Hidetaka Hirota

Hidetaka Hirota is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at Sophia University, where he teaches North American Studies and Migration Studies. He has previously served as a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University and taught in the Department of History at the City University of New York-City College.

Hirota is an expert in American immigration history, especially the history of American nativism and immigration policy. His award-winning first book, Expelling the Poor (Oxford University Press, 2017), examines the origins of immigration restriction in the United States, especially deportation policy, revealing how its roots lay in nativism against destitute Irish immigrants and more fundamentally economic ideology in nineteenth-century New York and Massachusetts. The book received prizes and accolades from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the American Society for Legal History, the New England American Studies Association, the American Conference for Irish Studies, and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Hirota frequently contributes editorials on American immigration policy and nativism to major newspapers, such as The Washington Post and The Irish Times, and has been interviewed on these topics by various venues, including C-SPAN, The Atlantic, and the Center for American Progress.