For nearly 150 years, the Supreme Court has denounced jurisdictional ambiguities in immigration policy, regularly striking down state laws as unconstitutional intrusions on the federal government’s “broad, undoubted power.” Most scholarship on the historical evolution of US immigration policy has followed suit, rendering invisible the role of state governments and federalism in immigration policy during the crucial, transformative decades of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. This article redresses these silences by spotlighting the aggressive state policy activism and critical intergovernmental negotiations over how to control immigration and noncitizens from the 1870s to the 1920s. Focusing on two older, eastern seaboard states—Maryland and Virginia—and two newer, southwestern states—Arizona and New Mexico—these historical case studies show how subnational immigration initiatives were fueled by distinctive local and regional labor need and racial landscapes. This article also identifies and illuminates distinct forms of autonomous, interdependent, insistent, and validated activism by states in immigration federalism.

Labor Secretary Frances Perkins championed liberal immigration policies between 1933 and 1940. Some efforts were successful, but most were not due to political, economic, and social constraints on immigration policy making, especially in Congress. Yet, she reorganized the enforcement functions of her department when she created the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Narratives abound about the period, though few delve into this reorganization. In this article, I share an analytical framework that I developed, “policy innovation through bureaucratic reorganization,” to explain how Perkins temporarily eased the debarments, as well as deportations, of newcomers by adjusting agency resources, including staffing, budget, and infrastructure. I describe how she responded to pressures from immigration restrictionists by tightening these functions. My narrative adds to the literature on immigration policy history, which has not fully appreciated the role of bureaucratic reorganization. This research bolsters the perspective in political control theory that bureaucratic structure merits as much attention as does legislation as a tool for control.

The year 1975 marked a watershed year for Spanish-surnamed people in the United States and their relationship with the federal government. In that year Congress extended the Voting Rights Act to include a “language minority” category, requiring federal election officials to translate election materials under certain conditions. By validating language rights for language minorities, Congress expanded federal voting protections far beyond African Americans. Advocates for Spanish speakers took up the cause before Congress, which created a new federally protected category based on the long history of discrimination in education and society they collected in testimonies. These language protections catered largely to Spanish speakers, though the category also included Alaska Natives, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. The process of gaining a separate language minority status is explored in this article, which explains how Congress chose to create a law that included Spanish speakers by name.

In 1929, Congress passed a law capping the US House of Representatives at 435 seats, delegating the power to reapportion to the Executive Branch, and empowering state legislatures to redistrict with few federal limitations. The 1929 law was a compromise after nearly ten years of squabbling over how to apportion pursuant to the 1920 Census. In this article, we consider the apportionment debates of the 1920s both to better understand the politics of the era and to draw lessons that might apply to a potential reapportionment debate today. Throughout the decade, partisanship and political self-interest structured members’ votes on reapportionment. The legislation that eventually passed resulted from a compromise that greatly empowered state legislatures to redistrict freely by removing federal requirements that had been in effect since the 1870s, effectively shifting the battle over congressional representation from one over reapportionment in Congress to one over redistricting in the states.

The political transformation that culminated in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act fueled scholarly interest in welfare history. As politicians dismantled welfare, scholars discovered long histories of raced and gendered social control, intertwined public and private interests, and fixations on work and personal responsibility. They also recovered more promising possibilities of cash assistance. This article examines foundational welfare histories published between 1971 and 2018. I suggest that this somewhat isolated body of work has shed bright light on the history of neoliberalism from the perspective of people never fully included into social citizenship. It exposes how neoliberalism is and is not different from mid-century liberalism and recovers a long history of resistance. In an era when few talk about cash assistance, welfare historiography is vital for restoring fading memory of its redistributive potential.