Undermining the Gates: Immigration Law Enforcement and Corruption at the United States Borders in the Early Twentieth Century

Description

Between 1875 and 1924, the US Congress enacted major immigration laws designed to exclude or limit a growing list of so-called “undesirables” from immigrating to and remaining in the United States. Efforts to restrict migration met with determined resistance from aspiring migrants and facilitating immigration outside the law became a highly lucrative transnational business during the era of exclusion. This talk examined how some immigration officials helped to fuel and profited from the business of illegal immigration and how the Bureau of Immigration responded internally and publicly when confronted with evidence that its own officers were undermining the very laws that they had sworn to enforce.  

Speaker Bio:  Lauren Catterson is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. She earned a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours in History at the University of Western Australia, and Master of Arts in History at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral dissertation research focuses on misconduct and corruption complaints filed against US immigration service personnel in the early twentieth century, examining the extent to which allegations of official wrongdoing jeopardised the reputation and credibility of the nascent US immigration bureaucracy and helped to define and redefine the limits on individual officers’ discretionary authority. She holds a Jackman Junior Fellowship from the Jackman Humanities Institute, and is one of the winners of this year’s CSUS Graduate Research grants.