Immigration is white supremacy
Banned Histories of Race in America
American immigration policy is about white supremacy. That’s not an interpretation or my opinion. It’s what they wrote. The first naturalization law in this country was the 1790 Naturalization Act and it reserved that right exclusively for “free white person(s)”. That’s where the commitment was made and after that, everything went along the most predictable and obvious path.
There’s the as-racist-as-it-sounds Alien Enemies Act of 1798. There’s the even-more-racist-than-it-sounds Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the 1888 Scott Act that expanded and strengthened the restrictions of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Supreme Court affirmed the Scott Act the following year, but even that wasn’t enough white supremacy. In 1892 Congress passed the Act to Prohibit the Coming of Chinese Persons into the United States and that was finally enough white supremacy for Congress.
Just kidding. Building yet again on Chinese exclusion laws, the 1917 Immigration Act created an “Asiatic barred zone” that included British India, much of Southeast Asia and most of the Middle East. For those troublesome not-yet-white Europeans, the act also included literacy tests, a Jim Crow classic use to restrict the Black vote.
The 1921 Emergency Quota Act set more limits on the “Asiatic” and the not-yet-white population by creating a ceiling on how many people from each country could be in the US. These quotas were set using the 1910 census when the population had been smaller, giving only the appearance of consideration. That strategy didn’t quite go as far as they wanted, so a few years later we get the 1924 National Origins Quota Act setting “Asiatic” and not-yet-white quotas even further into the past by aligning with the 1890 census.
Eventually World War II brings labor shortages and it was time for white supremacy to do a little regrouping. Along comes the 1942 Bracero Agreement allowing for Mexican nationals to work in the US as agricultural workers. The Chinese Exclusion Act gets repealed the same year. The Displaces Persons Act of 1948 allows the immigration of more than 200,000 victims of Nazi displacement. The not-yet-whites were becoming The New Whites.
Over the next few decades there’s a lot of accommodating The New Whites. An act would set an immigration quota, then break it. They’d redefine who and who wasn’t considered a refugee. It got so wild there for a second that Latinos almost became white. Really. Check out this short clip from the Republican Presidential Primary debate between George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Be warned, this level of compassion will seem AI generated.
Reagan’s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act had legalization programs that now sound like pure fantasy. One allowed undocumented immigrants who’d lived here for four years to legalize their status. The other allowed particular agricultural workers to apply for permanent resident status after working for only 90 days.
Then here comes Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, reinvigorating American institutions with as much white supremacy as they could handle—and then some! The crime bill gave the Attorney General the power to bypass deportation proceedings and dripped the blood in the water those 1990s politicians were craving. Soon came the bipartisan 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). Only a bipartisan effort would result in that name.
The IIRIRA made it more difficult to enter the country legally, more difficult to attain a legal status, easier to lose that status and far easier to be deported. What’s worse is that IIRIRA, as Patrisia Macías-Rojas puts it, “recast undocumented immigration as a crime and fused immigration enforcement with crime control.”
It’s basically the creation of the problems we see today. IIRIRA also drastically increased our unauthorized immigrant population. It used to be that people just came and went over the border, working, then going home. But IIRIRA’s giant boost to Border Patrol made reentry far more dangerous so, if you got in, you were likely to stay in. Throughout the decade between Reagan’s 1986 Act and 1996’s IIRIRA, the unauthorized population increased by 2 million. Over the next decade it would increase by 7 million.
The George W. Bush administration had the USA Patriot Act which brought on mass surveillance, countless detentions and senseless deportations. Obama deported more people than any other US President up to that point—more than all 20th century presidents combined—earning the nickname “Deporter-in-Chief”. Throughout his presidency, multiple mass graves of migrants were discovered in Texas, miles inland from the border.
Trump’s campaign promises of keeping Black and brown people out of the country were realized with the Muslim ban, border wall and brutal family separation policies. ICE agents tortured people into signing their own deportation orders.
Biden—who voted for IIRIRA while in the Senate—ran on “Not another foot” of Trump’s wall, and closing ICE detention centers. But since taking office, Biden has suspended 26 federal laws to keep building Trump’s wall, fought in court to keep ICE torture hidden and detention centers open and House Democrats are currently trying to stop the administration from opening new migrant prisons. Human rights and Immigration advocates mostly call Biden’s policies equal-to or worse-than Trump’s.
Wrongful deportation is a constant. Hate crimes against Latinos and Muslims are on the rise. Honestly, I’ve only really scratched the surface here, but I hope it’s been made obvious that deliberately creating a white supremacist system, criminalizing its victims and then manufacturing a national dependence on said system is a bad idea. Our leaders could stop this any time they want, but as they have left no options for Americans to vote their way out, it is probably going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.
https://immigrationhistory.org/item/1790-nationality-act/
https://immigrationhistory.org/item/scott-act/
https://immigrationhistory.org/item/geary-act/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/233150241800600101
I always find your essays painful to read... Not the writing, the writing is great! The content is brutal. I taught and read history for many years and I often know much of what you are saying already, but your frame and put it all together into powerful indictments of our myths and institutions. Keep up the great work. It is too bad that legislatures all across the country are limiting what can be taught in history classes. I'm sure I'd be fired by now if I were still at it!