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Journalism of Courage
With the US presidential election around the corner, immigration has emerged as the most burning issue in the country’s electoral debates. While some may think it’s an issue popularised by Donald Trump, immigration has dominated the American political discourse since its discovery in 1492. A country built by immigrants, America has had two distinct periods of immigration history. In this two-part series, we will first explore the initial period from 1492 to 1996. This period was largely defined by legislation designed to either promote or deter foreign entry. The second period is the era of deportation, where immigration became a national security issue and the immigration from Latin America succeeded all waves before it. Throughout this time, there has always been the notion of the ‘other’ – an immigrant that is less desirable due to their customs, appearance or perceived differences from the native population.
On Easter weekend of 1992, a group of 140 Haitian refugees occupied a hangar at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay. Those assembled assumed that they were heading to America but at the last moment, military officials informed them that they were being denied on health grounds with test results indicating they had AIDs. Instead of the promise of a free land, the Haitians were held in detention for almost two years before being returned to a war-torn country.
A decade previously, the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) noted that they found a connection between 34 cases of AIDS and Haitians. This ‘connection’ led to Haitians being stigmatised, leading to tens of thousands of AIDS-free Haitians in the US losing jobs, housing, educational opportunities and social acceptance.
The association between immigrant groups and disease is not unique to Haiti. In 1849, Irish Catholics were blamed for a cholera outbreak on the East coast. The Chinese were accused of transmitting plague. The Italians were accused of carrying tuberculosis and the Jews, trachoma. Pigmented immigrants like the Vietnamese were blamed for hepatitis and most recently, Latin American immigrants were accused of spreading Covid. Immigrants bringing in diseases is as fundamental to the American psyche as apple pie, baseball and freedom.
The first to do so however, were the colonists, particularly Christopher Columbus, who brought with him enough diseases to kill 95 per cent of the native population.
The Native Americans’ way of life was disrupted in the late 15th century when Europeans began to arrive on American shores. Some came to explore, while others came to conquer. With them, they brought new plants, animals, ideas, technology, and diseases. At first, native Americans and Europeans coexisted. However, as European immigration increased, Natives realised that their customs and traditions were very different from European colonists. While Native Americans practised communal land ownership, Europeans generally bought and sold land individually. A disconnect between the two’s conceptualisation of land led to Europeans claiming most of Indian territory.
Those Europeans attracted even more settlers and by the 1600s three different groups of immigrants — economic (in search of jobs), religious (fleeing persecution), and forced (slaves) — came to settle in the United States.
The British Crown, which controlled most of America, embraced this. According to Marilyn Baseler, author of Asylum for Mankind (1998), England was happy to send away its “redundant”, “beggars”, and “orphans”. British convicts were offered either the noose or a passage to America. By the end of the 17th century, England even promoted its colonies as a refuge for the oppressed subjects of its rivals.
However, as the Crown lost its influence, it embraced a policy of curtailing immigration, as a means of fortifying its existing colonies, while the colonists viewed immigration as a means of consolidating the newly claimed land. As Maxine Seller emphasised in Historical Perspectives on American Immigration Policy (1982), the colonists were so sure that immigration meant prosperity, that they listed restricted immigration as one of the reasons for breaking up with the British polity.
When America gained independence in 1776, one of the first issues that politicians grappled with was that of citizenship. Having no concrete solution, they largely left the topic unexplored. As Kevin Johnson, Dean of UC Davis School of Law, states, “In the Constitution, very little attention is paid to immigration.”
Although many of the founders were concerned about Catholicism, assimilation and alien voting rights, Thomas Jefferson summarised their position when he said that “the present desire of America is to produce a rapid population, by as great importations of foreigners as possible.” Initially, foreigners were reluctant to embark on a long and treacherous journey to unknown lands. However, as promises of riches travelled across the Atlantic, immigration soared and so did anti-immigrant sentiments.
The immigration debate in the late 18th century mirrored that of today. As Seller remarks, arguments in favour of immigration tend to revolve around the “favourable” quality of immigrants and the notion of the US as a “haven.” Restrictionists on the other hand, claim that immigrants threaten the nation’s “ideological affiliations” and “political institutions.”
The first to bear the brunt of that stigma were the German and Irish. Colonists worried that German immigrants, as subjects of the Holy Roman Empire being unaccustomed to freedom themselves, would abuse it in America. Irish immigrants, primarily the Catholic poor were accused of having excess loyalty to the Pope and being financial burdens to the state. As one 1848 Massachusetts Senate report states, “The Irish are wholly of another kind in morals and intellect … neither add to the intelligence nor wealth of this comparatively new country.”
That being said, as Paul Spickard, Professor of History at UC Santa Barbara, notes in an interview with indianexpress.com, “There was never a time where Irish or German people couldn’t vote, run for office, hold property or testify in court.” While they were ‘otherised’ in American sentiments, they did not face the same type of discrimination as the Chinese and Black population experienced.
While immigration was fairly limited up until 1830, international developments such as the Irish potato famine (1845-1852) and European political revolutions helped triple the number of foreigners entering the US. While British immigrants had largely assimilated into American society, as non-British and non-Protestant immigrants came to the States, a nativism movement emerged over fears that the new immigrants were poor, non-English speaking and religiously diverse. American nativism was so widespread that by the 1850s, a new political party sprung up around it. The Know Nothings party subsequently won local elections and came close to competing for the presidency.
When the Civil War began in 1861, and demand for labour increased, pro-immigration Republicans sought to discredit nativism. The party lost its influence but the nativism sentiment never disappeared. During the war, the Lincoln government also regulated a treaty wherein China had to allow immigration to the US to meet with labour shortages. Chinese immigrants arrived in droves to California, filling a labour shortage within the railway industry. However, according to Johnson, there was a negative reaction to Chinese migration, some of it “blatantly racist,” which led to the formation of the first discriminatory US immigration laws. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which imposed a tax on Chinese immigrants and denied entry to “any convict, lunatic and idiot.”
Around the same time, America also witnessed an influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe with 10.4 million arriving between 1861 and 1890. These Europeans, unlike their predecessors, were criticised for a failure to assimilate, with Melting Pot (1908) author Israel Zangwill writing that they created ethnic enclaves which “at their most vibrant, were social worlds unto themselves.” A similar argument would be made in the 21st century against Mexican immigrants.
With the new nativism movement gaining traction, scholars of the era contended that certain ethnicities possessed immutable intrinsic characteristics that would prevent assimilation into American society. “They looked at things like head size and came up with biological arguments to keep out certain people,” says Johnson.
These claims proved politically popular and culminated in a number of anti-immigration laws, literacy tests, and language requirements being implemented from 1907 to 1920. Finally in 1921 and 1924, the US government, under President Calvin Coolidge, passed two national quota laws. Months before signing the Immigration Act of 1924, Coolidge had argued that “America must be kept American.”
The law set an annual quota of 164,000 on immigration and established a country cap that allocated 82 per cent of the world quota to immigrants from Western and Northern Europe. Based on 1890 census data, it severely limited immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, completely excluded immigration from Asia and created a new category of ‘undocumented’ immigrants who were eligible for deportation. Between 1919 and 1932, the flow of immigrants decreased by 94 per cent.
According to Tom Gjelten, correspondent for NPR, the 1924 Act was an attempt to categorise people according to their desirability and ability to assimilate. He says, “the Nordics were considered the best immigrants, people from Asia and Africa were at the bottom and Mediterranean or Slavic were somewhere in between.”
However, as the law did not place restrictions on the Western Hemisphere, waves of Mexicans entered the country to meet labour demands.
As the 1924 Act did not restrict Mexican immigrants and because Mexico shares land border with the US, Mexican immigration soared in the 1920s, despite arguments that they were “mixed breeds,” or as economist Roy Garis stated at a federal Senate meeting in 1930, “peons.” As a result, the federal government decided to classify Mexicans as ‘white,’ while excluding Indians from the same category despite racial theorists claiming that Indians were of Aryan descent.
As the 1924 legislation applied retroactively, one Indian immigrant family was particularly affected.
Kala Bagai, born to Sikh parents in Amritsar, married her husband Vaishno Das and in 1915, at the age of 22, emigrated to the US with her three children. Arriving in San Francisco, according to her granddaughter Rani Bagai, Kala was amazed by the city, and delighted in walking barefooted across the beach. She was one of the first Indians to emigrate and newspapers covered her story with amazement, remarking on her inability to speak English and her distinctive nose ring. Kala and her family eventually settled into American life, opening up a number of convenience stores and helping to welcome other South Asian immigrants.
However, after the quota system was established, Vaishno was forced to abandon his stores and asked to go back to India. As members of the anti-colonial Ghadar party, Vaishno and Kala feared returning to India and instead opted to remain illegally in America. In 1928, Vaishno died by suicide and wrote, “I do not choose to live the life of an interned person.” Kala eventually got citizenship in 1950, became a community leader, and had a street in San Francisco named after her in 2021. However, her story remains one of many told by immigrants, of discrimination, hardship and loss before acceptance.
While Kala and her family were undocumented, millions of Mexicans were legally allowed entry into the United States. However, that did not stop people from resenting them being there.
According to Johnson, Mexicans were not kept out by quotas and instead, informal measures were employed to deter immigration. During the Great Depression era, over one million Mexicans were deported or ‘repatriated’ to create jobs for natives, even though 60 per cent of those exiled were US citizens. During World War II, the demand for labour spiked again, leading the government to implement the Mexican Labour Program, commonly known as the Bracero Program. Between 1942 and 1964, the programme facilitated the legal entry of 4.5 million Mexican workers. However, as historian Karen Douglas reports in The Criminalisation of Immigrants (2013), rather than deter illegal immigration, the Bracero Program encouraged it. Eventually, it “cemented the relationship between US employers and relatively cheap labour supply provided by Mexican workers.”
