[On February
5, 1917 Congress passed the influential and exclusionary Immigration
Act of 1917. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that Act and other stages
across the history
of immigration laws, leading up to a weekend post on where our laws and
narratives stand in 2020.]
On two distinct
but ultimately interconnected public scholarly lessons for the present.
One of the more
consistent phrases deployed in response to the anti-immigrant bigotry and xenophobia
at the heart of Donald Trump’s
2016 campaign and then his presidency
(and, frustratingly but clearly, not at
all limited to him and his administration in our
current moment) has been that America is “a land of immigrants.” The
sometimes unstated, sometimes overt argument being that these attitudes and
policies run counter to fundamental American histories and values. But of
course, as both my latest book We
the People and Erika Lee’s wonderful new book America
for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States remind us,
anti-immigrant, exclusionary sentiments are as foundational to the US as
immigration has been. Moreover, and perhaps even more saliently, what I hope
this week’s blog series has highlighted is that much of the time American immigration
laws themselves—from their 19th century creation and early 20th
century development to their late 20th century shifts and evolution—have
at the very least reflected and extended those anti-immigrant narratives, if
they have not indeed been a primary societal location for them.
Seen through
that lens, many of the Trump administration’s extreme and xenophobic policies
and proposals sit squarely in the history and legacy of American immigration
laws. The Muslim
Ban, his first post-inauguration policy proposal, represents another ethnic
and national exclusion, much like the Asian exclusions that comprised the first
national immigration laws (although the fact that it targets a religion makes
it, I would argue, even more unconstitutional than those exclusions were
[although although the Supreme Court generally
sided with those exclusions]). Detaining
Hispanic immigrant families and children at the border echoes both the Angel
Island detentions during that Asian exclusion era and the long 20th
century history of targeting and deportations
of Mexican Americans. Even when his proposals seem to violate fundamental aspects
of our current immigration laws, such as his goal
of eliminating so-called “chain migration” (family reunification as a legal
priority), these histories remind us that even those now fundamental aspects
have always been conflicted and contingent (as I noted in Friday’s post, family
reunification was only added to our national immigration laws in 1965, and then
in relationship to other priorities such as economic status that Trump is now
seeking to amplify).
So one public
scholarly lesson of better remembering our immigration histories has to be that
Trump and our era are, sadly but clear, not nearly as much of an anomaly as we
inclusive folks would like to believe. But there’s another lesson, and it’s the
one I argued for in this
We’re History piece on birthright citizenship (itself a target
of Trump administration challenges): the histories of the battles for
inclusion, for immigrant and civil rights in opposition to these discriminations
and exclusions, both remind us of the need to and model the ways to carry that
battle forward in the 21st century. To me, that’s the definition of
critical patriotism: recognizing all the ways that the US has consistently
fallen short of our national ideals, but also remembering the figures and
communities that have fought to push us closer to those ideals, and committing to
honoring their legacy by carrying the fight forward. The history of immigration
and immigration laws offers one particularly clear and salient illustration of
all those layers, and better remembering its most exclusionary elements only
drives home the continued, desperate need for efforts to push us further toward
the inclusive ideal embodied in the “land of immigrants” narrative.
Valentine’s
series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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