Michael A. Schoeppner

Dissertation: "Navigating the Dangerous Atlantic: Racial Quarantines, Black Sailors, and United States Constitutionalism"

“Living Illegally” tells the stories of free Black people whose illicit migrations belie the oft-told story of the United States’ open borders in the era before Chinese Exclusion. Before Reconstruction, lawmakers in twenty states and federal territories banned the arrival of free Black migrants, both African American and foreign-born. Those who broke these migration bans were “living illegally,” and the threat of arrest, incarceration, compulsory labor, and deportation hung over them. For thousands, this threat was realized, even as hundreds of thousands of European migrants simultaneously immigrated to the United States unencumbered. In the antebellum period, Blackness made otherwise legal migration criminal. The experience of free Black migrants who encountered these laws illustrates the power and limits of interracial social networks, the race-based origins of US immigration law, and the racial dimensions at the root of urban policing. In evading and contesting the laws, Black migrants helped usher in both Reconstruction’s revolutionary reconfiguration of citizenship and the federalization of US immigration law.