on. Just trying to remind you of something that's pretty essential. So I hope you enjoy this |
| 2:11.9 | episode. One more thing before we go. Thank you to all our patrons. Just wanted to say we've just lined up a few new |
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