Decompiling Oppression #9
Sam McVeety
We've talked peripherally about immigration before, but with the recent executive actions around immigration, it seemed like an important opportunity to give a fuller survey of the origins of US immigration policy.
Immigration policy in the United States has evolved considerably over time, but started to take on its general shape beginning in the 1870s, centered on the Chinese Exclusion Act. This marked the beginning of an era (continuing through today) where immigration policy is defined by a philosophy of gatekeeping, and determining who was worthy and who wasn't. We'll be drawing heavily on Erika Lee's analysis of this topic in her article on Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping (longer, but great reading if you have the time).
While there had been some smaller immigration laws passed in the century since the country's founding (including the Naturalization Act in 1798), the Chinese Exclusion Act was a major immigration law that set a number of precedents. Crucially, this was the beginning of the modern bureaucracies around immigration, creating provisions for federal immigration officials and the increased need for surveillance, record keeping, and tracking.
One of the key insights from Lee's article is that historical analysis of the Act usually focuses on it through the lens of historical anti-Chinese sentiment, whereas Lee identifies the Act as a much more significant template for exclusion that structures the national conversation around immigration for decades to come. Summarizing public sentiment at the time, Lee writes that:
[T]he presence of Chinese laborers had a baneful effect upon the material interests of the state, and upon public morals; that their immigration was in numbers approaching the character of an Oriental invasion, and was a menace to our civilization; that the discontent from this cause was not confined to any political party, or to any class or nationality, but was well nigh universal; that they retained the habits and customs of their own country, and in fact constituted a Chinese settlement within the state.
This idea of "unassimilability" was critical in shaping immigration policy and politics in the years to come. Proponents of the Act drew a key distinction between immigrants who were capable of assimilation (typically white Europeans) and those who were unsuitable to assimilate, either because of their refusal or inability to do so. Immigration policy thus took up the mantle of legally defining this distinction between "good" and "bad" immigrants and, critically, tied it to specific notions of race and ethnicity. Up until this point, provisions like the Alien and Sedition Acts had expanded the government's ability to detain and deport "dangerous" non-citizens; the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first time that "dangerous" was explicitly conflated with race and nationality, which continues today.
Naturally, there is also an economic dimension to this conversation. The argument went that Chinese laborers were competing for American jobs, putting "real Americans" at a disadvantage because of their willingness to work under worse conditions with fewer stipulations. This construction of "stealing American jobs" has been re-deployed to motivate anger towards numerous immigrant groups, particular migrant labor from Latin America in our current era (ironically, often inexplicably coupled with further stereotypes of immigrants as "lazy").
Once constructed, this template of the "unassimilable alien" has been transferred to numerous groups. In our current national conversation, language use and religion have become a key marker for assimilability. The use of the Spanish language is portrayed as an unwillingness to participate in "American" culture, so much so that propositions like California's Proposition 227 (since overturned) have created fundamental barriers to access in our education system. Similarly, false representations of Sharia Law have been used to justify the fundamental "otherness" of Muslims residents.
My invitations to you:
Personal: Think about the aspects of your identities that are deemed assimilable or not. How do you choose to display or not display these depending on a situation?
Communal: Take some time to learn more about the local history of immigration policy in your region. How have initiatives like Proposition 227 (or similar) been justified in the past? How can we push back against such efforts in the future?
Solidarity: This time is especially challenging for the undocumented members of our communty. Consider donating to the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network (WAISN) COVID relief fund.
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