Are Slaves “Immigrants” or “Migrants”?

This question has been controversial for students in my immigration and employment class. I get it: the words we use in connection to human migration are fraught with unclear meaning— for example, “illegal” versus “undocumented” or “unlawful” alien.

In my class materials, I have referred to African slaves as “immigrants.” My students, almost unanimously, have disagreed.

They make the valid point that people who are captured, uprooted from their homes, forced on ships in shackles, and sold at auction as slaves in the colonies cannot be called “immigrants.” Their views have been so emphatic that I have adopted their use of “migrants.”

Where was I coming from in calling slaves “immigrants”? Most people who came to America in the 1600s and 1700s were indentured servants. They were usually white English people who gave up their freedom for seven years to pay for passage and an apprenticeship in America. They are called immigrants— but they were not free people (nor were they slaves, to the point made by my students).

Here is a perspective from Prof. Aaron Fogelman (1998). He says that slaves should be called “immigrants.”

He make a different point from mine: By excluding slaves from the “immigrant” category, we completely overlook the experiences and cultural contributions made by slaves in early America. We simply delete them from our inquiry of American immigration.

What do you think? Migrant, immigrant, or another term? I welcome your view (email me at mhl@illinois.edu). 

Meanwhile, consider what Prof. Fogelman thought:

“The large volume of eighteenth-century migrations to the thirteen colonies has been overlooked by historians who have neglected to consider the African slaves. In the 1970s Peter H. Wood and C. Vann Woodward lamented the exclusion of African slaves from the ranks of “immigrants.”  They attributed it to racism and the tendency of immigration historians to begin their studies in the nineteenth century, as African immigration into the United States was ending. Too often historians have used the European model to explain immigration and the immigrant story in American history-whatever does not fit that model may not be understood as immigration.

In my view, however, immigrants were people who came from somewhere else to the mainland colonies or the United States (as opposed to having been born there). The immigrant story critical to the demographic, economic, and cultural development of the United States is an ongoing, complex, and changing tale that enlists a cast of characters from nearly all parts of the globe. In the past generation that view has become more accepted, as historians have given increasing attention to slaves in the colonial period as forced African immigrants. But a comprehensive study of immigration into British North America and the United States that includes Africans and takes into account their varied ethnic backgrounds is still lacking, even though the number of slaves imported may have equaled or surpassed that of European immigrants in the eighteenth century.”