George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Michael Kaelin is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. His dissertation, “Selected Lives: Immigrant Community and the Origins of Federal Immigration Policy in New York, 1847-1882,” examines German and Irish American participation in New York State’s Board of Commissioners of Emigration, the body that regulated immigration into New York in the mid-nineteenth century. Arguing that foreign-born actors centrally shaped the Board’s policies and procedures, it reveals that this system reflected German and Irish American conceptions of “worthiness” and proper behavior among new immigrants. Their ideologies and practices were embedded in the first federal system in 1882, for which the New York apparatus served as the primary model. His work has been supported by the German Historical Institute, the German Society of Pennsylvania, and the Peter Paul Miller Educational Travel Fund.