Vol. 14 No.11 (November 2004), pp.

DEFINING AMERICA THROUGH IMMIGRATION POLICY, by Bill Ong Hing. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. 336pp. Cloth. $71.50.  ISBN: 1592132324. Paper. $27.95.  ISBN: 1592132332.

THE “HUDDLED MASSES” MYTH: IMMIGRATION AND CIVIL RIGHTS, by Kevin R. Johnson. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. 264pp. Cloth. $59.50.  ISBN 1-59213-205-7. Paper. $19.95. ISBN 1-59213-206-5.

Reviewed by Audrey Kobayashi, Migration Policy Institute, Washington, DC, and Queen’s University Department of Geography, Kingston, Ontario.  Email: kobayasi@post.queensu.ca

The publication of two books on the relationship between immigration policy and racism in the United States could not have been more timely. In the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election, immigration is widely touted as the election issue that both sides wish most to avoid, while pollsters and journalists claim that the topic generates more interest among the public than any other single issue.  Negotiations over implementation of the 911 Commission Report hang most crucially on the issue of whether the implementation legislation (H.R. 10) should include immigration reform. Fuelled by the almost nightly attacks on the “invasion of illegal aliens” by journalists such as CNN’s Lou Dobbs, citizens’ groups are forming across the country to pressure action against undocumented workers, especially those from Mexico. Reports of harassment and overstretching of administrative authority – to the point of undue process – against both citizens and non-citizens of Arab or Muslim (and other non-whites) in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001 continue. Over all of these events hovers an unmistakable aura of deep and unflagging racism, its presence all the more forceful in the atmosphere of fear that marks recent political events in America.

Bill Ong Hing’s broad contention in DEFINING AMERICA THROUGH IMMIGRATION POLICY is that immigration policy has been used throughout American history, since its first iteration in the 17th Century, to define the American citizen. That citizen is white, predominantly of anglo-saxon heritage, and deserves cultural and economic privilege defined and sustained by legislative, policy, and political means. In a tour de force of detailed facts and legal citations, he wades through the complex legal measures that have guided immigration law and policy over more than two centuries, at each stage linking specific legal actions with dominant views of the “ordinary American.”

While the targets of immigration exclusion have varied over time, Hing demonstrates a remarkable consistency in official pronouncements over who deserves the title of “American.” During the early colonial era, Quakers were targeted for their purported lack of allegiance. The so-called “Alien and Sedition” acts, four pieces of legislation [*838] that include the Naturalization Act, passed in 1798, provide the first legal statement of the normative notion of who is considered an “American.” These acts were aimed initially at those would-be French immigrants whose political views were at odds with those of America, but later in the 19th Century shifted to curtailing the arrival of Germans and Catholics (especially Irish Catholics). The Know-Nothing Party (most prominent during the 1850s, its champion ex-President Fillmore) presided over a nativist image that in the ensuing century has never completely been shaken. The most vociferous expressions of alien-ness under the jurisdiction of those acts and later laws, however, were reserved for Chinese immigrants, completely excluded under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, just a year before Emma Lazarus wrote “give us your tired, your poor,” in a poem, later inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, that has become emblematic of America’s ambivalent definition of itself as a nation of immigrants. A year later, in 1864, the first comprehensive federal law, the Act to Encourage Immigration, came into force in a social context in which the notion of the true American was well entrenched.

Hong details the development of a hierarchical notion of who qualifies to be identified as American over subsequent decades, with Asians consistently deemed the most unacceptable, and others added to the list at various places on the acceptability ladder: southern and eastern Europeans and Jews thwarted by the Literacy Law of 1917 and the Quota Law of 1921; Communists, homosexuals and “other” undesirables who held unpopular political views specifically excluded in the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which overhauled immigration policy in light of growing controversy over the definition of loyalty and patriotism. All these developments, Hing claims, were accompanied by a public discourse of fear and exclusion that set the stage for events that have occurred since 11 September 2001.

The course of nativist views in the years since the McCarran Walter Act, however, is increasingly complex. Hing characterizes the decades from the 1960s through the 1990s as a period of politicizing the southwest border with Mexico and entrenching a deeply held rivalry between “true” Americans, and Latino/a immigrants depicted as a threat to American jobs. As the numbers of undocumented workers have increased, actions to control the border have become increasingly desperate and draconian, as “[t]he looks and ethnic background of prospective immigrants remained a test for which direction modern policy makers would take” (p.111).  Starting with “Operation Wetback” in 1954, through the creation of a border patrol with sweeping powers, through a series of administrative attempts – including amnesties – to curtail the numbers, and the most recent manifestation, Operation Gatekeeper, which includes both operational and physical deterrence (through fences), Hing depicts a disregard both for the constitutional guarantees of the 4th Amendment and, indeed, for human life. As efforts to control the border, especially through physical means, have increased, so has the death toll of individuals pushed to place their trust in human smugglers, or to face the rugged and perilous terrain where apprehension seems least likely but death by dehydration most probable. [*839]

As the power to use immigration policy to define, or to respond to definitions of, the true American has increased, Hing contends, this deeply entrenched political ideology has taken on deeper moral tones. Until the 1950s, powers of physical removal, or deportation, were used in significant but infrequent cases, that include Chinese exclusion, the deportation of “radicals” during the 1920s, and of Japanese Americans during World War II. Since the 1952 Act, however, powers of removal have been much stronger and have been used more widely. In addition to the removal of war criminals, and some dubiously alleged war criminals, such powers have extended to the roundup of Iranian students in 1979, the selective targeting of individuals, such as John Lennon, suspected of harboring anti-American views. The ostracism of gays and lesbians in American life has been reinforced by their designation, until relatively recently, as “mentally defective” and thus subject to exclusion by immigration officials. The process of asylum, while ostensibly bringing America in line with international conventions on human rights, has been deeply political and ideological, used as a tool to bolster anti-Communist sentiments in the case of Cubans and Chinese, but to apply a racial standard of unacceptability in the case of Haitians.

The overall result of this sorry history is what Hing terms the “de-Americanization” of mainly people of color, such as Asian Americans and Latinos/as. De-Americanization goes beyond the official disenfranchisement of specific immigrants, to underpin contemporary expressions of racism. Despite significant social and legislative changes that define America as diverse and that increase guarantees of human rights, American society still witnesses a significant range of racist acts, from seemingly harmless pranks and comments to the actions of vigilantes, to attacks – physical and verbal – on people construed as having Mexican origins. Such actions, Hing claims, are rooted in a notion of who deserves membership in the club of “real” Americans, a club in which the terms “American” and “white” are synonymous. The process of de-Americanization is capable of re-inventing itself, to focus on different groups – Asians, Jews, Mexicans, Haitians – as the political ideology of the day demands. Most recently, its target has been Americans, and non-Americans, of Arab and Muslim origin. For those subjected to de-Americanization, the line between alien and citizen is a fine one, often transgressed when non-Americans, and those deemed not to be true Americans, are thrown into the same basket of undesirability.

Somewhat surprisingly, Hing ends on a cautiously optimistic note. There are, he claims, two Americas, “one narrow and one broad” (p.275), and the choices made by individuals, by policy makers and politicians, in education, and in public discussion, determine which will prevail. Thumbing back through 275 pages, this optimism is buoyed, by intermittent discussions of how the moral and political issues surrounding immigration policy have been debated publicly, and particularly how they have been treated by various presidential regimes. The Federalists set the tone with notions of racial purity and alien threat through immigration: Jefferson spoke of the threat of “blot or mixture on [the] surface” of the American [*840] population (quoted p.17), while Adams’ inaugural address identified the “pestilence of foreign influence” as the “angel of destruction” (quoted p.18), his words a fitting prelude to the Alien and Sedition Laws. Nonetheless, Lincoln was a strong proponent of immigration. In the twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson espoused an image of a diverse America in which immigrants were welcome, and twice vetoed the Literacy Law of 1917. His position was overturned, however, by Roosevelt’s “100 percent American” campaign, pushed by the motto, “America for Americans.” President Truman, under whose watch both the Loyalty Review Board (1947) and the McCarran-Walter Act (1952) became law, nonetheless made a strong stand for human rights, and his unsuccessful veto message with respect to the 1952 act stands as one of the country’s major pleas against bigotry of all kinds. Although, like Wilson, he was unsuccessful in overturning what he viewed as reactionary legislation, his position shows that there was at the time considerable tension over questions of human rights, and Truman’s commitment to civil rights (as well as the 1954 BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION case) did much to advance the discussion in subsequent decades. Another point of transition occurs during the Kennedy-Johnson era, by which time the tension over immigration, racism, and civil rights issues was at an historic high. While both Kennedy and, subsequently, Johnson pushed for the removal of quotas and a liberalized immigration policy, their administrations also took conciliatory positions to blunt intolerant reactions. Ted Kennedy assured detractors that under the new legislation, “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset” (quoted p.95). The result, Hing contends, was a more global vision and a muting of xenophobic forces, but little moderation of racial prejudices.

Nevertheless, Hing’s optimism rests upon the fact that if the history of American immigration policy presents a strongly normative vision of who qualifies as American, the discourse of that definition has been anything but monolithic. Presidential views and the Supreme Court represent the most powerful voices in that discourse, but “ordinary” Americans, in their increasing diversity, are also part of the conversation, and change is possible. Racism may be deeply engrained in immigration law and policy, but there is plenty of room for debate, and that debate has not been complex, but emblematic of a country’s definition of itself.

In THE ‘HUDDLED MASSES’ MYTH, Kevin R. Johnson’s argument is broadly similar to that of Hing’s, that American immigration history is fundamentally racist, at odds with definitions of human rights entrenched in constitutional amendments, and intolerant of those whose views do not support normative political thinking. In nearly 100 fewer pages, he covers much of the same historical territory, but paints with a broad brush, rather than with the fine, case-by-case detail that Hing presents. He also places stronger emphasis on events since 11 September 2001.

Johnson’s overall claim is also more focused on critical race theory. He argues that there is a fundamental connection between racist attitudes towards non-citizens and immigrants and similar attitudes toward minority [*841] citizens. Like Hing, he contends that the targets of racism have shifted as a result of political and ideological changes, but he goes further to claim that racist sentiments are expressed most strongly in times of national fear. Immigration policy, therefore, not only reflects the larger process of racial construction, it contributes to it.

Johnson’s explanatory framework is consistent with the recent ideas of many scholars who seek to understand the “New Racism.” First, he claims, a process of displacement allows overtly racist views to be expressed against immigrants from particular regions, when it has become politically unacceptable to express such views against native-born American minority groups. The fact that it is no longer acceptable to make openly racist statements against African Americans, for example, does not mean that such ideas are not tacitly supported; but immigrants of either Arab/Muslim or Latino/a (especially undocumented) origin can be attacked with impunity. Further, he applies the psychological notion of cognitive dissonance to explain what he refers to as “historical oddities”: that the Chinese Exclusion Act was roughly contemporary with the abolition of slavery; that BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION and the abolition of the “separate but equal” doctrine could occur in the same year as Operation Wetback; that the fight against naziism could occur in the same context as the uprooting of Japanese Americans and the KOREMATSU decision; that the civil rights movement could gather steam conterminously with the Vietnam War and its demonization of Asians.

Rather than seeing such contradictions as tensions between forces of racism and progress, he sees them as a kind of inevitable displacement. When the law or social circumstances make it difficult to focus on one group, he depicts racism as moving to an easier target, rather like a mob thwarted by police action moving from one street to another. The result is a bleak vision: “In the end, we peer into a heart of darkness, where we see that the deepest fears held by racial minorities – that a majority of society desires and has consistently strived for Anglo-Saxon homogeneity and hegemony – are demonstrated to be more than justified” (p.16). Immigration law has played a particularly sinister role in maintaining American racism both because it is such an important tool of political processes, and because it is relatively immune from legal constraint and exempt from judicial review. Indeed, immigration policies provide a territory into which racist acts can be displaced with impunity, by virtue of the fact that they target “aliens” rather than American citizens.

The book presents a series of case studies showing how immigration policy and judicial actions, particularly those of the Supreme Court, have wielded racist intentions and forced racialized results. A chapter is devoted, respectively, to racial minorities per se, political undesirables, the poor, criminals, women, and lesbians and gays. In each chapter, Johnson draws upon case law to show how these groups have been cast as foreigners, racialized, and both physically and socially excluded from American citizenship. In each case, laws and policy have “ebbed and flowed with the immigration winds of the day” (p.109).  In each case, actions have been based on dubious theories about the [*842] characteristics of particular racialized groups, although the basis for racist assumptions has become more subtle over time. And, in each case, there has been a significant impact upon established communities of the same racial and ethnic backgrounds that goes beyond the simple application of immigration policy. The relationship between official actions in the name of immigration law and social actions in the name of civil society is a discursive one.

The relationship between racialization and immigration status is therefore not presented as a simple correlation. Johnson’s discussion of women, for example, shows that women immigrants, especially immigrants of color, have been treated badly as appendages of their husbands, and that conditions were historically especially difficult for women – citizens and non-citizens – who married across the color bar. In recent years, however, as the position of women in general in American society has improved, so have the immigration laws; advocacy to protect women from domestic violence influenced the development of a more comprehensive approach to women seeking asylum on the basis of gender-based persecution. At the same time, current emphasis on labor force qualifications often works against poor women and those with little education, who are disproportionately represented in positions such as domestic service, where they often suffer exploitation and abuse. Women’s rights advocacy groups, therefore, have tended to benefit middle class women; while those in earning low wages or, even more so, the undocumented, receive relatively little attention.

Johnson’s logic of displacement does not always work. For example, he claims (pp.80-81) that official actions in recent times towards Muslims have much in common with treatment of Japanese Americans during the 1940s (true), in some ways worse, however, because they are not based on executive order, but on ethnicity and religion, which are “more subjective and error prone than nationality.”  I find this contention puzzling for two reasons. First, the actions of the 1940s occurred against all Americans of Japanese ancestry, not a selected number. Second, the basis for the executive order was not nationality, but race. While the existence of an executive order does imply a less arbitrary application than what we have seen in recent days, it also represents an awesome and frightening abuse of power. Even more frightening, when the validity of that power was challenged in KOREMATSU, the actions of the government were upheld, under the explicit recognition that Fred Korematsu was an American, not a “foreign,” national. In other words, Johnson does not give enough credit to the fact that the Japanese-American example upholds his theory that immigration policy is a reflection – and sometimes a pale reflection – of the treatment of native minority groups. At the same time, the treatments of Japanese- and Arab-Americans, sixty years apart, provide a rather dismal set of bookends on a civil rights history that is not as proud as many commentators – and certainly most politicians – would want to claim.

Johnson concludes that the history of immigration policy in the United States is a history of the social construction of the racialized “alien.”  The strength of this contribution is not in the [*843] presentation of a factual history, which has been done in more depth elsewhere, including in Hing’s DEFINING AMERICA. What Johnson adds to the discussion is his broad-based analysis, not only of the racialized nature of immigration law and policy, but of the connections between public discourse of “race” and broader notions of civil rights and citizenship. If the “huddled masses” concept presents a romantic myth of America as the refuge of immigrants, it correlates with romanticized ideas of all Americans marginalized by race, class, gender, or sexuality. Immigration policy is thus a measure of the nation to which it is applied.

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Taken together, these two volumes comprise a detailed analysis of the racialized nature of American immigration history, and contribute concrete examples to support the established notion that race is socially constructed in a society’s image of itself. Perhaps their most important contribution, however, is to provide a perspective on contemporary discussions of who qualifies for full citizenship status in the current context of the “war on terror.” Although both authors touch only lightly upon this context, no doubt because the full significance of recent events was just coming to light as these manuscripts were going to press, both express their dismay at the extent to which immigration policies since 11 September 2001 show how little has been learned from a racist past.

The abuses of immigration policy over the past three years are extensive and well documented. They include secret activities, racial profiling, overreaching of administrative authority in detention and deportation cases, abuses of rights in custody, and violation of due process in a range of jurisdictions, paralleled in society at-large by hate crimes, employment discrimination, and individual acts of racism throughout civil society (Chishti, et al. 2003). “True” Americans are being defined, and “aliens” are being de-Americanized – and made the objects of hate – in keeping with the very specific terms according to which the “war on terror” is being waged, through discourses of fear, patriotism, and demonization of those viewed as foreign. These facts support both authors’ contention that racism has not been overcome, but has shifted its targets with the political climate.

If Johnson’s theoretical framework is apt, then we should not be surprised to see things going on that extend far beyond what one might expect as a reasonable set of responses to national security threats; indeed, both official acts and public discourse show a significant level of racialized hatred fuelled by fear, and an equally significant displacement of that hatred from traditionally marginalized groups to Arabs and Muslims. Critics who talk of the “new racism” point to the fact that it is often subtle, not (at least not always) because its effects upon racialized communities are more subtle, but because it follows the contours of contemporary normalized discourse, and is thus less visible to its proponents than actions of the past that may now be condemned as blatantly racist. The resulting cognitive dissonance allows Islamaphobia to be accepted in the same conversation that supports affirmative action. But it also points to one of those “historical oddities,” a time when the level of tolerance for a range of racist acts is [*844] higher than the developments of recent decades would indicate. At least, we might hope that this is a temporary setback.

The current context also shows that Hing’s concept of de-Americanization and Johnson’s notion of displacement go far beyond the treatment of Muslims and Arab Americans. Incidences of hate crimes, for example, have increased against all groups of color, and are also more easily tolerated than at other times. Even more telling is the example of moral panic stirred up against undocumented workers, tagged as “Mexican” out of proportion even to the actual number of Mexican workers currently in the country. In that public conversation, issues of border security are being displaced from questions of how potential terrorists might enter the country, to the need for greater patrol of the southwest border with Mexico, and morphed into anxiety about the loss of American jobs, which has less to do with the “invasion” of low-paid undocumented laborers than with other aspects of economic globalization. But the current open season on undocumented workers has, as Hing shows in great detail, a very long history. And both authors might have pointed out that, had immigration been policy over time been less influenced by ideology and normative notions of the acceptable American, it might have been more effective at achieving policy goals, whether those be economic, humanitarian, or demographic. Furthermore, both authors point out that the racialized logic that fuels immigration policy covers a range of groups, including gays and lesbians; it is not a huge step to extend that logic to note that their status as “real” Americans is also currently under attack in the controversy over same-sex marriage.

The conversation about “illegal aliens” sounds awfully reminiscent of that which targeted Asian immigrants from the mid-19th to the mid-20th Century. And despite the legal measures that have been put in place since to secure human rights (including the overturning of KOREMATSU several decades later), recent evidence suggests that protection against abuses is not much better today. And, if the tenor of CNN news, or the presidential debates, is indicative of the public discussion – or lack of discussion – about how to forge new immigration policy, it is still informed as much by ideologies of color as any other consideration.

If there is room for optimism, it is because books such as these are part of the arsenal from which we might draw to thwart racism in immigration policy today. The “huddled masses” myth remains just that, but the legal system has much more potential than ever before to overcome oppression. Scholars such as Hing and Johnson make a valuable contribution to lighting the way. The debate is as vociferous as ever. Who is listening?

REFERENCES:

Chishti, Muzaffar A., Doris Meissner, Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Jay Peterzell, Michael J. Wishnie and Stephen W. Yale-Loehr. 2003. AMERICA’S CHALLENGE: DOMESTIC SECURITY, CIVIL LIBERTIES, AND NATIONAL UNITY AFTER SEPTEMBER 11. Washington DC: Migration Policy Institute.

CASE REFERENCES:

BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION. 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

KOREMATSU v. UNITED STATES, 323 U.S. 214 (1944).

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© Copyright 2004 by the author, Audrey Kobayashi.