Selling America: Immigration Promotion and the Settlement of the American Continent, 1607–1914

Between 1820 and 1920, more than 33 million Europeans immigrated to the United States seeking the "American Dream." They came in response to an image of America as a land of opportunity and upward mobility sold to them by state governments, railroads, religious and philanthropic groups, and other boosters. But as historian Christina A. Ziegler-McPherson shows in Selling America: Immigration Promotion and the Settlement of the American Continent, 1607–1914, the desire to make and keep America a "white man's country" meant that only Northern Europeans would be recruited as settlers and future citizens while Africans, Asians, and other non-whites would be either grudgingly tolerated as slaves or guest workers, or excluded entirely.

The work reframes immigration policy as an extension of American labor policy and connects the removal of American Indians from their lands to the settlement of European immigrants across the North American continent. The author contends that Western and Midwestern states with large American Indian, Asian and/or Mexican populations developed aggressive policies to promote immigration from Europe to help displace those peoples, while Southern states sought to reduce their dependency upon black labor by doing the same. Chapters highlight the promotional policies and migration demographics for each region of the United States.