August 28, 2017
THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:
Trump's travel ban is firmly rooted in our history of racist immigration policies (Christopher Petrella, 1/30/17, The Bangor Daily News)
The history of U.S. immigration law is squarely based in the ideology of racialized nationalism. In 1920, Harry Laughlin, an eminent eugenicist with a doctorate in cytology -- the study of plant and animal cells -- from Princeton University, testified to the U.S. House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization that "the character of a nation is determined primarily by its racial qualities." Laughlin's sentiment captured the spirit of the time. During the 1920s, a number of immigration and legal reforms grew out of the scientific notion of intractable difference between races and an abiding belief that the purity of whiteness must be protected at all costs. The Immigration Act of 1924 was established for the express purpose of limiting the influx of "dangerous" and "dysgenic" Italians, Arabs, eastern European Jews, Asians and other not-fully-white "social inadequates."
The Immigration Act of 1924 -- a piece of legislation recently praised by Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump's nominee for U.S. attorney general -- dramatically limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origin quota system. Signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge on May 26, 1924, the bill capped total annual immigration at about 165,000 -- less than 20 percent of the pre-World War I average -- by establishing ceilings on the maximum number of immigrants allowed from any given country: specifically, 2 percent per year of the number of immigrants from a given country as recorded in the 1890 census. The choice to peg immigration to that census was far from arbitrary. Since the 1890 census reflected a higher population percentage of "desirable" northern Europeans than any of the subsequent three censuses, people from those countries enjoyed artificially inflated immigration and naturalization opportunities under the new quotas. To be sure, this provision was no doubt meant to establish an advantage to Anglo-Saxon Protestants who represented the majority of the U.S. population in 1890.In his 1916 bestseller, " The Passing of the Great Race," famed eugenicist Madison Grant argued that while northern European immigrants of the 19th century were "skilled, thrifty, and hardworking" just like native-born Americans, more recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were "unskilled, ignorant, predominantly Catholic or Jewish" and virtually unassimilable. Grant, among other eugenicists, was tapped as an expert to speak on the threat of "inferior stock" from eastern and southern Europe and played a critical role as Congress debated provisions of the Immigration Act of 1924.At the urging of Grant and others, the act did not include any provision whatsoever for immigrants from Asian countries. The bill stipulated "the absolute exclusion of the aliens ineligible to citizenship," a code for Asians. This continued a longstanding policy in existing immigration laws dating from 1790, 1870, 1882 and 1917 that already had excluded most Asians from naturalizing. Exceptions to these blanket prohibitions included Japanese and Filipinos. But the Immigration Act of 1924 -- in conjunction with the U.S. Supreme Court's 1922 ruling in Ozawa v. United States, which found the Japanese "not white" and therefore ineligible for U.S. citizenship -- closed even these loopholes. These quotas and prohibitions would stand until the midcentury, when Congress in 1952 eliminated race as a basis for naturalization and in 1965 jettisoned the national origin quota system, finally invalidating the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Opposition to immigration is to the Right as support for abortion is to the Left.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 28, 2017 9:06 AM