America’s Legacy on Immigration Is One of Exclusion

 
 
One of the best aspects of studying history is being able to channel its power to crush myths and received wisdom alike. Among the many sobering revelations in recent years for me has been the absurd dysmorphia that exists between America’s self-styled status as an immigrant-friendly nation — a safe haven for the downtrodden for which the Statue of Liberty stands as an enduring symbol — and what our history, and indeed our present, actually shows. I’ve come to accept that, as a nation, we simply don’t embody the values so poignantly captured by Emma Lazarus. What I didn’t fully realize is the degree to which we never have, and how in fact we actively worked against them in favor of policies coded along racial lines. If her immortalized words represent something akin to a national credo, as generations of Americans have assumed, how come we never acted the part?

Caitlin Dickerson’s first story for The Atlantic looks at the history of immigration in the US. In speaking with dozens of scholars on the subject, she finds that our internal strife over whether to let in foreigners has existed from the country’s inception. As Caitlin demonstrates, and as our history relates with startling clarity, we’ve never been a nation that welcomed immigrants — excepting those of Northern and Western European descent. Our legacy is one in which immigrants of color were routinely and systematically deprioritized in terms of eligibility, and explicitly targeted for deportation and border enforcement.

A key point Caitlin makes is that our “nation of immigrants” tagline is only true in the most literal and superficial sense. What’s often left out of the narrative is how racialized our policy toward immigrants has always been. Examples abound of limiting immigration in a naked attempt to preserve America’s ‘whiteness’. From the 19th century onward, our government’s leaders pursued this immigration agenda with alacrity and made no attempt to conceal its singular purpose. Our history on immigration policy can thus be more accurately thought of as a history of racial exclusion, wherein only predefined ethnic groups were permitted access to the American dream.

I didn’t learn basically any of what’s covered in this article in grade school. And in talking with teacher friends of mine, that’s because it’s generally not covered in public school curricula, at least not in detailed fashion. I suspect it’s one reason why many of America’s founding myths are so pervasive: we haven’t allowed our history to speak for itself and properly debunk them. Even Trump’s maximally inhumane immigration policies were held up by opposing factions as a reason to return to a bygone era more in tune with the ideals and principles on which the country was supposedly founded. What Caitlin argues, rather, is that if we are to forge a better path for the future, we shouldn’t be looking to our own past for guidance, but should instead be using that history to improve upon the ideals we never bothered living up to in the first place.

Excerpts from America Never Wanted the Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses (emphasis mine):
 

“This forgetting has allowed the racism woven into America’s immigration policies to stay submerged beneath the more idealistic vision of the country as “a nation of immigrants.” That vision has a basis in truth: We are a multiethnic, multiracial nation where millions of people have found safety, economic opportunity, and freedoms they may not have otherwise had. Yet racial stereotypes, rooted in eugenics, that portray people with dark skin and foreign passports as being inclined toward crime, poverty, and disease have been part of our immigration policies for so long that we mostly fail to see them. “It’s in our DNA,” Romo says. “It’s ingrained in the culture and in the laws that are produced by that culture.”

[…]

“President Joe Biden’s immigration plan would make citizenship available to millions of unauthorized immigrants. Democratic members of Congress rallying behind it have said it would establish a more inherently American system, arguing implicitly that the Trump administration’s often overtly stated preference for white immigrants, or no immigrants at all, was an aberration from the past. “To fix our broken immigration system, we must pass reforms that reflect America’s values,” Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a co-sponsor of the proposed legislation, said in a statement introducing the bill. “For too long, our immigration system has failed to live up to the ideals and principles our nation was founded on,” said Senator Alex Padilla of California, another co-sponsor. But Donald Trump’s immigration agenda was executed without a single change to laws already passed by Congress, and his rhetoric and policies were consistent with most of American history. “The Trump era magnified the problem, but the template was there,” Rose Cuison-Villazor, a scholar of immigration law at Rutgers University, told me.”

[…]

“As the country moves forward from the past four years of harsh immigration policies, it must reckon with a history that stretches back much further, and that conflicts with one of the most frequently repeated American myths. “This idea that somehow immigration was based on the principles stated on the Statue of Liberty? That never happened,” Romo said. “There has never been a color-blind immigration system. It’s always been about exclusion.”

[…]

“When the Pilgrims crossed the ocean to settle in the New World, they brought with them ideas that would evolve into “manifest destiny,” which held that the United States was a land that had been bestowed by God on Anglo-Saxon white people. In 1790, the first American Congress made citizenship available only to any “free white person” who had been in the country for at least two years. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act blocked Chinese immigrants—and in 1917, it was expanded to block most Asians living between Afghanistan and the Pacific. These laws were upheld numerous times by federal courts, including in a seminal Supreme Court case from 1922, in which the government prevailed by arguing that citizenship should be granted as the Founders intended: “only to those whom they knew and regarded as worthy to share it with them, men of their own type, white men.”

[…]

“To call America a nation of immigrants is not wrong, either as a factual statement or an evocation of American myth. But that fact coexists with this one: Over the past century, the United States has deported more immigrants than it has allowed in. Since 1882, it has deported more than 57 million people, most of them Latino, according to Adam Goodman, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. No other country has carried out this many deportations. This “challenges that simplistic notion of a long tradition where the United States has welcomed immigrants,” Goodman told me.”

[…]

“There are legitimate debates to be had about how to balance economic, geopolitical, and humanitarian concerns in formulating immigration policy. But too often, such concerns have been invoked as euphemisms to disguise arguments that are really about race.”

[…]

“In moving toward the more inclusive system that some elected officials now say they want, the country would be not returning to traditional American values, but establishing new ones.”