The Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies presents,
Book Event: “Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants”
New York: Oxford University Press (24 March 2026)
Event Details:
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
12:00-2:00pm
1302 International Affairs
Advance Registration Required
with Anna O. Law, author; Associate Professor, Herbert Kurz ‘41 Chair in Constitutional Law and Civil Liberties, CUNY Brooklyn
Moderated by Elizabeth Saunders, Director, Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies
With comments by Turkuler Isiksel, Associate Professor of Political Science, Columbia University
Author Bio:
Anna O. Law holds the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights in the Department of Political Science at CUNY Brooklyn College. She completed her Ph.D. in Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Her publications appear in both social science and law journals and investigate the interaction between law, legal institutions and politics. Her first book, The Immigration Battle in American Courts (Cambridge University Press 2010), examind the role of the federal judiciary in U.S. immigration policy, and the institutional evolution of the Supreme Court and U.S. Courts of Appeals. Law is a former program analyst at the bipartisan, blue-ribbon United States Commission on Immigration Reform. She has shared her expertise with the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Department of Homeland Security and National Science Foundation. In 2007, she appeared as a recurring narrator with other academic experts and two Supreme Court justices in the PBS award winning documentary. Her current projects include a second book on immigration federalism and slavery, and National Science Foundation funded research on gender & asylum.
About the Book
Since the late nineteenth century, the US federal government has enjoyed exclusive authority to decide whether someone has the ability to enter and stay in US territory. But freedom of movement was not guaranteed in the British colonies or early US. By contrast, voluntary migrants were met with strict laws and policies created by colonies and states, which denied free mobility and settlement in their territories to unwanted populations.
Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship presents a story of constitutional development that traces the confluence of the logics of slavery and settler colonialism in early legal rulings and public policy about migration and citizenship. The book examines the division of labor between the national and state governments that endured for over a century, reasons why that arrangement changed in the late nineteenth century, and what the transformation meant for people subject to those regimes of control. Drawing into one study the migration policy histories of groups of people that are usually studied separately, and combining the methodologies of political science, history, and law, Anna O. Law reveals the unmistakable effects of slavery and Native American dispossession in modern US immigration policy.
