Mormon, Muslim, and Sikh Migration to the West: Empire and Religion in Federal Immigration Law

In 1891, the federal government excluded polygamous migrants from entering the United States. This clause, originally designed to stop Mormon migration to the West, had a strange career that filtered diverse religious migrants at American borders in the early twentieth century. Imperial expansion across the Pacific elided racial and religious undesirability in those who traveled to the American West. Inspectors brought these cultural assemblages with them when they asked migrants about their relationships with polygamy, and migrants navigated these encounters with various strategies of passing through the border. Drawing on numerous Boards of Special Inquiry, this article compares Mormon, Muslim, and Sikh migrant experiences with the polygamy question at the border and argues that, even though imperialists and immigration restrictionists policed the movement of insular and foreign people, religion facilitated imperial pathways for migrants to travel along to the American West. This article is part of a special issue of Pacific Historical Review, “Religion in the Nineteenth-Century American West.”