ABOUT ME
Cody Nager is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His scholarship focuses on how interactions between the diverse people of America and the broader Atlantic world shaped structures of racial inequality, economic development, political rights and national identity in the United States. He currently is a Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and previously served as a Graduate Teaching Fellow at City College of New York and a Writing Fellow at the CUNY School of Law.
His dissertation, Determined to be American: Regulating Immigration and Citizenship in the Early American Republic, 1783–1815 argues that migration was the ideological and political wedge which divided the populace of the early Republic into parties that battled over America’s racial, socioeconomic and ideological composition. The newly independent nation’s precarious international position led to fierce debates about migration that proved inextricably tied to differing visions for the course of national economic development, the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world, and the connection between the coerced migration of enslaved Africans and the voluntary migration of free individuals. Americans thought selecting the “right” immigrants would bring economic success while picking the “wrong” ones would take the jobs of hardworking Americans, occupy fertile western lands with unproductive population, and expand the reprehensible system of slavery. While other scholars have emphasized disagreement over Alexander Hamilton’s financial plan or concerns over the transfer of power from slaveholding southern planters to a northeastern merchant class as the impetus for partisanship, his dissertation places the regulation of migration as the driving force. Transnational influences on migration have been widely studied by scholars of the twentieth century, but his research demonstrates how the high-stakes debates of the early Republic shaped clashes over the regulation of migration that continue to this day.
His next project investigates how the uneven enforcement of U.S. migration and naturalization policy provided racial minorities with the opportunity to access citizenship rights from which they were legally excluded. When Congress passed the nation’s first naturalization act in 1790, they restricted the process to “free white men.” Despite this, racial minorities still engaged with the process because the act left local courts to determine what constituted whiteness. Later, the contested whiteness of the 1840s Irish immigrants drove renewed discontent with racial minority naturalization. After the Second World War, growing migration from Africa, Asia and South America again complicated the enforcement boundaries of race and naturalization. By investigating the relationship between diverse migrants and local enforcement of policy, his project will resituate US migration in the racial and ethnic context of a broader Atlantic world and recontextualize current debates over race and migration policy.