Reviews of Books

Two figures are inescapable in the early history of immigration to North America: Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, the French immigrant to colonial America who celebrated the American as "a new man," and Emma Lazarus, the nineteenth-century New York City poet whose welcome to "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" appears at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Marilyn Baseler's "Asylum for Mankind" portrays them as co-conspirators of sorts, combining to promote a misleading image of the United States as an asylum of economic opportunity and political and religious liberty. As Baseler sees it, the reality was far more ambiguous. The opportunities enjoyed by immigrants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were limited and due mainly to political expediency and accident. Crèvecoeur and Lazarus, as well as the eighteenth-century press, took this modest achievement and enveloped it "in a cloud of propaganda and rhetoric" (p. 241).	1
"Asylum for Mankind" poses two questions. How did the United States come to be identified as a benevolent asylum? How fully did newcomers to colonial, Revolutionary, and early national America enjoy opportunity and experience liberty? To these questions Baseler brings an important perspective. Whereas most studies of colonial immigration focus on specific geographical areas and groups, Baseler takes a panoramic view of migration in the Atlantic world. Her analysis is distinctive for its dual concern with public policy and social history. Based on naturalization records, newspapers and periodicals, and laws and statutes throughout the North American colonies, "Asylum for Mankind" surveys the immigration policies formulated by a succession of English, Continental European, and North American lawmakers during two centuries. In method and scope, Baseler's work takes an aggregate approach, subsuming differences among groups and colonies in a far-ranging synthesis.	2
Baseler sets immigration to America firmly in the context of mercantilism, the competitive expansion of European nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the development of republican ideals. In her telling, immigration policies fall into two periods: a mercantilist phase in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and a republican regime in the post-Revolutionary era. During the earlier period, asylum was defined primarily in terms of opportunity—economic, political, religious freedom—and as such reflected mercantilist aims. By contrast, after the Revolution, asylum meant liberty, expressing a republican vision of America's place in the world.	. . .