Photo
by Gage Skidmore.
Written
by Guillermo Cantor
Media outlets
around the globe reported on President Trump’s disparaging comments regarding
nationals of certain countries. According to the Washington Post, during
a discussion with lawmakers in the White House regarding protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and
African countries on Thursday, the president asked “Why are we having all these
people from shithole countries come here?” He suggested instead that
the United States should bring more people from countries such as Norway.
At a very
minimum these comments are incredibly offensive. But the president’s remarks
are also the expression of a deeper conception of what our nation is or should
be; in other words, the values upon which our society should be organized.
Racism has
deep roots in U.S. immigration policies and laws. While we routinely hear and
uncritically accept the mantra that “the United States is a country of
immigrants,” that statement should be taken with a grain of salt. Yes,
immigration has played a significant role in the formation of the American
people.
Yet, a review
of the history of U.S. immigration policy reveals the existence of immigration
regimes by which individuals from certain countries were explicitly or
implicitly denied admission based on their nationality.
Arguably,
racism and nationality bias have never been as explicit in our immigration
system as they were between 1790 and 1952. During this period, according to
scholars David Cook Martin and David Scott Fitzgerald “legislators
restricted naturalization […] to particular racial and ethnic groups, with a
consistent preference for whites from northwestern Europe.”
During this
time, the country adopted highly restrictive and racially-biased laws including
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which halted Chinese immigration and banned
Chinese immigrants from becoming U.S. citizens, and the Immigration Act of
1924, which limited the number of immigrants authorized to be admitted into the
United States through a national origins quota.
The racially
biased national-origin quotas remained in effect until 1965, when President
Johnson signed into law the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The 1965 act was
clearly a product of its time. An immigration system that had been based on
national-origin quotas designed to perpetuate the existing ethnic makeup of the
U.S. population was intolerable for a country that was making progress in its
internal struggle against discrimination and racism.
In two
extraordinary years, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, and the 1965 INA. According to legal scholar Gabriel Chinn, “Diversification of the immigrant stream is,
from this perspective, no less a civil rights triumph than is equal opportunity
under law in the voting booth or in the workplace. The elimination of race as a
factor was a practical as well as symbolic change.”
The newly
enacted system in the 1965 INA attempted to end discrimination by eliminating
the quota-system and treating countries “equally” through the establishment of
an annual per-country cap. Although the system was based on seemingly noble
goals, it presented numerous practical problems and a de facto bias. For
example, neighboring countries with a well-established history of
migratory flows such as Mexico and more removed countries with small
populations were subject to the same treatment. As a result, Mexican nationals
typically wait for a visa for much longer periods than nationals from other
countries.
The issue of
national origin and diversity was also central to the discussions that preceded
the inclusion of the diversity visa lottery program in the Immigration Act of
1990. While some controversy surrounds this program because of its return to
national origin considerations, the ultimate purpose of this program was to
affirmatively expand the admission opportunities for individuals from certain
countries—rather than openly penalizing other countries.
All in all,
how to best approach the notions of race, diversity, and fairness in the
immigrant admissions system has been historically problematic and the question
of how to deal with immigrants’ national origin has been at the very core of
the major immigration policy debates. And this is far from surprising
considering that nations define themselves through the official selection of
foreign nationals who seek residence in their territory.
What we are
witnessing now through the vulgar words of the president is the brutal
reemergence of a tradition of thought that ranks certain countries and the
nationals of those countries as morally inferior and consequently, undesirable.
Reintroducing
the issue of race and nationality in such a crude way is clearly a symbol of
where the immigration policy discussions are headed. While this should not come
as a surprise given the direction of the various immigration proposals advanced
by the Trump administration, the words pronounced by the president bring the debate
back to a dark and painful place that we all hoped the country had left behind
for good.
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