A. Slavery as Immigration

Immigration has been defined as the moving across national frontiers, as opposed to moving within borders. Immigration has also been defined as a history of alienation and its consequences — “broken homes, interruptions of a familiar life, separation from known surroundings, the becoming a foreigner and ceasing to belong.” These definitions have traditionally been applied to entrants from Europe and later, Asia. Blacks were often either explicitly or implicitly excluded from definitions of immigration, dismissed as being merely “imported slaves” whose movement lacked the complexity of later immigration to the Americas, or deemed unwilling victims of conquerors. Notwithstanding these pronouncements, black arrivals to the Americas had all the attributes of immigrants. In fact, they created the immigrant paradigm: arrivals with alien languages, cultures and customs, who enter at the bottom-most social and economic levels and labor tirelessly.

I have wondered whether a first generation “chattel slave” was also, in some sense, an immigrant? That is, might the involuntarily enslaved African, forcibly brought to the United States for condemnation to a life in chattel slavery, be more accurately considered a certain type of immigrant? And, if so, what are the implications of those revelations for understanding the origins and operations of U.S. immigration law? If transatlantic slavery was, in part, the earliest system for immigration in the United States, what legacies of that system should scholars of immigration law recognize, and what are the implications of that history for immigration law and policy today? That is to say, from the standpoint of immigration law, might the chattel slavery system be more accurately considered a compound institution system comprised of not only labor and sociocultural structures, but also a state-sponsored, pernicious system of immigration?

Slavery grew in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a more economical alternative to an earlier class of immigrant labor: white indentured servants imported from Britain. Arguably, slavery presents the best example of a hierarchical framework for immigrant rights: slaves were (involuntary) immigrants whose movement was strictly regulated according to their origin (African or domestic), legal status (slave, freedman, free born black), and each state’s laws on the subject.

Black Americans are not usually mentioned in a discussion about immigrants. However, it must be remembered that African slaves were an immigrant population that was forcefully brought to our shores and not allowed to assimilate into mainstream society.