Factually, America is a nation of immigrants, excluding Native Americans and Black descendants of enslaved Africans. So, approximately 84 percent of Americans have ancestors who came to America from places outside its borders. Despite these homages to our diversity compared to other countries, America has actually always been hostile to new groups of immigrants setting foot on its soil. All we need to look at is our history to find that those words are nothing more than a bumper sticker.
In 1790, less than 15 years after becoming a nation, the 1790 Naturalization Act established that only “free white persons” who had resided in the United States for at least two years could be granted citizenship. In 1882, Congress passed the first Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers. That law was subsequently followed by a series of laws (1882-!904) that became increasingly more restrictive towards Chinese immigration.
If you think that the United States only shuts the immigration door on the basis of race. There is also an established history of restricting immigration on the basis of ethnicity and religion. The Immigration Act of 1924 calculated an immigrant quota based on an estimate titled “National Origins of the White Population of the United States in 1920.” The quotas were heavily weighted towards Western and Northern European countries (approximately 88 percent). For all intents and purposes, Chinese or Japanese immigrants need not apply. Immigrants from predominantly Catholic countries were not welcome either.
Between 1851 and 1920, 4.3 million Irish immigrants arrived in the United States, with the majority arriving in the 1850s. This influx of Irish immigrants was a catalyst for the Nativist movement, which looked at the Irish immigrants as undesirables and garbage. Sounds familiar? Xenophobic politicians and Americans went as far as describing them as not white; this was also true for Italians. If there’s one thing we know about America, it’s that if you’re not considered a member of the club, you’re considered a second-class citizen or worse. Irish Americans didn’t become full-fledged members of the whiteness club until the 60’s. Prior to that, hatred and vitriol targeted Irish immigrants for their ethnicity and religion, and considered “negroes turned inside out.”
One of the most horrific chapters in American history was how we treated Jewish people who wanted to escape the tyrannical reign of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. The Immigration Act of 1924 limited the number of immigrants from Germany to approximately 25,000 individuals a year, while hundreds of thousands of Jews from Germany sought asylum.
It would be very easy to just blame these anti-immigration policies on politicians and bureaucrats, but polls showed that 75 percent of Americans were against expanding immigration to save Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. A public display of the callousness of U.S. policy towards immigration was the case of the MS St. Louis, known as “The Voyage of the Damned.” Over 900 mainly Jewish passengers were barred from disembarking in Havana, Cuba, because immigration quotas for Germany were met. When their appeals were denied, they turned to the U.S., but their requests were denied, and they returned to Europe. Approximately 250 of those passengers died in the Holocaust.
It wasn’t until 1965, with the enactment of the Immigration and Nationality Act (Hart-Cellar Act), that immigration from Black nations began to grow. It eliminated the national-origin quotas in the Immigration Act of 1924. Prior to the enactment of the Hart-Celler Act, an estimated 165,000 Caribbean and African immigrants were resident in the United States. For decades, the United States policy was a virtual ban on non-native Black people entering the United States. Many in the Black Civil Rights Movement abhorred this hypocrisy (enslavement was fine, but immigration is a step too far) and played an important role in passing the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
Fast forwarding to today, the next three decades of policy and legislation have regressed us back to a time when hatred and fear have been the driving force of immigration policy. We currently have a latter-day version of the Brown Shirts that kill and abuse individuals. Regrettably, millions of people whose ancestors were attacked for coming to the United States, both legally and illegally, are now the attackers. They voted for this.
In my opinion, one of the vilest human traits is the ability of the oppressed to assume the role of the oppressor. We now have a president who boldly states how he wants more immigrants from Norway and Sweden, but not immigrants from Latin American countries. He constructs a non-existent genocide against white people in South Africa, but deports Palestinians and Iranians who are actually victims of a genocide and repressive regimes.
As far back as grade school, I can remember being told that America was a “melting pot.” This was always supposed to be a point of pride. If only it were true. Based on my life experience, America is a country where social and economic status create a layered effect, more akin to a parfait.
Historically and to this day, the bottom layer is Black people. The next layer would be Latinos and other brown ethnicities. Next in the immigration hierarchy would be Asians. The penultimate level would be white people, and the cherry on top would be rich white men. Yes, we are a country of immigrants (despite anti-immigrant sentiment), but millions have paid a heavy price to make it so.
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