The current controversy over American immigration policies gives Hidetaka Hirota's Expelling the Poor special interest and relevance. As the first thorough examination of how individual states attempted to control immigration before the full implementation of federal immigration laws in the 1890s, this book – originally a doctoral dissertation –draws the important connections between state and federal control. It closely examines the policies of individual states, especially New York and Massachusetts, but also California, Louisiana, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, and shows that, contrary to common assumptions, immigration was closely regulated before the passage of federal laws. The focus is on the East Coast and California because the South never developed strict controls and regulations on immigration, its officials being too preoccupied with keeping African Americans down in the years after the Civil War.

Another common misconception Hirota dispels is the notion that the federal controls of the late nineteenth century were a result of anti-Asian racism in the West. Rather, it was the reaction to the massive influx of poor Irish immigrants during the famine, concern over their local economic impact, and anti-Irish prejudice that formed the basis for federal immigration controls. The physical impact of famine and poverty and then the transatlantic voyage in the steerage of a diseased timber ship left a deep mark on these people and contributed to the hostility that met them upon their arrival.

Racial prejudice was certainly an important reason for state and then federal immigration controls against poor Irish immigrants, as illustrated in some remarkable nativist cartoons included in the book. But Hirota also points to fears – both legitimate and exaggerated – of the financial burdens that large-scale pauper immigration imposed on American cities. The fact that British and Irish authorities were assisting the paupers from their poorhouses to leave for America – in effect “shoveling out” the paupers (16) so that the United States and Canada could deal with them – created a lot of ill will and indicated the real financial problems associated with dire poverty. It also became a justification for institutionalized deportation.

In perhaps its most interesting and insightful chapter, Expelling the Poor examines the policy of deportation and the experience and lives of the deportees once they were returned. The origins of deportation in American immigration law were rooted in the British poor law, one of many institutions the United States inherited from the mother country. Just as the British poor law allowed parishes to expel transient beggars back to where they came from, American immigration law now extended that to repatriate paupers to Ireland or Britain – in effect internationalizing the old poor law. Deportation became common because of both financial concerns and nativism, the combination of which was a potent force. At least 50,000 persons were deported from Massachusetts alone between 1830 and 1890. Disproportionate numbers of them were Irish women with children. Hirota uses extensive primary sources to reconstruct the experiences of deportees, which were often quite surprising and horrific. Even American citizens and those married to American citizens got swept up and deported, mainly to Liverpool, where British authorities dealt with many by relocating them to Ireland. Often deportees were simply marched off the boat at the British port – without any resources whatsoever – to fend for themselves. Not surprisingly, many resorted to prostitution and other crimes to survive.

Hirota makes another important contribution by reevaluating the Know-Nothing movement, which was especially potent in Massachusetts, and the Free Soil movement, both of which were dominated by nativists. Normally seen as short-lived and ineffectual reactions to Catholic immigration, these movements actually had a deep and lasting impact on state immigration control policies and deportation movements. Hirota explains how that influence persisted, developed, and ultimately shaped the national federal policies that restricted the numbers of immigrants from certain countries, particularly those in Southern and Eastern Europe as well as Asia. The Free Soilers, especially, led the “crackdown” (98) on foreign paupers and helped radicalize restrictions, while the Know-Nothings took control of state politics in Massachusetts in the mid-1850s and put anti-Irish hostility into law – all paving the way for the virtually unlimited power of immigration officials later in the century. At the same time, increasing industrialization was threatening to undermine working-class independence, and the cheap foreign labor that the destitute Irish represented became a convenient focus for blame and hostility, especially during the financial panics and depressions of 1857 and 1873. California's early attempts to exclude Asians on the basis of race foundered on Constitutional issues concerning states regulating trade, so the federalization of exclusion laws became the solution. This culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was clearly about race, but the dominant concerns that underpinned late nineteenth-century restrictions were more about economics.