Adam McKeown

Adam McKeown, Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, will complete a book analyzing the historical roots of the modern system of immigrant documentation, such as identity cards, visas, and passports. McKeown argues that these controls evolved and were developed in the process of regulating migration from Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He contends that the difference between Asian and European migration patterns are not the product of economic or cultural differences, as some scholars have suggested, but of bureaucratic restrictions on Asian migration.