Book Review

Canada and the United States

Marianne S. Wokeck. Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1999. Pp. xxx, 319. Cloth $60.00, paper $21.50.

American revolutionaries did not so much invent the idea that the new nation would serve as an asylum of liberty for oppressed peoples of the world as ratify a notion that was as old as the colonies themselves. These two studies, using different approaches, establish the primacy of the colonial period in laying the foundation for America's subsequent experience with immigration. At the same time, they demonstrate that America's ambivalence about its role as refuge has an equally long history.	1
Marilyn C. Baseler makes this ambivalence the central theme of her book. In dense and often fascinating detail, she locates the origin of the idea of America as asylum in seventeenth-century England. The island nation had gained a reputation as a refuge for persecuted continental Protestants, but worries over an influx of indigent immigrants encouraged officials to shift the responsibility to the colonies. Mercantilist thinkers strongly advocated such a policy, arguing that England only weakened itself when it allowed its own subjects to move to America. By redirecting the flow of continental Protestants to the colonies, England peopled its possessions while maintaining both its domestic population and its reputation as an asylum.	2
Over the next century and a half, the colonists—all of whom, of course, were immigrants or the descendants of immigrants—debated the role of their land as an asylum in terms that would become all too familiar to later generations of Americans. Free white Protestant Europeans (especially English ones) were more than welcome to enjoy the blessings of economic opportunity and mild government, while others—the poor, the Catholics—need not apply. Transported British convicts presented a dilemma: colonists could use the labor, but they resented England's identification of America as a convenient dumping ground for its own undesirables. Involuntary African immigrants sparked even greater controversy. Although their race defined Africans as "undesirable," only a handful of colonists could imagine dispensing with slavery. The irony, Baseler notes, is that fears of a rising slave population led to subsidies for white immigrants to maintain racial balance; thus the chances for advancement of the latter group depended on the subjugation of the former.	3
Immigration all but ceased during the Revolutionary War, but the debate resumed in the postwar period as a crucial part of the process of national self-definition. When British commentators denigrated the whole idea of an American refuge for the oppressed by citing the treatment of Loyalists, the former colonists protested that voluntary allegiance to republican ideals stood at the heart of American citizenship (which necessarily excluded Loyalists) and pointed to the renewed flow of immigrants—even from Britain—as evidence that America's reputation as an asylum remained intact. Yet such defenses of America failed to represent the full spectrum of its citizens' opinions. During the 1780s, Americans argued not only about the proper treatment of Loyalists but also about which immigrants were desirable and which were not. If citizenship was, in the end, easier to obtain in America than in any Western European country, unnaturalized immigrants initially confronted a welter of requirements and restrictions depending on where they settled.	. . .