Immigration was in the news again this week as Elvira Arellano was deported to Mexico by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement while her eight-year-old son, a U.S. citizen, remained behind, being cared for by the church that was providing Arellano refuge in Chicago. Mother and son were shortly reunited but the plan is for him to return to Chicago to continue school in the third grade. One has to wonder, at what point has the immigration debate taken such a wrong turn if a child is effectively orphaned to make a political case? The policy-making process has become so political that skewed examples need to be staged in order to evoke outrage and action from the public.
It is meaningful how plays on terminology can affect perception. Interestingly, the “immigration debate” and the “illegal immigration debate” have become interchangeable. It is also interesting how illegal immigration is a concern when it relates mostly to the Mexican border. One hundred and sixty years ago, when the southwestern states belonged to Mexico, these borders were more fluid. Crossing borders wasn’t illegal when Northern Europeans traversed over them to take over North America in the 1500s, and it wasn’t illegal when slave traders kidnapped Africans and forced them into slavery in the early 1600s. It only became illegal when the Northern Europeans who settled in this country, decided to take ownership, and in this process of appropriating, closed the very borders that had been opened for them. In 1790, the Rule of Naturalization was enacted, a uniform rule of naturalization that was established to determine citizenship, one condition being a two-year residency. In 1795, the two years was found to be insufficient and was thus expanded to five.
Apparently, immigration is always legal for the colonizer and it is the right of the colonizer to dictate and define what is legal, illegal, for whom, and for how long.
Since then, immigration laws have been established to exclude based on hype. In the 1850s, the Chinese were the Mexicans of today. Thousands of Chinese people were drawn to the United States by the opportunities for labor and prospects of gold. By 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed and re-enacted in 1892. By 1902 it had become a permanent directive in effect until 1943, during World War II, when China was an ally. Once the Chinese Exclusion Act was established, farmers in the West were faced with a shortage of laborers, upon which Japanese settlers were encouraged to immigrate, but per the Japan-U.S. Gentlemen’s Agreement – in which Japan agreed not to send over too many Japanese citizens to the U.S. and California agreed not to discriminate against residents of Japanese descent – the Japanese were required to immigrate at an acceptably low rate, enough to exploit for cheap labor, but not too many to appear to overrun the country. Then, the 1917 Immigration Act put the nail in the coffin by banning immigration from all Asian countries with the exception of Japan and the Philippines.
Having thus taken care of Asian immigrants, a backlash to the influx of mostly Southern and Eastern European immigrants from the 1880s to the 1920s set off the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, which limited the immigration of each “historically” represented in the U.S. in1910. That quota clearly did not have enough of a restricting impact, and so the 1924 Immigration Act was passed, wherein the cap was decreased to two percent of the represented population in 1890. This legislation finally proved to be successful in decreasing immigration for the interim.
During the period of expansionism, while the United States was attempting to conquer the whole continent, there were no immigration issues with Mexico. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe, following the Mexican-American War, ceded California, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico to the United States. Under the Treaty, having won four very sizeable states and then some, the U.S. magnanimously agreed to grant citizenship to approximately 75,000 Mexicans (who were living in the acquired states), and recognized the rights of Mexicans to retain their language, culture, religion, and property. The close of the 20th century, with the increase of immigration from Asia and Latin America, however, brought about increased racial and ethnic intolerance.
Today, while Mexicans represent the greatest number of legal immigrants to the United States, two-thirds of undocumented immigrants are from Mexico as well, which provides an easy handle to latch onto for xenophobes. Related to illegal immigration, there is often an outcry of economic deficits due to job loss, complaints about the strain put upon the welfare system, and grievances about the increase in taxes that citizens must pay because illegal immigrants do not; these are all arguments that incite anxiety and antipathy towards the illegal immigration issue. However, despite the fact that many of these issues are unfounded and false, it is still perplexing how illegal immigration and legal immigration become so easily conflated. Moreover, in terms of costs and benefits, what is not raised is the increased cost that has been incurred due to the oft hysterical response to these immigration concerns. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 moved the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services from the Department of Justice to the then newly formed Homeland Security (DHS), restructured INS and other agencies under the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), including moving Border Patrol under USCIS. Beyond just the physical restructuring, a dramatic adjustment was the budget for USCIS, which has increased from $1.5 billion in 1994 to $10 billion in 2007. The cost to stave off (il)legal immigration is very steep, but apparently worthwhile, as the debate continues and policies to restrict persist.
Given the history of immigration in the United States and the U.S.’s response to the influx of immigrant groups, the issue does not appear to be concerns over illegal immigration, but rather the changing faces of the country. History also dictates that there will always be a face that represents a threat, and that this, too, shall pass – and once passed, another target will be sought.
The views expressed in this posting are those of the author and have not been approved by the House of Delegates or the Board of Governors of the American Bar Association and, accordingly, should not be construed as representing the policy of the American Bar Association.