In the era of popular sovereignty, preserving the state has meant protecting the boundaries separating populations. Arguments offered in immigration debates in the United States from 1890 to 1990 demonstrate whether, and the extent to which, Americans believed immigrants to threaten sovereignty. Sovereignty was in fact invoked explicitly in every era of major policy change. Public arguments also focused attention on the nature of the threat that immigrants presented, and hence on the essence of American citizenship. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, external threats were seen in racial terms, and race defined the difference between American citizens and others. By 1952, ideology overlaid, and partially deplaced, race as Americans' central identifying characteristic. Americans were no longer primarily white, but primarily democratic and capitalist. From the mid-1960s through 1990, liberal and human rights criteria were emphasized as American credibility in the cold war was seen to be at stake, though by the mid-1980s, economic competition had overtaken ideological concerns. When the central threat to the U.S. was seen in economic terms, economic values infused immigration preferences. Within this process, the demands of public-interest arguments rather than material interests best explain the policy outcome. For any position to succeed, it had to justify itself in terms of ideas about threat, equity, and the meaning of history. The result in each period were policies that established a new view of what ought to be inside and outside the borders dividing citizen from noncitizen. Alterative explanations of policy change such as those focusing on partisanship, unemployment, public opinion, or immigrant interest groups prove unsatisfactory. Structural theories of world politics can only offer partial clarification since countries have freed trade while they have extended regulatory control over admission to citizenship. If legislators and others understand themselves to be creating or maintaining sovereignty by restricting immigration, then sovereignty should be seen as a policy choice rather than as a structurally determined outcome.Ph.D.Political ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104388/1/9513480.pdfDescription of 9513480.pdf : Restricted to UM users only
