The Origins of the “Illegal Alien” Reconsidered

This paper sheds new light on the history of the concept of the “illegal alien” in the United States. Opponents of immigration in the United States today frame debates over immigration in a binary way, stigmatizing undocumented immigrants as “illegal aliens,” as opposed to “legal immigrants.” While Chinese exclusion in the late nineteenth century created the category of the unlawful immigrant status, many historians locate the origins of the discursive dichotomy and the notion of the “illegal alien” in the Immigration Act of 1924, which consolidated the unlawful status with the quota and visa systems. This paper reconsiders the origins of the dichotomous categorization of immigrants that stigmatized one group in relation to the other by examining debates over Irish, Italian, Japanese, and Mexican immigration during the long nineteenth century. In the antebellum period, the British government’s and Irish landlords’ policies for sponsoring the passage of the Irish poor to the United States created the perception that any person migrating with assistance from a third party would be undesirable. This notion was reinforced at the turn of the twentieth century when the federal alien contract labor law prohibited the landing of foreign workers whose passage was paid by American employers. Proponent of this law condemned Italians, Japanese, and Mexicans who were imported to the United States in violation of the law as degraded, bound laborers and as “unnatural” and “artificial” immigrants, in contrast to free immigrants who came to the United States on their own. This paper argues that the discourse on the alien contract labor law, which divided immigrants into “unnatural” and “natural” ones and disparaged the former group, laid the foundations for the nativist logic in modern America.