Our Immigration Past, Present and Future

There are certain ideals we proudly carry in our collective cultural legacy.

All men are created equal...
I have a dream...
Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...

Sadly, in many anti-immigrant arguments I've encountered, this last one has been modified to exclude those without immigration papers. In fact, if this argument had been accepted less than a hundred years ago, the great waves of Irish, Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrants would have been placed in isolated detention centers and deported. Joshua Holland argues this more eloquently than I ever could in his article on AlterNet, Hardliners Try to White-Wash Their Own Pasts by Redefining Immigration .

Descendants of the huge waves of European immigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries make much of the fact that their great grandparents came here "legally," but they rest their case on a technicality: the only reason they were legal was that there was no law in effect restricting European immigration until the 1920s.

Furthermore, one of the few restrictions on immigration at that time was the Chinese Exclusion Act, which severely limited Chinese immigration and denied Chinese residents a path to citizenship. This first major law restricting immigration in the United States was on the books in one form or another, from 1882 to 1943.

It was enacted in response to economic fears, especially on the West Coast, where native-born Americans attributed unemployment and declining wages to Chinese workers whom they also viewed as racially inferior.

Does this argument sound familiar? It is a sad reality that United States' Immigration history is one steeped in racism. When I hear nativists declare, "The law is the law," I have to agree with them. But is every law a good law? Slavery was law. Segregation was law. Lynching was law and a national past time. The 1920 Cable Act mandated that any American woman who married an Asian should lose her citizenship. In 1923 the Supreme Court ruled that Indians from the Asian continent could not become citizens. There is a reason why laws are modified and repealed.

Laws change to better reflect our culture's growing social conscience. Immigration and Custom Enforcement's strict adherence to faulty law, while disregarding the United States Constitution and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, does not create justice in our society. In fact, I would argue that the Enforcement-on-Steroids strategy is actually stripping away at our proud cultural legacy.