Immigration to the United States

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Immigration to the United States

A disproportionately large part of the history of immigration to the United States, and much of the history of legal deliberations over U.S. immigration policy, has been shaped by a preoccupation with whether or not the migrants in question were understood to be racially “white.” In other words, the determination of U.S. immigration and citizenship law—and thus the very definition of who has been recognized as eligible to become a genuine “American” and a legitimate member of the U.S. national polity—can only be adequately understood in relation to a sociopolitical order of white supremacy.

EARLY IMMIGRATION LAWS

In what was the first legislative determination of access to U.S. citizenship, and, in effect, the first official definition of U.S. nationality, the first Congress of the United States mandated in the Naturalization Act of 1790 that a person who was to become a naturalized citizen must be “white.” What is perhaps most remarkable, however, is that this whites-only policy for migrant access to U.S. citizenship remained in effect until 1952. Although the law never specified what precisely was to be understood by the term “white,” it established an enduring explicit racial barrier to all migrants’ prospective access to U.S. citizenship, requiring individual migrants (and more often than not, entire migrant groups, defined by national origin) to either have their whiteness confirmed and accepted by authorities or have any possibility of U.S. citizenship denied. Between 1878 and 1952, there were fifty-two legal cases, including two that were considered by the U.S. Supreme Court, in which various migrants contested their presumed ineligibility for citizenship by petitioning to be recognized as “white.” When pressed to define whiteness in this manner, the courts variously resorted to virtually any definition that ensured that people of non-European origins would be excluded. Sometimes the rationalizations were based on the purportedly objective truths established by “scientific” or anthropological experts, and in other instances, when such expertise proved inconvenient for the purposes of racial exclusion, the courts upheld definitions of whiteness that were justified according to “common knowledge” and the accepted opinions of “the common (white) man.” Exceedingly seldom were the instances when a petitioner was actually recognized to be white, and thereby eligible for U.S. citizenship.

Among the first actual U.S. immigration laws ever enacted was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which, following decades of large-scale Chinese labor migration, prohibited any further Chinese migration. Not only was the access of migrants to citizenship explicitly barred on the basis of “race,” but this law began an era of unprecedented immigration regulation that would increasingly seek to exclude whole groups from entry into the country solely on the explicit basis of race or racialized “nationality.” Chinese exclusion was followed by prohibitions against Japanese and Korean labor migration by a diplomatic “Gentlemen’s Agreement” in 1907. Finally, the Immigration Act of 1917 established an “All-Asia Barred Zone,” proscribing migrations from an area bordered by Afghanistan on the west and the Pacific on the east. The extension of the exclusions that were already in effect for China, Japan, and Korea to all of eastern and southern Asia was primarily intended to prohibit migration from British colonial India. Filipinos, however, having been designated as U.S. “nationals” due to their colonized status following the Spanish-American War of 1898, were a notable exception to the all-Asian exclusion. The Quota Act of 1921 and the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed severe restrictions on migration from eastern and southern European countries on the basis of a national-origins quota system, reaffirmed the All-Asia Barred Zone. Thus, the formulation of “Asiatic” and “Asian” as overtly racialized categories became institutionalized by law and ensconced in U.S. immigration policy.

These expansive and rigid restrictions against Asian immigration were coupled with the absolute omission of Latin American migrations from any specific national-origins or hemispheric stipulations or regulations. This left the robust and enthusiastic importation of Mexican migration unhindered by any all-encompassing exclusions or other numerical quotas. But it remained sufficiently flexible to label such migrants “illegal” and subject to mass deportations as a routine technique of labor subordination and discipline. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the decades following the U.S. war against Mexico, migration became an indispensable source of labor for burgeoning new industries such as mining, railroads, ranching, and, increasingly, mechanized agriculture, especially in the former Mexican regions that came to be known as the “American Southwest.”

IMMIGRATION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Through the beginning of the twentieth century, this transnational movement back and forth between the United States and Mexico remained largely unhindered, and the border between the two countries went virtually unregulated. There was a widespread acknowledgement that Mexicans were encouraged to move freely across the border, and, in effect, come to work without any official authorization or immigration documents. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, Mexicans remained the predominant Latino group in the United States, and for the first half of the century they accounted for the vast majority of Western Hemisphere migration as a whole. Although a dramatically restrictive system of national-origins quotas had been formulated in the 1920s for European migrations, this system of statutory numerical controls pertained exclusively to immigrations from the Eastern Hemisphere. Alongside this severe framework of immigration restrictions and prohibitions, and despite the vociferous opposition of many nativists who readily denounced Mexicans and other Latinos as racial inferiors to the “American” white race, the prospects for “legal” migration from Latin America remained numerically unhindered. Given the crucial role of Mexicans as a disposable migrant labor force within the United States, their numbers were left effectively unlimited.

This is not to say that there were no legal grounds by which U.S. immigration officials could selectively deny entry to prospective Latin American migrants, or to later deport them after the fact. Despite the absence of any statutory quotas to restrict their numbers, unofficial policies at the local level of U.S. consulates charged with issuing immigration visas in Mexico, for instance, were nonetheless imposed to periodically limit the number of prospective “legal” migrants. At the statutory level, there were other bases for the restriction of Latino migrants during this era, but these depended upon a selective enforcement of qualitative provisions in immigration law. The qualitative features of immigration law involve rules and regulations governing who may be allowed to migrate, with what characteristics, how they may do so, and how they conduct themselves once they have entered the country.

Thus, during the first half of the twentieth century, “legal” immigration could be (and frequently was) denied to many Latino migrant workers from relatively impoverished backgrounds due to a person’s perceived “illiteracy” or presumed “liability to become a public charge” (often associated with having no pre-arranged employment). Attempted migration could also be refused for such infractions as a failure, upon entry, to pay a required $8 immigrant head tax and the $10 fee for a visa. Likewise, Latino workers could be subsequently deported if they could not verify that they held valid work visas, or if they could otherwise be found to have evaded inspection upon entry. In the case of a worker who later became unemployed, a migrant could be determined to have become a “public charge,” which allowed immigration authorities to retroactively judge that the person had originally been culpable of a prior condition of “liability.” In addition, a migrant charged with violating U.S. laws, or having engaged in acts that could be construed as “anarchist” or “seditionist,” could also be summarily deported.

By the 1920s, all of these violations of the qualitative features of the law established deportation as a crucial mechanism of labor discipline and control, not only coordinated with the vicissitudes of the market’s demand for migrant workers but also for the purposes of counteracting unionization and political organizing among Latinos. The abundant availability of such a mass migrant labor force encouraged the expectation among employers that it also be exceptionally flexible and tractable, and that its mobility could be effectively managed and subordinated to employers’ needs. Indeed, it is revealing that the U.S. Border Patrol, from 1924 (when it was first created) until 1940, operated under the auspices of the Department of Labor.

The possibility of deportation arose as a consequence of successive changes in U.S. immigration law, and of the remarkably malleable, but increasingly restrictive, policies that summarily defined various migrations as “legal” or “illegal,” thus creating an image of U.S. national sovereignty defined by the territorial integrity of its physical borders. It is important to emphasize, however, that the possibility for “illegal” migrants to be deported was almost always coupled with, and overwhelmingly overshadowed by, the more or less insatiable demand for their legally vulnerable labor, and thus for an effectively permanent importation of ever-greater numbers of undocumented migrant workers. The pervasive racialization of their specific national identity allowed for a commonplace disregard of the juridical distinction between undocumented Mexican migrants and U.S.-born birthright-citizen Mexicans (Chicanos or “Mexican Americans” ). This was most dramatically demonstrated by the mass deportations and coercive “repatriations” of Mexicans who were

U.S. citizens, usually alongside their migrant parents, during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Over the course of the twentieth century, U.S. immigration policy toward Latin America came to be distinguished chiefly by increasing regulation and restriction. There was a dramatic overall shift from a policy of numerically unlimited possibilities for “legal” migration from anywhere in the Western Hemisphere (excluding colonies) to one of strict annual quotas for every country of origin, which began with specific immigration legislation in 1976. Latin American experiences of migration to the United States, and consequent U.S. Latino community formation, have been profoundly shaped by this history of calculated interventions in immigration law. Until the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965, there were no numerical quotas whatsoever restricting the “legal” entry of migrants from any of the countries of the Western Hemisphere (excluding colonies). With the hemispheric quota enacted in 1965 and put into effect in 1968, and then, after 1976, with the individual country quotas, an alarmingly disproportionate number of Mexicans (and, increasingly, other Latin American migrants as well) found themselves with no other recourse than to become undocumented, and they were thus relegated to an indefinite condition as “illegal aliens.”

Despite its unprecedented restriction of Latin American and Caribbean migrations, the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 is typically celebrated as a liberal reform. This is because it finally eliminated the nationalorigins quota system that had severely restricted European and Asian migrations. The actual exclusions against Asian migrations had been sporadically dismantled during the 1940s and 1950s because they came to be seen as an embarrassment that impeded diplomatic relations with China and Japan. Subsequently, Asian migrations remained subject to the very strict national-origins system that otherwise remained in place, thus ensuring that permitting migration from Asian countries did not in any significant way alter the fact that only miniscule numbers of Asian migrants would be allowed entry to the United States. This changed dramatically after the 1965 amendments to U.S. immigration law took effect. Notably, because of the absolute interruption in Asian migration during the Exclusion Era, new provisions for family reunification were very often irrelevant—at least initially—for people seeking to migrate from Asia. Therefore, the law’s explicit preferences for professional or otherwise highly skilled migrants were commonly the only avenue available. In this way, the law effectively predetermined a middle-class social composition for the new Asian migrations. Over time, however, family reunification provisions created opportunities for somewhat greater class diversity in subsequent waves of Asian migration. Meanwhile, new restrictions limiting migration from Mexico and other Latin American countries ensured that the already massive Latino labor migrations would not only be overwhelmingly working-class in character, but also rigidly locked into a degraded social condition due to the legal vulnerability of these migrant’s undocumented immigration status.

Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, Latinos and Asians have provided the vast majority of new migrants to the United States. These recent migrations are simply incomprehensible, however, without a critical appreciation of the instrumental role of the law in hierarchically evaluating, ranking, mobilizing, and regulating them. The operations of U.S. laws of citizenship and immigration reveal decisive features that determined how the variously racialized identities of Latinos and Asians have been profoundly shaped in historically specific relation to the U.S. policy. Furthermore, the racialized experiences of these non-European migrations reveal crucial aspects of how the wider U.S. sociopolitical order of white supremacy has continually been maintained and reproduced, not only in relation to its own internal racial dynamics but also in ever-changing relation to the rest of the globe.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ancheta, Angelo N. 1998. Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Chang, Robert S. 1999. Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation-State. New York: New York University Press.

De Genova, Nicholas. 2004. “The Legal Production of Mexican/Migrant ‘Illegality’.” Latino Studies 2 (2): 160–185.

_____. 2005. Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

_____, ed. 2006. Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Haney-López, Ian. 1996. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press.

Hing, Bill Ong. 1993. Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850–1990. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Kim, Hyung-Chan. 1994. A Legal History of Asian Americans, 1790–1990. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Lee, Erika. 2003. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Ngai, Mae M. 2004. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Salyer, Lucy E. 1995. Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Nicholas De Genova

Encyclopedia of Race and Racism