Making a New Kind of Migrant: Ethnicity, Gender, and the War Brides Act of 1945

Michael B Limmer, University of Missouri - Columbia

This paper explores the gendered and racial assumptions surrounding the construction of the War Brides Act and subsequent acts of family reunification. Utilizing sources from government records, House committee debates, Stars and Stripes newspaper, soldier letters, and oral histories, the paper seeks to understand this privileged immigration status and how the state valued and justified the immigration. The War Brides Act significantly separated the spouses from racial exclusion as their value to the state did not originate from their ethnicity as traditional laborers in the workforce as with previous waves of migration. Instead, the law obscured their ethnicity to force them into the narrative of the state's ethnically restrictive immigration system. Through the War Brides Act, their value to the state derived from their role as familial laborers, as wives and mothers of U.S. soldiers.

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 Presented in Session 237. Migration, Regulation, Exclusion, and Control at and within Borders