Immigration and a public charge to use our history honestly

All too often, we hear people misusing our history to validate and institutionalize injustice. We recently heard White House administrator Ken Cuccinelli on the radio point to the 1882 Immigration and Naturalization Act to support the current proposal to disallow citizenship to immigrants who receive government support services. It’s part of the “public charge” clause, he said; U.S. immigration law prohibited anyone who would be a charity case from entering the U.S. “That’s how we’ve always done it in America, because in America we believe in industry and rugged individualism and hard work.”

Those are ringing words that most Americans do like to hear. But there are two problems with this that are always present when people try to make our history support injustice: first, there have indeed been many times in which the U.S. did the wrong thing, and violated its mandate. Those failures should be called out as such, as deviations from our norm, not offered as proof that our norm of justice for all is somehow carried out by committing injustice.

Second, and almost inevitably, they are wrong. The 1882 “Act to regulate immigration” had three parts. First, it said that 50 cents would be collected from every immigrant who arrived in a U.S. port and the money would be used to create a fund “to be called the immigrant fund, and shall be used to defray the expense of regulating immigration under this act, and for the care of immigrants arriving in the U.S. for the relief of such as are in distress…” Contrast that with what’s happening on our southern border today, or in any city or town where immigrants are living under the threat of roundup and deportation.

Next, it said that any passengers found to be a “convict, lunatic, idiot, or other person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge, they shall report the same… and such persons shall not be permitted to land.” Nowhere in this is a person’s ability to make a living without ever relying on charity—since government welfare did not exist at the time—mentioned. This is addressing debilitating mental illness.

Finally, the Act says that “…from time to time [issue] instructions [best] calculated to protected the U.S. and immigrants entering into the U.S. from fraud and loss…” –perhaps the fraud and loss of being refused citizenship after taking advantage of social services legally offered.

Unfortunately, few Americans know their own history well enough to recognize these types of misrepresentations. They fall prey to them, and come to doubt our mandate in an especially destructive way: they become cynical. Liberty and justice for all is only quoted to shame the U.S. as representing a mission that we have never lived up to, that we have always deliberately violated. U.S. history is presented as an unrelieved series of crimes and deliberate injustice.

Letting our history be torn apart in this way is very dangerous to our politics. If we sense today that something is wrong, we have to be able to defend and support that feeling with our own history. We have to be able to say “This is not what America is all about” and know that others will agree. We have to understand that our current pushback against injustice is backed up by generations of Americans who came before us, who pushed back against slavery and sexism and voting restrictions and school segregation and imperialism and religious intolerance. The study of American history is in part a return to the source of that feeling, that need we have to be a just nation, and to understand and validate it, whether by calling out failures or celebrating successes.

Truth vs. Myth: Illegal immigrants must be stopped!

We have reposted this item many times. We never dreamt that we would post it in response to the U.S. government taking children and babies away from their parents, putting them into government holding facilities, losing track of them, and then deporting their parents. And all because the parents crossed the U.S.-Mexico border… well, the government says they are crossing illegally, but it is not illegal to cross that border into the U.S. and claim asylum.

Not everyone who crosses the U.S.-Mexico border is from Mexico; many are from other Latin American nations. Not all claim asylum, but many do claim that they are fleeing their own countries in fear of their lives. To have their children taken from them at the border as a punishment for this—again, it is legal to enter the U.S. without a visa if you are claiming asylum or refugee status—is beyond words. The horror of it is wholescale: thousands of children seized and put into detention, lost in detention, or, even more agonizing, into the foster care system, as if they were orphans, and with the goal of placing them in U.S. families to live for the rest of their lives. It is a legitimate fear that putting these children into foster care is not a stopgap, temporary measure, but a way to forever keep them in the U.S. and destroy their families. It is not unlike kidnapping.

Former acting head of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement under the Obama Administration John Sandweg did not mince words on this:

…A guardian is then appointed to represent the best interests of the child. Meanwhile, the parent is shipped off, let’s say, to Honduras. There they are, they don’t speak English, they don’t have any money to hire a U.S. lawyer, and now their child is caught up in the state child welfare system, where an advocate might argue that it is not in the best interest of that child to be sent back to violence-ridden Honduras, to live in a life of poverty and under threat of gang violence.

It gets very difficult: [since] the parent can no longer appear, then at some point, depending on state laws, parental custody rights are severed, and if the parent can’t appear in state court, which of course they can’t, because they’ve just been deported, or they’re in detention, they run a serious risk of losing their rights as a parent to control where their child goes. I think there’s a very serious risk that of the people who are already deported, they are not going to see their child again any time soon, at a minimum, if not until adulthood.

The horrible irony of people fleeing violence and claiming asylum being arrested and deported, and then forced to sit by while the U.S. government justifies kidnapping their children on the basis that it is granting those children asylum is soul-crushing. Parents who came to the U.S. for asylum are refused, but their children are potentially forcibly detained here on the grounds that they must be provided asylum. Children can be refugees, but not their parents.

In case anyone is wondering, this is not one of the United States’ founding principles of liberty and justice for all. If you counter that a U.S. founding principle does not apply to non-U.S. citizens, you are correct. But you must also see that when the U.S. violates and perverts its moral foundations, U.S. citizens suffer. We become rudderless and immoral. We lower our standards of humanity first by hurting outsiders, then by hurting each other. Then nothing is left. The goal is to accept immigrants and help them to become Americans, not to destroy what it means to be an American. Here’s the original post with an introduction from September 2016:

In light of the continuing legal concern with illegal immigration, most notably the anti-immigrant threats currently being voiced by Donald Trump, we’re re-posting a Truth v. Myth staple on immigration and why it is now so often illegal.

Most of us have ideas on how to fix illegal immigration, but we never stop to ask why illegal immigration is now so common, but never was before. Americans have always tried to stop certain types of immigrants—Irish, Chinese, Jewish, etc.—but you will not find battles over illegal immigrants (except when people from those banned groups somehow got into the country). There was no such issue, really, as “illegal immigration” throughout our long history of immigrants. So why is it such an issue today?

The single answer is that we now make it much harder to become a legal immigrant than we have ever done before. That’s it. It’s not that today’s immigrants are more criminal. It’s not that our own sainted immigrant ancestors were more law-abiding. It’s simply a matter of changing the law to make it harder to become a citizen, a process put in motion during and after WWII.

So here’s the original post, with a few new additions:

Myth: Immigration used to be good, but now it is bad.

Supporting myth: Today immigrants are shiftless, lazy, and/or criminal, whereas they used to be hardworking people trying to make a better life for their children.

“Proof” of myth: Immigrants today don’t bother to learn English, want Spanish to be the official language of the U.S., refuse to become legal U.S. citizens, working here illegally instead, and constantly enter the U.S. illegally without even trying to become citizens because they want a free ride without paying taxes.

You know what we so often hear when Americans talk about immigration now?

1. They support anti-immigration laws.

2. Sure, their ancestors were immigrants, and they’re proud of that.

3. But their ancestors “followed the rules,” and therefore deserved to be here, while

4. Immigrants today have not followed the rules, and therefore do not deserve to be here.

This is a powerful myth. It seems to ring true. But do you know what the “rules” were for immigrants coming through Ellis Island for so many years? Look healthy and have your name listed on the register of the ship that brought you. That was it. “If the immigrant’s papers were in order and they were in reasonably good health, the Ellis Island inspection process would last approximately three to five hours. The inspections took place in the Registry Room (or Great Hall), where doctors would briefly scan every immigrant for obvious physical ailments. Doctors at Ellis Island soon became very adept at conducting these ‘six second physicals.’”

When one of the HP visited the Ellis Island museum in 1991, they saw a film that said you also had to provide the address of a friend, sponsor, or family member who would take you in. And off you went.

So we can’t really hand out prizes to past immigrants who followed those rules. They were pretty easy to follow. If that’s all we asked of Mexican immigrants today, we wouldn’t have illegal immigrants.

Immigrants today are faced with much more difficult rules. In other words, they actually face rules.

Go to Google and type in “requirements for U.S. citizenship.” It’s hard to say how many million pages come up. You petition for a Green Card—or rather, you have a family member already in the U.S. or a U.S. employer become your petitioner, and fill out the visa petition. Your employer-petitioner has to prove a labor certificate has been granted, that you have the education you need to do the job, that s/he can pay you, etc.

Then you’re on the waiting list—not to get a Green Card, but to apply for a Green Card.

One could go on and on. Basically, it’s much harder to get into the U.S. today and to become a citizen than it was when most white Americans’ ancestors came through.

The real problem with immigrants today is the same as it was in 1840: each generation of Americans hates and fears the new immigrants coming in. In the 1850s, the Irish were the scary foreigners destroying the nation. In the 1880s it was the Italians. Then the Chinese, then the Eastern Europeans, then the Jews, now the Mexicans.

Each generation looks back to earlier immigrants as “good,” and views current immigrants as bad. In the 1880s, the Irish were angry at the incoming Italians. In the 1900s, the Italians were banning the Chinese from coming in. As each immigrant group settles in, it tries to keep the next group out.

It’s really time we ended this cycle. Here are some quick pointers:

1. Latin American immigrants are not qualitatively different than previous European immigrants.

2. Spanish-speaking immigrants do NOT refuse to learn English; in fact, the children of Spanish-speaking immigrants are less likely to speak the old language than the children of other groups (that is, more children of Chinese immigrants speak Chinese than children of Mexican immigrants speak Spanish).

3. Your European immigrant ancestors honored nothing when they came to the U.S. but their desire to be here. They didn’t anxiously adhere to “the rules.” They did the bare, bare minimum that was asked of them, which was easy to do.

4. If we reverted to our earlier, extremely simple requirements for entering the country and becoming a citizen, we would not have illegal immigrants. If we choose not to go back to the earlier requirements, we have to explain why.

The usual explanation is that if we made it as simple now as it once was to enter this country and become a citizen, the U.S. would be “flooded” with “waves” of Latin Americans, poor and non-English-speaking, ruining the country. Which is exactly the argument that has always been made against immigrants, be they Irish, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, etc. Each group is going to destroy the country and American culture and society. It never seems to happen.

But it might happen now, with Latin American immigrants, not because they will destroy the country but because those in the U.S. who are so afraid of them will rip the country apart trying to keep them out. Taking the long view, I can say there’s hope that that won’t happen. But it will take a good fight to get all Americans to realize that the key to this nation’s success has always been the open-door policy.

Immigration will always be with us—thank goodness! The only informed position on the challenges it poses is a historically informed position.

The 2017 Fugitive Slave Act

We’re re-running this post because, sadly, it is more relevant than ever after the blow to DACA this past week. People who participate in DACA give all of their information (country of birth, birth date, any IDs like a driver’s license, home address, relatives’ names and addresses, etc.) to the federal government in return for its aid. Now that information might be used against them, to locate and deport them and their families. It’s one more way in which a federal act filters down to local law enforcement, which filters down to all of us, just as the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act did:

We’re interrupting our series on Barack Obama’s Farewell Address once again, but this time not because it was removed from whitehouse.gov, along with pages on civil rights, healthcare, and climate science, by the Trump Administration. Instead, we are struck by how much the war on Latin American immigrants (and this one group is the real focus of anti-immigrant activism in this country) reminds us of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act (also known as the Fugitive Slave Law).

We learn about the FSA when we learn about the Compromise of 1850, of which it was a part. To pacify proslavery forces who were angry that California was allowed to enter the Union as a free state, the Compromise allowed slaveholding and trading to continue in Washington, DC, and upheld the “rights” of slaveholders to their “property”—enslaved people—throughout the Union.

This meant that if you lived in, say, Wisconsin, and had voted to pass personal liberty laws in your state outlawing slavery, those laws were overturned. Slavery would be upheld in “free” states, because slaveholders were allowed to enter free states and reclaim escaped people, and even pick up black citizens who had never been enslaved—the word of the slaveholder was accepted over the word of the black citizen and even the white citizens of the state. Whites were forced by the law to help slave-catchers, they were fined and jailed for failing to do so, or for helping an escapee, and whites were forced to live with the rescinding of the personal liberty laws they had voted for on a state level. Thus, slavery was basically enforced in every state of the Union, and outrage over this was expressed by many Northerners who had previously been publicly neutral about slavery.

If the Fugitive Slave Act was all about enslaved blacks, asked Northerners, why was it fining, jailing, and threatening free whites? Why did it seem to focus just as much on attacking the liberties of northern white citizens as it did on preventing black Americans from gaining their liberty? It was just another example of the slave power perverting democracy and threatening free government.

When we hear people today, in 2017, talking about the laws and acts they are going to put in place to stop the alleged democracy-killing overflow of Spanish-speaking immigration to the United States, they sound a lot like people who would have liked the Fugitive Slave Act. Here is an NPR interview with Brandon Judd, president of the union that represents U.S. Border Patrol agents, the National Border Patrol Council, which endorsed Trump during the campaign, from yesterday:

INSKEEP: What do you think about the president’s effort to compel, if he can, local and state authorities to be more helpful to the Border Patrol and immigration authorities in doing their jobs and rounding up people who are here illegally?

JUDD: Well – so my understanding is that he’s not compelling them to help us round them up. But what he is saying is if they come in contact, if a police officer, say, from Phoenix Police Department – if a police officer from the Phoenix, Ariz., police department comes in contact with somebody that he knows is here or suspects that is here illegally, then his responsibility is to contact an immigration enforcement officer to come in and find out. It’s the same with me. As a Border Patrol agent, if I make a vehicle stop and I find that illegal activity is taking place outside of the laws that I enforce…

INSKEEP: Drunk driver for example.

JUDD: Exactly – it’s my responsibility to call the local law – the local law enforcement so that they can come out and take care of the problem.

INSKEEP: Are we not actually arguing about that much then? Because there are local authorities who are saying, yeah, yeah, if we find somebody who’s obviously in violation, we have to turn them over, but we do not want to make that our job. We don’t want it to be our job to seek them out or to hold people when otherwise there would not be reason to hold them.

JUDD: And it’s not going to be their job. It’s not going to be their job to go seek out illegal immigrants in the United States. That is immigrations officers’ jobs and it’s not theirs. But if they do come in contact with people that are in the country illegally, they should have a responsibility and duty to report people that are breaking the law.

Judd’s statements are disingenuous. How would that police office in Phoenix “know” that someone he meets is “here illegally” without a mechanism in place to track all immigrants and make their data available at all times to police, and require the police to consult it? There’s no way to “know” someone is a legal immigrant or not without looking up their information, which means asking/forcing the person you have “come in contact with” to give you their name, address, etc. And of course, “come in contact” with is blandly disingenuous as well: when do police officers “come in contact” with people? We’d wager that 95% of the time it’s by stopping them on the premise of a violation of the law. Judd himself puts contact in the context of a vehicle stop. So already we have a question of who is being stopped and why which has, of course, been asked for over a century in this country, beginning with black Americans stopped by police for no reason and extending to brown Americans getting the same treatment.

The reporter’s characterization of police officers resisting being turned into immigrant-catchers is in line with all white Americans being forced into being slave-catchers in 1850. Judd says it won’t be the police officer’s job to “seek out illegal immigrants”, but reiterates that police officers who don’t turn in people who are here illegally are violating their duty and the law. If you get in trouble for failing to do something, you will find ways to do it. If police officers will be sanctioned for failing to turn in illegal immigrants, they will begin turning in illegal immigrants. They will look at the data, identify people here illegally in their cities and towns, stop them on another pretext, and turn them in.

And if the police must do this, eventually they will enlist the general public in helping them to do this. They will paint all immigrants here illegally as murderers, as Judd does later in the interview by saying “I think the country is going to be a lot safer. I really do, yes, absolutely. I mean, I was there with what they call the angel families, families that had children that were killed by persons that were in the United States illegally.” And once all illegal immigrants are child-murderers, it will be against the law not to seek them out and turn them in, for everyone.

And then we are all slave-catchers.

The 2017 Fugitive Immigrant Act

If the Fugitive Slave Act was all about black slaves, asked Northerners, why was it fining, jailing, and threatening free whites? Why did it seem to focus just as much on attacking the liberties of northern white citizens as it did on preventing black Americans from gaining their liberty? It was just another example of the slave power perverting democracy and threatening free government.

INSKEEP: What do you think about the president’s effort to compel, if he can, local and state authorities to be more helpful to the Border Patrol and immigration authorities in doing their jobs and rounding up people who are here illegally?

JUDD: Well – so my understanding is that he’s not compelling them to help us round them up. But what he is saying is if they come in contact, if a police officer, say, from Phoenix Police Department – if a police officer from the Phoenix, Ariz., police department comes in contact with somebody that he knows is here or suspects that is here illegally, then his responsibility is to contact an immigration enforcement officer to come in and find out. It’s the same with me. As a Border Patrol agent, if I make a vehicle stop and I find that illegal activity is taking place outside of the laws that I enforce…

INSKEEP: Drunk driver for example.

JUDD: Exactly – it’s my responsibility to call the local law – the local law enforcement so that they can come out and take care of the problem.

INSKEEP: Are we not actually arguing about that much then? Because there are local authorities who are saying, yeah, yeah, if we find somebody who’s obviously in violation, we have to turn them over, but we do not want to make that our job. We don’t want it to be our job to seek them out or to hold people when otherwise there would not be reason to hold them.

JUDD: And it’s not going to be their job. It’s not going to be their job to go seek out illegal immigrants in the United States. That is immigrations officers’ jobs and it’s not theirs. But if they do come in contact with people that are in the country illegally, they should have a responsibility and duty to report people that are breaking the law.

And then we are all slave-catchers.

Truth v. Myth: Illegal immigrants must be stopped!