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Hidetaka Hirota
Associate Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley
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Hidetaka Hirota
Associate Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
AREAS OF TEACHING
PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
BIO
I am a social and legal historian of the United States specializing in immigration. My major areas of research are the nineteenth-century United States; American immigration law and policy; the U.S. and the World; and transnational history. I am particularly interested in the history of American nativism and immigration control. My published works have examined the origins and early developments of U.S. immigration policy from the antebellum period to the Progressive Era. I am the author of Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2017). I am currently an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. I received my Ph.D. in History from Boston College. Before joining UC Berkeley, I served as a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University and taught at the City University of New York-City College and Sophia University in Japan.
EXTENDED PROFILE
I am an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. I am a social and legal historian of the United States specializing in immigration. My major areas of research are the nineteenth-century United States; American immigration law and policy; the U.S. and the World; and transnational history. I am particularly interested in the history of American nativism and immigration control. My published works have examined the origins and early developments of U.S. immigration policy from the antebellum period to the Progressive Era. Adopting a social and legal history approach, my scholarship pays equal attention to the legal dimension of immigration control and the practical implementation of immigration laws on the ground.
I am the author of Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2017). It received the First Book Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Lois P. Rudnick Award from the New England American Studies Association, and the Donald Murphy Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies, as well as Special Commendation for the Peter J. Gomez Prize from the Massachusetts Historical Society. The publication of the book was supported by the American Society for Legal History Paul L. Murphy Award.
I received my Ph.D. in History from Boston College, where my dissertation won the university’s best humanities dissertation award. Before joining UC Berkeley, I served as a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University and taught at the City University of New York-City College and Sophia University in Japan.
As a historian, I deeply value public engagements. I have contributed editorials on immigration policy and nativism to major newspapers, such as The Washington Post and The Irish Times, and have been interviewed on these topics by various venues, including C-SPAN, The Atlantic, and the Center for American Progress.
RESEARCH
I am a social and legal historian of the United States specializing in immigration. My major areas of research are the nineteenth-century United States; American immigration law and policy; the U.S. and the World; and transnational history. I am particularly interested in the history of American nativism and immigration control. My published works have examined the origins and early developments of U.S. immigration policy from the antebellum period to the Progressive Era. Adopting a social and legal history approach, my scholarship pays equal attention to the legal dimension of immigration control and the practical implementation of immigration laws on the ground.
I am currently working on a few book projects. One is titled The American Dilemma: Foreign Contract Labor and the Making of U.S. Immigration Policy. The project examines a fundamental dilemma in American history – the tension between nativism against foreigners and demand for their labor. By locating the origins of this dilemma in the federal government’s attempts and failure to restrict the immigration of contract workers from Asia, Mexico, Canada, and Europe in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the book reveals how the debate over imported labor gave rise to a national immigration regime in the United States. In doing so, it illuminates the intersections of law, labor, capitalism, racial politics, and overseas expansion in long-nineteenth-century America, offering a new synthetic interpretation of the history of U.S. immigration policy. Another project explores the relationship between Japanese immigrants and U.S. immigration laws to 1924. Based on extensive research on Japanese-language sources at archives in Japan, as well as materials obtained at U.S. and Canadian archives, the project investigates the significance of Japanese immigrants for the development of U.S. immigration laws. As a long-term project, I am working on a synthetic history of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States from the American Revolution to the present.
My first book, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy(link is external) (Oxford University Press, 2017), fundamentally revises our understanding of the origins of immigration restriction in the United States, especially deportation policy. Historians have long assumed that immigration to the United States was free from regulation until the introduction of federal laws to restrict Chinese immigration in the late nineteenth century. But the influx of impoverished Irish immigrants over the first half of the nineteenth century led nativists in New York and Massachusetts to develop policies for deporting destitute foreigners to Europe and Canada. Expelling the Poor demonstrates how the policies in the Atlantic seaboard states, which were driven partly by ethnic prejudice against the Irish but more essentially by economic concerns about their poverty, laid the foundations for federal immigration laws.
PROJECTS AND EXHIBITIONS
Current Projects:
The American Dilemma: Foreign Contract Labor and the Making of U.S. Immigration Policy
Japanese Immigrants and U.S. Immigration Laws
Book
Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Articles
“Limits of Intolerance: Nativism and Immigration Control in Nineteenth-Century New York,” in Special Issue: Island Nations: Histories of Demographic Change in Majority Minority Societies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47, no. 16 (2021): 3771-3787.
“Exclusion on the Ground: Racism, Official Discretion, and the Quotidian Enforcement of General Immigration Law in the Pacific Northwest Borderland,” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (June 2017): 347-370.
“‘The Great Entrepot for Mendicants’: Foreign Poverty and Immigration Control in New York State to 1882,” Journal of American Ethnic History 33, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 5-32.
“The Moment of Transition: State Officials, the Federal Government, and the Formation of American Immigration Policy,” Journal of American History 99, no. 4 (March 2013): 1092-1108.
AWARDS
INTERVIEWS
Appeared in podcast The Case for Immigration and discussed the history of American immigration policy, October 27, 2019.
Appeared in podcast Uncommontary and discussed the history of American immigration policy, October 15, 2019.
Appeared in podcast Immigration Nerds and discussed the origins of the public charge clause in American immigration policy, August 29, 2019.
Appeared in podcast The Road to Now and discussed Expelling the Poor and the origins of American Immigration Policy, April 7, 2019.
Appeared in podcast New Books Network and discussed Expelling the Poor, January 23, 2019.
Interviewed by Mother Jones for an article, “An Old Anti-Irish Law Is at the Heart of Trump’s Plan to Reshape Legal Immigration,” August 29, 2018.
Appeared in a podcast run by the Center for American Progress and discussed current immigration policy, February 23, 2018.
Interviewed by TIME for an article, “25 Moments That Changed America,” June 30, 2017.
Appeared in C-SPAN: American History TV and discussed nineteenth-century Irish immigration, June 25, 2017.
Appeared in CUNY Radio and discussed Expelling the Poor and contemporary immigration politics, February 16, 2017.
Interviewed by The Atlantic for an article, “First, They Excluded the Irish: President Trump may block entry to foreigners who need public benefits—a proposal rooted in 19th century laws targeting a wave of impoverished immigrants,” February 2, 2017.
Interviewed by NBC NEWS for an article, “Digital Project Aims to Preserve Stories of Incarcerated Japanese Americans,” October 15, 2015.
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