The words at the base of the Statue of Liberty read, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” This Emma Lazarus verse is regularly regarded as the embodiment of U.S. generosity toward migrants and refugees. Schoolchildren learn it.
Noble rhetoric notwithstanding, the “huddled masses” have rarely been welcomed into the United States.
In 1790, the country’s first naturalization law proclaimed that only “free white persons” could become U.S. citizens. This law was accompanied by the policy of “Indian removal,” carried out with zeal by Andrew Jackson, a slave trader and land speculator who boasted in 1830 that the “savages” who had “occupied the countries now constituting the Eastern States were annihilated or have melted away to make room for the whites.” A century later, the Attorney General of California, Ulysses Webb, argued against Filipino immigration by saying that “this Government as founded…was then a Government of and for the white race.” He continued, without the slightest hint of irony, “We thank God that only we, the white people, found it first and we want to be protected in our enjoyment of it.”
Between the mid-1800s and World War I, some 25 million European immigrants had entered the United States. But immigration laws during that time were written to exclude most nonwhites. While there were no legal barriers to most European immigrants who wanted to enter, that wasn’t the case for some other groups. Chinese workers were completely barred from entering in 1882, the year of the first federal ban on immigration based on nationality. A 1917 law prohibited all Asian immigration, declaring an “Asiatic barred zone” from Afghanistan to Japan. Most Asians were formally prohibited from becoming citizens until World War II, and even then, only a very small quota would be allowed to enter.
The immigrants who were allowed to enter usually suffered intense discrimination. Groups like the Irish and Italians were subject to constant discrimination by employers, landlords, and public officials. The native-born often accused them of stealing jobs, using public resources, and committing violent crimes. One way these European immigrants gained acceptance was by embracing racism toward black people and other groups of non-European origins.
Soon after World War I, the U.S. Congress passed new laws that severely restricted immigration, targeting non-European immigrants as well as people from southern and eastern Europe.
The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, passed by overwhelming majorities in Congress, introduced a new quota system with differing quotas for each country. Since the quotas were proportional to how many people from each country already lived in the United States, they heavily favored Western European countries over others.
The 1924 reform also created the Border Patrol, which soon began carrying out deportations. During the Great Depression the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations deported between 1 and 2 million people of Mexican descent, both citizens and non-citizens.
During World War II, as the U.S. government was fighting the Nazis in Europe, it was simultaneously prohibiting most of the Nazis’ victims from obtaining asylum in the United States. The family of Anne Frank was repeatedly denied U.S. visas. The U.S. hadn’t declared war against racism and genocide, but against the expansionist ambitions of competing imperial powers. The stated justifications for excluding Jews and other Nazi victims were that they might be German spies or communist subversives who would undermine U.S. capitalism. Refugees were labeled a threat to “national security”
The bitter irony is that U.S. policy creates many of the refugees in the first place. In Mexico and Central America, U.S.-funded militarization and support for business-friendly governments has exacerbated violence, poverty, and social dissolution, contributing to the flow of people northward. In the 1980s, the United States funded Central American military regimes that slaughtered some 200,000 people. Fewer than 3 percent of Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum requests were granted between 1984 and 1990.
In the case of Mexico, the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the larger set of pro-business policy reforms that started in the 1980s – cuts to social spending, deregulation, privatization, and so on – led to further impoverishment. Mexican workers and small farmers have suffered even more than the U.S. working class. By 2007 there had been a net loss of 1.9 million agricultural jobs, mostly due to the flooding of the Mexican market with cheap (and government-subsidized) agricultural products from the United States. The Mexican poverty rate today (55.1 percent) is even higher than it was in 1994. Quite naturally, some of these poor people have tried to migrate north in search of survival. Bill Clinton foresaw this consequence and announced a major increase in border militarization known as Operation Gatekeeper. By cracking down on attempted border-crossings at cities like San Diego, Operation Gatekeeper drove more migrants to cross the border through the desert. The result was a major spike in the number of people who die – hundreds each year – trying to cross into the United States.
In 1965 an immigration reform created uniform quotas for various countries. But this new quota system was still highly restrictive, assigning quotas of just 20,000 to most countries, regardless of the size of their populations. The vast majority of foreign-born people would still have no chance of ever entering the United States legally, unless they 1) had an immediate family member who was a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident, 2) had connections with an employer who would “sponsor” them, or 3) could convince unsympathetic judges and immigration officials that they faced an extreme threat of violence in their home countries. This basic legal framework remains in place today.
A major goal of U.S. immigration policy is to ensure high profits for U.S. businesses, particularly large employers in sectors like agriculture, retail, hospitality, healthcare, and high-tech. The government thus makes certain exceptions to its restrictive policies for immigrants who will contribute to that goal. Mexican workers were allowed entry under the Bracero program, but not allowed to engage in collective bargaining. U.S. employers were allowed to set the braceros’ wages, and used the program as a way to drive down wages for all workers, exploiting the racism of most U.S. labor unions. Even as it admitted bracero workers, the U.S. government made sure Mexicans knew they had no rights that it was bound to respect. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were deported under the 1954 “Operation Wetback,” as the head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service warned that “hordes of aliens” were carrying out “an actual invasion of the United States” from Mexico.
There is no contradiction between the government admitting some immigrants as it also carries out mass deportations. Immigration laws have always sought to preserve an underclass of workers who have few rights, who live in terror of deportation, who can be exploited for the benefit of capitalists and then disposed of. Chinese workers were allowed to come toil on the railroads in the mid-1800s – for miserable pay and in dangerous conditions – but barred from entering soon thereafter.
Obama, deported more immigrants than any other president, and expanded a deportation apparatus that Trump is now gleefully utilizing.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Exclusions and hierarchies are not predetermined by human nature. A different system – one that respects the rights and dignity of all people, and allows us all to share in the fruits of technological progress – is entirely within our reach as a species. Rejecting the birthright lottery requires, at a minimum, that we recognize migration as an inalienable human right – not something that should be restricted to some arbitrarily defined group of “deserving” immigrants.
We don’t need to wait for some distant future to start practicing cooperation and solidarity. Moreover, cooperation can win real material gains. Research by economist Michael Reich shows that when diverse groups of workers collaborate with each other against the bosses, the entire working class benefits in the form of higher wages and better working conditions. Stronger interracial cooperation correlates with higher wages across the board, including for U.S.-born white workers. Conversely, “racial inequality benefits capitalists and hurts white workers, by weakening workers’ solidarity and bargaining strength.”
Uniting immigrants and the native-born is an urgent imperative.
An adapted and abridged article by Kevin Young, teacher of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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