America's Immigration Battle

Via Fabian Fauth on Unsplash

March 24, 2020, at 5:42 PM

The latest section of Race I read, pages 127-185, was part of a bigger section entitled “The Age of Racism.” It largely focused on how racism existed around the world between the 1700s-1940s, but in vastly different forms. In America, it was focused on Africans. In Germany, it was focused on Jews. In Britain, it was focused on Indians. Racism was a constant, in other words, but the race that people hated was not.

Aronson notes at the start of this section that, “Race in Europe often meant something different from race in America. Where you were defined who you were — so that getting on a boat to cross the Atlantic, you could leave one race and join another” (Aronson 131). This introduces the fact that this section has to do with immigration; indeed, racism and immigration were, and are today, inextricably linked.

Free Whites Only

As I just mentioned, this section made me think a lot about current events. For example, Aronson soon introduces the idea of race-based immigration laws in the United States, describing a law in place from 1790 until 1952 that made being a “free white person” a requisite for citizenship (Aronson 136). It was the fact that this law was in place just 68 years ago that piqued my interest, but the parallels to other times in history that kept me interested. Indeed, I immediately noticed comparisons to other events in history, and to the present day.

What I noticed: while race- or ethnicity-based immigration laws have become less overtly racist over time, they haven’t actually stopped being racist.

No Chinese

A striking example of legal exclusion of immigrants in the United States was the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882. Aronson mentions this period in American history, writing “...there were now powerful senators from Western states who were determined to prevent Chinese people from becoming citizens. The compromise Congress adopted was to keep the word “white,”... but then pass a series of ever-harsher laws banning Chinese (and later also Japanese) people from becoming citizens” (Aronson 163).

In this case, the racism was pretty obvious. History.com reports that the law served to “assuage prevalent concerns about maintaining white ‘racial purity,’” and that its purpose was to stop Chinese people from immigrating to the US and becoming citizens (History.com Staff). It was also long-lasting; it was renewed in 1892 and became permanent in 1902, with Chinese immigrants not able to become citizens until 1943 (History.com Staff). The Chinese Exclusion Act was a milestone in racist immigration law, and set the stage for even more dramatic legislation.

No Asians

I mention the Chinese Exclusion Act because it was part of the beginning of the era of racial quotas in immigration, exemplified in the 1924 Immigration Act. Also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, it was the most extreme immigration limitation yet, including a national quota system based on data from 34 years prior and complete exclusion of immigrants from Asia (“The Immigration Act of 1924”).

This was an extreme step, justified by previous immigration restrictions passed during the crisis of World War I (“The Immigration Act of 1924”). In contrast to the Chinese Exclusion Act, this legislation was part of a general theme of American isolationism at the time, and, therefore, its racial undertones were obscured. They were, however, still there, and anti-immigrant sentiment had been alive and well in the United States at that point for a good hundred years. (Nativism in the mid-1800s is a good example of this).

My point (based on Aronson’s point in this section) is that prejudice and racism have been intertwined with immigration for the entire lifetime of this country. This historical context is the reason I started thinking about immigration today: it seems similar.

No Muslims

The reason I’ve been rambling about the history of immigration in the United States is that I feel it applies to the present day, which is something I noticed while I was reading this section of Race.

One of President Trump’s campaign promises was to bar Muslims from this country. This is not an interpretation of his policy; it’s something he actually said in 2015: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on” (Kight).

And that’s what he did: the version of the ban that went into effect (it was challenged in court) stopped most immigration and some travel from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen (Kight). Other than Venezuela and North Korea, these are all Muslim-majority countries, and the original ban excluded those two while including several other Muslim-majority countries (Kight).

This action was supposed to prevent terrorism in the United States, specifically “radical Islamic terrorism.” However, there is a lot of reason to believe that that’s a racist* generalization of the world’s Muslims, and, therefore, the policy is in keeping with America’s history of racist immigration policy. My explanation follows: 

*Side note: even though "Muslim" is not a race as we usually think of race, Islamophobia is a type of racism in my opinion. Here's an article that explains why -- basically, it relies on a cultural definition of race, which I think is legitimate.

Axios reports that Trump’s travel restrictions -- again, put in place mostly on Muslim countries -- have, in total, impacted 7% of the world’s population (Kight). The world’s population was estimated at 7.7 billion people in 2019 — that means around 539 million people were found to have been restricted by this ban. The idea that there are 539 million Muslim terrorists in the world is frankly ridiculous — first of all, there were only around 1.8 billion total Muslims in the world in 2015 (Lipka). Was the ban assuming that around 30% of the world's Muslims were terrorists, or at least potential terrorists?

Obviously, I’m not suggesting that any ban like this could possibly be so effective that the only people it stopped were terrorists, or that the only people affected by this ban were Muslim. I don’t pretend that the travel ban was billed as only stopping terrorists either; it’s expected that the price of a protective ban is stopping people who aren’t dangerous. However, the motivations of the ban should still be questioned, since we can reasonably assume that it was meant to target potential threats to the country, and it's clear it mostly targeted Muslims. There is significant evidence that suggests that Muslim terrorists aren’t a big enough threat to warrant such action:

94% of terrorist attacks in the United States between 1980 and 2005 were by people who weren’t Muslim (Alnatour). In Europe, that number is even lower: Muslim terrorists were responsible for less than 2% of attacks between 2010 and 2015 (Alnatour). Additionally, the vast majority of Muslims surveyed in 2015 didn’t support terrorist organizations such as ISIS, with almost 100% of Muslims in Lebanon and over 90% in Israel and Jordan saying they viewed ISIS unfavorably (Lipka).

So, if most terrorists aren’t Muslim, and most Muslims don’t support terrorists, it seems unreasonable to block millions of people from traveling to our country because they are Muslim. I would venture that the president’s travel ban is not totally about terrorism. Instead, I see a connection back to historical immigration legislation that targeted a specific group: prejudice.

Many in politics, the media, and the Democratic Party claimed, and have continued to claim, that Trump’s travel ban is racist. I admit that issues of racism are hard to define; when there’s an excuse for an action that seems racist, it can be difficult to tell whether a person is trying to be racist or not. However, given the facts listed above about Islamic terrorism, the fact that many of the people banned by the policy were refugees in extreme need of help from the United States, and Trump’s general rhetoric about Muslims**, it’s certainly not a stretch.

**This article tracks years of comments by Trump about Muslims, underlining why I think he seems racist towards them.

At the very least, it’s cause for concern. Hopefully this gives a picture of why I thought about the travel ban while reading this section of Race. My main take-aways are summarized here:

1. As Aronson details, the United States has, pretty consistently throughout history, discriminated against various groups in its immigration policy, for suspect (racist) reasons.
2. Racism toward Muslims in immigration policy is similar to previous immigration legislation that targeted a specific racial or ethnic group. 

One final thought -- I think the value of reading books about history, like Race, is that we can often make new connections to our modern world. That's what I feel happened as I read this section: by learning about the past, I began thinking about the present in ways I never would have otherwise. 

Works Cited

Alnatour, Omar. "Muslims Are Not Terrorists: A Factual Look at Terrorism and Islam." HuffPost 

     News, Verizon Media, 9 Dec. 2015, www.huffpost.com/entry/muslims-are-not-

     terrorist_b_8718000. Accessed 23 Mar. 2020.

Aronson, Marc. Race: A History beyond Black and White. Atheneum Books for Young Readers,

     2007.

Fauth, Fabian. On the Edge of Liberty. Unsplash, 13 Apr. 2017, unsplash.com/photos/1_EedIBc6jY. 

     Accessed 24 Mar. 2020.

History.com Staff. "Chinese Exclusion Act." History, A&E Television Networks, 24 Aug. 2018, 

     www.history.com/topics/immigration/chinese-exclusion-act-1882. Accessed 23 Mar. 2020.

"The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act)." Office of the Historian, United States 

     Department of State, history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act. Accessed 23 Mar. 

     2020.

Kight, Stef W. "The Evolution of Trump's Muslim Ban." Axios, Axios Media, 10 Feb. 2020, 

     www.axios.com/trump-muslim-travel-ban-immigration-6ce8554f-05bd-467b-b3c2-

     ea4876f7773a.html. Accessed 23 Mar. 2020.

Lipka, Michael. "Muslims and Islam: Key Findings in the U.S. and around the World." Pew 

     Research Center, 9 Aug. 2017, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/09/muslims-and-islam-

     key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-world/. Accessed 23 Mar. 2020.