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Saving the Nation Through Exclusion: Alien Laws in the Early Republic in the United States and Mexico

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Erika Pani*
Affiliation:
Centro de Investigatión y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), Mexico City, Mexico
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In 1798, the U.S. Congress enacted a series of laws that affected resident aliens by restricting their access to citizenship and making those deemed to be “dangerous to the peace and safety of the Unites States” subject to deportation at the will of the Executive. In 1827, the Mexican government enacted the first of three laws for the expulsion of Spaniards, which ordered the removal of those born on the Spanish peninsula. In both cases, these laws went against the premises for membership that the young nations had set after independence. In both cases, it was argued that such violent measures were necessary to save the nation. As such, they suggest that even though the modern nation is often described as a subjective community, linked by horizontal bonds of solidarity, few mechanisms are as effective in forging an “us” than the construction of a hostile “them.”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2008

References

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19 Michael Durey’s survey of British political exiles shows that nearly one-half of them were involved in journalism and pamphleteering, while 18 radical émigrés edited 49 newspapers and magazines, mostly in the middle states. Durey, Michael, “Thomas Paine’s Apostles: Radical Emigrés and the Triumph of Jeffersonian Republicanism,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 44 (October 1987), pp. 661688, 670, 682.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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29 Duane was one of the radical journalists that contributed to creating the “earthy, boisterous, brash,” popular rhetoric of the Republicans in the 1790s. Following 1798, he worked under Benjamin Franklin Bache at the Philadelphia Aurora, a foremost Republican newspaper, which he ran with Bache’s wife after its editor was arrested under the Sedition Act and died of yellow fever. Duane had spent his youth in Ireland as a rebellious journalist and was identified with other radical immigrants in Philadelphia. Secretary of State Pickering hoped to arrest him under the Alien Act but could not, as Duane had been born in America in 1760. Smith, Freedom’s Fetters, pp. 276–292; Durey, Michael, Transatlantic Radicals in the Early American Republic (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997), pp. 235236;Google Scholar Tagg, James, Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 284285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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37 Spes in Livo, Día de Gloria o de luto para los enemigos de la patria. O defensa de la segunda parte de Vayanse los gachupines, sí no, les cuesta el pescuezo (Mexico: Imprenta de la testamentaría de Ontiveros, 1827), p. 3.

38 “Strangers,” Congressman Harper argued during the discussion of the 1798 Naturalization Law, “could not have the same views and attachments as native citizens.” Congressman Harper in Annals of Congress, House of Representatives, 5th congress, 2d session, p. 1568 at www.loc.gov. For Federalist efforts to restrict the definition of national identity, from Congress and from the bench, see Smith, Rogers M., “Constructing American National Identity: Strategies of the Federalists,” Federalists Reconsidered, ed. Ben-Atar, Doron and Oberg, Barbara B. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), p. 1940.Google ScholarPubMed

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41 Seth Cotlar, “The Federalists.” I owe much to this very suggestive article.

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44 46 to 40 the former, 44 to 41 the latter, Annals of Congress, 5th congress, 2nd session, p. 2028 at http://www.loc.gov.

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64 “Discurso que pronunció el presidente del congreso de Jalisco, c. Luis Portugal…”; Senator Molinos in “Cámara de Senadores,” El Águila (September 13, 26, 1827), p. 1.

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70 “Noticias nacionales. Dictamen de las comisiones unidas de gobernación y puntos constitucionales, sobre proposiciones del Sr. Blasco relativas a que los estados no pueden expulsar extranjeros de su territorio,” El Águila (October 14, 1827).

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89 See Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City [henceforth AGN], Expulsión de Españoles, vol.15, especially exp. 1, 2, 3; vol.49, exp.1. Exceptionally, José María Quintero claimed to have fought for independence and to have become “identified with the interest and future fate of even the last of the Mexicans.” AGN, Expulsión de españoles, vol.15, exp.11.

90 Kettner, James, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North Carolina Press, 1978);Google Scholar see also Smith, Rogers M., Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).Google Scholar

91 William’s case. Case #17, 708 Circuit Court, D. Cnt, 29F Cas 1330; 1799 U.S. App. LEXIS 39; 2 Cranch 82, September 1799.

92 For the primacy of local attachment and the sanction of community in the definition of membership within the Spanish monarchy, see Herzog, Tamar, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

93 “Política. Breve examen de los discursos publicados en El Observador Republicano,” El Amigo del Pueblo (October 24, 1827), p. 1.

94 “Ley. Reglas para dar carta de naturaleza,” Legislación mexicana, o colección completa de las disposiciones legislativas expedidas desde la independencia de la República, ordenada por los Lics. Manuel Dublán y José María Lozano, April 14, 1828 (México: Dublán y Chávez, 1876-1904) at http: //biblioweb.dgsca.unam.mx/dublanylozano/.

95 Zolberg, Aristide R., A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 199242.Google Scholar

96 Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955).Google Scholar

97 Foremost among these rights would be access to land. See Elkins, and Mckitrick, , “The Yeoman RepublicThe Age Google Scholar; Banning, , The Jeffersonian, pp. 203204.Google Scholar For Jefferson’s success in “fusing emotionally charged convictions into single discursive grid,” see Appleby, Joyce, “Without Resolution: The Jeffersonian Tension in American Politics,” A Restless Past: History and the American Public (Lantham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005), pp. 1939.Google Scholar

98 In Texas, colonists and land speculators—mostly, but not exclusively, American—defended their “absolute and total right to sell, dispose or alienate” their property, while the Mexican government claimed its right to regulate ownership of land through federal colonization laws. See Soto, Miguel, “Texas en la mira. Política y negocios al iniciarse la gestión de Anthony Butler,” Política, ed. Argüello, Suárez and Basante, Terrazas, pp. 3435.Google Scholar As Andrés Reséndez has shown, Mexican nationals were just as likely as colonists from the United States to embrace this vision of citizenship which linked land to the “ideals of liberalism and home rule.” Jaime, E. Rodríguez, O., “Masonic Connections, Pecuniary Interests and Institutional Development Along Mexico’s Far North,” The Divine Charter: Constitutionalism and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 125.Google Scholar

99 Renan, , Becoming National, pp. 5253.Google Scholar

100 For the political nature of nationalist mythology, see Smith, Rogers M., Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar