Immigration: A History of Xenophobia and Anti-Immigrant Myths in the US PDF

Here is the converted text from the image, formatted in Markdown: ### 4 Immigration Erika Lee The grainy black-and-white footage captures a dozen dark-skinned individuals swarming over a fence and running past a border checkpoint on Interstate 5 in San Diego County. They hop the freeway barrier an...

Here is the converted text from the image, formatted in Markdown: ### 4 Immigration Erika Lee The grainy black-and-white footage captures a dozen dark-skinned individuals swarming over a fence and running past a border checkpoint on Interstate 5 in San Diego County. They hop the freeway barrier and disappear into the US. "They keep coming," a deep-throated narrator ominously tells us. "Two million illegal immigrants in California. The federal government won't stop them at the border, yet requires us to pay billions to take care of them." Thus began California governor Pete Wilson's 1994 reelection ad. Playing to the xenophobic fears of a growing number of Californians, the ad was effective. Wilson was reelected, and voters approved Proposition 187, the "Save Our State" ballot initiative that proposed to deny nonemergency health care and public education to undocumented immigrants. Both the Wilson spot and the Proposition 187 campaign drew upon deep-rooted and well-known stereotypes about Mexican immigrants as criminals and undeserving lawbreakers. It explicitly demonized undocumented migrants, but it was a classic expression of what anthropologist Leo Chavez calls the "Latino threat narrative": all Mexicans in the United States with papers and without constitute a Hispanic “invasion' of the United States that will destroy America. The commercial's characterization of immigration also repeated one of the most enduring and powerful myths in the United States the "They Keep Coming" myth. This is how it works: immigrants are "they," not "us." Typically nonwhite and non-Protestant, they are dangerous foreigners who come here uninvited to take jobs away from Americans and to harm its people and institutions. Once started, immigration continues without end: "They keep coming." Immigration unleashes an unwanted and unending inundation of foreigners who, along with their US-citizen children, will eventually outnumber "us," meaning white and "real" Americans, and take over. In short, immigration is nothing less than a hostile invasion of the nation. Like all myths, this one distorts and obscures complex realities. For starters, it ignores the role of US foreign, economic, and immigration policies in promoting migration and obscures how global migration actually works. The United States has long been a particularly powerful actor shaping the movement of people by causing human displacement through war and foreign and economic policies. It also has a long history of coercing, recruiting, cajoling, and incentivizing foreigners to come to the country to serve its own economic needs. The US has rarely acknowledged its role in creating and directing migration and settlement. Rather, Americans typically view immigration through the "push-pull" framework whereby, the United States is responsible only for pulling foreigners to its borders and shores with the promise of jobs, freedom, and economic opportunity, but not for pushing them from their homelands in the first place. Far from being a harmless misinterpretation, the immigration myth has had dire consequences. When Americans have believed that the disadvantages of immigration have outweighed its advantages-or when certain immigrant groups have outlasted their usefulness the immigration myth has been dusted off to justify new restrictions and forms of control. We have deployed it and adapted it to demonize multiple and successive groups of immigrants and refugees while celebrating an exclusionary and nativist definition of American. It has been used to restrict both immigration and the rights of immigrants already in the country. It has been adopted to justify discriminatory immigration bans, the militarization of the US-Mexico border, and the expansion of America's deportation machine. It has allowed anti-immigrant xenophobia to become part of systemic racism and discrimination in America. The "They Keep Coming" immigration myth has deep roots in our past. We might even identify founding father Benjamin Franklin as inventor of the myth (along with his other inventions like the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove). In 1755 he anxiously characterized Germans, the largest non-English group of white settlers in colonial America, as "swarthy" aliens who "herd[ed] together." Left alone, he predicted, they would soon "be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglify-ing them." Pennsylvania would become "a Colony of Aliens," he worried. Franklin's anxiety over German immigration was expressed in ways that would become familiar to Americans across the centuries: there were too many foreigners; they did not assimilate; they were a danger that must be stopped. These anti-German sentiments established an important pattern of xenophobia in colonial America. But it was not just about a fear of foreigners. It was also about where non-English settlers fit into a colonial society defined and driven by white (English) settler colonialism, slavery, and white supremacy. Germans represented an unpredictable and growing danger to English settlers' power and dominance in the colonies at a time when they were vulnerable to a whole host of threats: mounting anti-Indian violence; an all-out war involving Pennsylvanians, the British, the French, and North American Indians; and a growing population of and dependence on enslaved Africans. This early example of the immigration myth not only provides an opportunity to see how deeply embedded it has been in American history; it also reveals how it neatly and deliberately obscures the realities of migration, including who has come and why. Franklin's message ignored how white settlers, especially Protestants like the Germans, were essential in furthering US settler colonialism. For example, the colony of Pennsylvania depended upon the migration of Europeans as part of British colonial expansion, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and land, and the establishment of white-settler control over territory and resources. The need for settlers was so great that William Penn recruited them through pamphlets and promotional writings and through agents posted in London, Dublin, Edinburgh, and Rotterdam. In the mid-nineteenth century, xenophobes and nativists warned of the new threat of Catholic immigration. Protestant preachers such as Lyman Beecher argued that Catholic foreigners were an invading force sent by **the pope.** And because they had the power to become naturalized citizens and vote, they would also be able to "throw down our free institutions." These immigrants, Beecher concluded, should be viewed as a hostile "army of soldiers, enlisted and officered, and spreading over the land." When up to1. 5 million Irish fled their homeland and came to the United States from 1846 to 1855, anti-immigrant activists formed the American (Know-Nothing) Party and devoted themselves to curbing the rights and influence of immigrants. They promoted and elected anti-immigrant candidates, and in states like Massachusetts forcibly removed more than 15,000 immigrants from 1850 to 1863. As in the colonial era, the immigration myth identified foreigners as a threat to the country during a time of great economic, social, and political upheaval in the decades leading up to the Civil War. The myth also included the identification of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants as "true" or "native" Americans who should remain the dominant force in the country. One of the Know-Nothings favorite slogans was "Americans must rule America." The promotion of the immigration myth in the nineteenth century also neatly glossed over how immigrants were not simply "com-ing"; they were being driven out of their homelands. Famine-era Irish had suffered for centuries under harsh Protestant British rule that stripped Catholics of their ability to vote, hold office, and own land. When the potato blight struck, around 15 percent of the total Irish population died of starvation and disease. Irish migration to North America was a bid for survival. The immigration myth also obscured the fact that the United States continued to rely upon foreign immigration. Large-scale European migration continued to advance the US settler colonial project of seizing Indigenous land. For example, the 1862 Homestead Act fueled European immigration with its promise to grant any person 160 acres of land recently ceded by Indigenous peoples (who viewed the act as a treaty violation). Notably, the promise extended not just to established American citizens but to new immigrants as well. Prospective settlers from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were recruited to the new territories. In the Upper Midwest, the foreign-born population ballooned while the Indigenous population dramatically declined. Serving the important needs of the expanding nation, these "Nordic" immigrants were never subjected to organized anti-immigrant campaigns. But on the West Coast, it was a different story. In 1876 the California State Senate described Chinese immigration as "dangerous unarmed invasion" that imperiled the state and the country. With Chinese immigration, the "They Keep Coming' myth became more tightly connected to racism and immigration restriction. Lawmakers identified Chinese as a "separate" race "distinct from, and antagonistic to our people." They claimed that the Chinese would soon occupy the entire Pacific coast and that it would become but a "mere colony of China." The US Congress eventually heeded the call of West Coast activists to protect them from the so-called Chinese invasion with the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The first federal law to single out an entire group for immigration exclusion based on their race and class, the Chinese Exclusion Act legalized xenophobia on an unprecedented scale. Chinese immigration plummeted. Chinese immigrants became victims of massive racial violence and were expelled from cities and towns across the US West. New immigrants were subjected to interrogations, medical examinations, lengthy detentions, surveillance, arrest, and deportation. The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act again masked the falsehoods upon which the immigration myth was built: "Chinese immigrants didn't simply come." They were pushed, lured, and brought. Chinese men had been heavily recruited to work on the country's railroads and in its factories, canneries, fisheries, and fields. In the 1860s, labor recruiters sent twelve thousand Chinese workers to build the great transcontinental railroad. But when that work was done, calls that the Chinese Must Go!" started gaining traction. Although Chinese immigrants were excluded after 1882, others continued to come. From 1905 to 1914, almost 9.9 million immigrants entered the United States. Many were from southern, eastern, and central Europe, new groups that were labeled "racial inferiors" by eugenicists such as Madison Grant. Immigration was, once again, labeled a source of economic, social, and political problems facing the country and an invasion that threatened America. "Swarms of Alpine, Mediterranean, and Jewish hybrids threaten to extinguish the old stock," Grant warned in his best-selling 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race. Grant expressed a special animosity toward Jewish immigrants, who he and other leading thinkers believed were a particularly "deficient" and dangerous "race". If the United States failed to act, Grant predicted the "passing of the great race' that had made America so 'great. Anglo Saxons needed to reassert" their "class and racial pride by shutting them out." Grant was just one of several voices clamoring for the gates to be closed to undesirable immigrants. Xenophobia and racism merged with "America first" nativism in James Murphy Ward's 1917 book, The Immigration Problem, or America First. It was also expressed in President Theodore Roosevelt's 1916 call for a "nationalized and unified America" as well as in the Ku Klux Klan's defense of an "America for Americans." By the 1920s, Congress acted again to close America's gates to dangerous foreigners. In 1924 the Johnson-Reed Act established national-origin quotas designed to cut immigration from southern and eastern Europe. It also banned "aliens ineligible for citizenship," which effectively barred all Asians. The restrictions put in place in the 1920s greatly reduced immigration. But continued US territorial expansion and rapid industrial growth required a massive number of workers, and between 1900 and 1930 at least half a million Mexicans, mostly male laborers, migrated north to the United States. An immigration backlash grew, with Mexicans embodying the latest version of the immigration myth. But unlike other groups, Mexicans had deep and historical ties in (and often predated) the United States, especially in the Southwest. They were neither foreign nor strangers. They were also white. Thus, one of the first tasks that xenophobes faced in mounting the campaign against Mexican im- migrants was to make them nonwhite, alien, and "illegal." This strategy continued to rely upon the already established immigration myth but also tailored it to specifically apply to Mexicans. Xenophobes first characterized Mexicans as a racially inferior race. Congressman John C. Box of Texas described Mexicans as a mixed race comprising "low-grade Spaniard[s], peonized Indian[s], and Negro slave[s] mixe[d] with Negroes, mulattoes, and other mongrels, and some sorry whites, already here." Others likened Mexican immigration to a reconquest of the Southwest, a rhetorical strategy that conveniently erased Mexicans historical presence in and claims to the US Southwest that and instead remade them as foreign invaders of their former homeland. Testifying before a congressional committee on immigration in 1930, for example, economist Roy Garis described the "Mexicanization" of the Southwest that jeopardized its future as thehome for millions of the white race." "Mexicanization" included the birth of Mexican American children in the United States. In 1930 California governor Clement C. Young reported that Mexican immigrants were having far more children than white Californians, a data point that he used to predict that Mexicans would soon eclipse the white population. The campaign to restrict Mexican immigration gained momentum. The US Border Patrol was established in 1924 to regulate immigration at the border and prohibit unauthorized immigration. In 1929 another law made illegal entry a criminal offense. During the Great Depression, Mexicans were targeted for restriction and deportation like no other group. From 192 to 1935, 82,400 Mexicans were deported by the federal government. They constituted 46.3 percent of all deportees even though they made up less than 1 percent of the total US population. Federal deportation drives were accompanied by local efforts to remove destitute Mexican American families. Social workers and local relief officials pressured, coerced, and deceived Mexican and Mexican American families to go to Mexico and never return. In the final count, nearly 20 percent of the entire Mexican and Mexican American population in the United States, up to one million people, were expelled to Mexico during the Depression. Sixty percent were American citizens by birth. For most, expulsion was final. Applying the "They Keep Coming" myth to Mexicans was extremely effective. That it led to such cruelty as the mass deportation efforts during the 1930s did not seem to matter to its proponents. Nor did the false claims upon which it was based. Like the Chinese before them, Mexicans had not just "come." In fact, American banks financed much of the construction of Mexican railroads that first made Mexican migration possible. During the 1880s, the Southern Pacific Railroad operated between Mexico City and Nogales; the Santa Fe-administered Mexican Central Railway ran from Mexico City to El Paso; the Huntington-owned In- ternational Railroad Company connected Durango, Mexico, with Eagle Pass, and the American-controlled National Railways linked Mexico City to Corpus Christi, Texas. By 1900, 14,573 kilometers of railroads directly linked Mexico City and the mineral-producing regions of northern Mexico with major trading cities in the American Southwest. These railroads brought agricultural goods, petroleum, and, increasingly, people northward. In addition, southwestern farmers, mine operators, railroad corporations, and large construction-firm owners aggressively recruited Mexican laborers to come north. During the 1920s, Mexicans became the largest ethnic group of farmworkers in California, and they made up nearly 60 percent of the workforce that was building and maintaining railroads in the West. Mexicans were also found in Minnesota sugar- beet fields, Chicago's factories, and Pittsburgh's steel mills. Before 1924, the US government aided this mass movement with a deliberate policy of "benign neglect" at the US-Mexico border. Border Patrol agents literallylooked the other way when Mexican workers were needed to harvest crops, build railroads, or work in the mines or factories. Both world wars ushered in a new era of recruited Mexican immigration. From 1917 to 1921, at least 72,000 guest workers were recruited to work in the United States. From 1942 to 1964, 400,000 Mexican men migrated to the US as part of the Bracero Program. After the war, the program continued, and what began as a binational agreement shifted into a program of imperial labor exploitation as the United States government and employers gradually gained control over the terms of the contracts. In addition, the direct recruitment and hiring of undocumented workers (and their families) grew alongside the program as employers increasingly sought to avoid the contract and transportation fees. Although this labor recruitment continued in Mexico, many in the United States promoted the immigration myth to close the border whenever it was deemed necessary to maintain control over an expanding pool of exploitable and deportable labor. In June 1954, the US Border Patrol announced that it would launch "Operation Wetback," an aggressive paramilitary law enforcement campaign against undocumented Mexican immigrants (ie., "wetbacks," the derogatory term used to describe migrants who entered the country without authorization by wading or swimming across the Rio Grande). A total of 1,075,168 Mexican nationals were reportedly apprehended. The immigration myth also shaped congressional debates leading up to the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Best known asa civil rights law that ended the discriminatory national origins system, the law also replicated immigration inequality, especially when it came to Mexican immigration. Lawmakers repeatedly pointed to the specter of a Latin American population explosion' that would send millions to the United States unless some restrictions were put in place. These concerns were translated into policy. The I965 Immigration Act opened the nation to new mass migration, but it also established the first global ceiling on immigration to the United States and the first-ever numerical cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. These restrictions, combined with the termination of the Bracero Program in 1964 and other measures specifically designed to scrutinize Mexican immigrants, set new limitations on Mexican immigration. What had been a massive amount of "legal immigration" (200,000 braceros and35,000 regular admissions for permanent residency) was reduced to the annual 20,000 quota. However, the need and desire for immigrant laborers, especially from Mexico, kept demand for such immigrants high. What followed was an increase in undocumented immigration and a growing number of undocumented individuals remaining in the United States rather than risking multiple trips across an increasingly militarized border. Undocumented immigrants were not the only ones to come. From 1980 to 1989 a record 6,244,379 immigrants were admitted into the United States for legal permanent residence, followed by 9,775,398 from 1990 to 1999. In stark contrast to immigration patterns earlier in the century, 80 percent of all new immigrants came from either Asia or Latin America. In addition, 1.2 million Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong refugees were resettled in the United States following the end of the wars in Southeast Asia. As in decades past, immigration became a flashpoint for culture wars and social, economic, and political anxieties that troubled Americans. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, these included a rapidly changing and deindustrializing economy that was displacing millions of blue-collar workers; new (and more radical) campaigns for social justice that challenged systemic racism, sexism, and homophobia; and the formal end of the Cold War, which raised new questions about the role of American leadership in the world. The immigration myth continued to be used to justify new restrictions on new immigration coming into the US and on immigrant communities already in the country. By the 1990s, some of the country's most prominent conservative intellectuals, writers, media commentators, and politicians helped to refine and mainstream a xenophobic message that relied upon the immigration myth to mobilize voters, gain political power, and attack the Left. Among the most prominent were writer (and British immigrant) Peter Brimelow, former presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, and Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. All argued that immigration was Just one of the many forces eroding the nation: a cult of multiculturalism and diversity that had gone too far; the rise of group identities based on race, ethnicity, and gender that threatened a unified national identity; and globalization that siphoned away jobs. They agreed that immigration was the largest and most dangerous threat. The so-called war on illegal immigration" that they helped to launch became a bipartisan effort. President Bill Clinton implemented new border-enforcement initiatives that accepted, rather than dispelled, the idea that immigration was a dangerous invasion. For example, Operation Gate-keeper' deployed increased numbers of Border Patrol agents and expanded the use of surveillance technologies to deter unauthorized immigration across the US Mexico border near San Diego. From 1993 to 1997, Congress increased southern border enforcement funding from $400 million to $800 million. After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, President George W. Bush turned immigration into a national security issue by moving all im- migration enforcement into the newly created Department of Homeland Security. He also increased investment in the Border Patrol and the de- ployment of six thousand National Guard troops to guard the border. By the time that President Barack Obama took the oath of office, the *They Keep Coming' myth had become institutionalized into federal immigration policy in the form of a legally robust, highly resourced immigration enforcement regime. Obama tried to push comprehensive immigration reform through Congress and announced a series of executive actions that granted temporary reprieve from deportation to mil- lions of Dreamers," young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as young children and who have lived and gone to school in the US. At the same time, his administration increased immigration-enforcement funding from $7.5 billion in 2002 to $18 billion in 2012. The federal government completed 651 miles of a 700-mile border fence, and immigrant detention expanded to 360,000 people by 2016. During the eight-year Obama administration, deportations also increased dramatically: 5,370,849 individuals were apprehended, 5,281,115 individuals were deported, and another 3,307,017 were apprehended at the US-Mexico border. In 2015 Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States with a message that perfectly articulated the "They Keep Coming immigration myth: *When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume are good people," Many Americans expressed outrage at these views, but in fact Trump was just repeating a message that had long been normalized on both sides of the political aisle. What was so curious about Trump's view of Mexican immigration was how outdated it was. Trump blamed Mexico for sending its people," but in fact, Mexican migration was overwhelmingly shaped by US economic, politcal, and military policies. For example, the North American Free Trade Agreement allowed American agricultural companies to flood Mexican markets with corn and other grains. Unable to compete with US corporations, two million Mexican farmers and farmworkers were forced out of agriculture. They migrated lirst to large Mexican cities and then to the United States in search of economic survival. Mexican immigration had indeed increased during the late twenti- eth century. But it was no invasion. In 2000I, foreign-born Mexicans ac- counted for only 3 percent of the total US population. In lact, by the time Trump was running for president, net migration from Mexico was below Zero, meaning that more immigrants were returning to Mexico than were heading to the United States. Despite its many inaccuracies, Trumps message resonated with voters, propelled him to the White House, and shaped his domestic policy agenda. In his first week in office, Trump signed executive orders to ban Mus- lims, deport millions, and build a wall along the US-Mexico border. Under his direction, the US government also separated more than three thousand children from their families and required asylum seekers trying to enter irom Mexico to remain in that country for months while they awaited cheir Us court hearings. During the global coronavirus pandemic, de president referred to COVID- 19 as the 'Chinese virus" and chained that immigrants were dangerous cameras of infection Bis language helpec co fuel amt Asian racism and historic levels of violence targeting Asian Americans across the country President trump eventually put in place more than one chousand nmmigration related acuons that made immigration harder and reduced the number of migrams coming to the tited Scates Although Presi- dent Joseph R. Biden Ir reversed some of these policies, many remained in place dering the first year of his administration. Immigration reform efforts stalled and many Trump alies concrued to keep the They Keep Com- ing immigration myth above From the colonial era to the Trump era, the They Keep Coming im- migration myth has been used by xenophobes to demonze immigrants and lobby lor ummigration restriction, it has created a climate of fear and fueled discrimination and explosion At the same ame . thas promoted A lalse and incomplete tarrave of how immigration works No part of the myth is actuaily true immigrants are not ounsiders "They' are 'us" lumigrants have o "kept coming" They have been driven, recruited, lured, and incentivized to come to the United States, often with the d- rect help and encouragement of the LS government and Businesses Orly by fully understanding the ongens endurance, and contemporary rele- vance of che They Keep Coming myth can we begin to dismantle it and de xenophobia at acism chat a heels