Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600-2000, a book by Professor Kunal Parker, was published this month by Cambridge University Press. It is Parker’s second book. His first book Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1790-1900 focused on the historical relationships between law, politics, and history.
The book taps into the long history of immigration and citizenship going back to the seventeenth century, which tells us that "immigrants" were not only people from outside the country, but also how the United States has made all kinds of its own people foreigners, from Native Americans to free blacks to women. It also covers how the problem of undocumented immigrants emerged.
“In Making Foreigners, Kunal Parker shows how American law defined alienage and citizenship in ways that have confounded simple oppositions of insider and outsider,” wrote Mae Ngai, U.S. Legal and political historian at Columbia University. “Parker provides a powerful analysis of how various groups ‘native’ to American territory have been constructed as ‘foreigners’ in both law and society.Making Foreigners is a tour de force that makes us rethink how the very notion of being ‘foreign,’ has little to do with where one might stand in relations to territorial boundaries.”
Watch Professor Parker discuss his latest book:
Because of his groundbreaking studies on immigration, Parker, who is a Dean's Distinguished Scholar at Miami Law, is often called upon by the media to discuss issues of relevance to the current political cycle: the birthright citizenship issue; the question of immigration federalism on the undocumented immigration issue (should states have the authority to regulate the issue); and the general problem of deportation of immigrants, which has escalated since 1996. He was most recently quoted prominently in a piece in The Atlantic: “Birthright Citizenship Wasn’t Born in America.”
A native of India, Parker grew up in Bombay (now Mumbai) and came to the U.S. in 1986 to study at Dartmouth College. He transferred to Harvard University and earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1990. Parker went on to Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the Harvard Law Review and Harvard Human Rights Journal, before graduating cum laude in 1994. He also has a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University.
