Trump's racist view of immigration runs through our nation's history

[j brown's body]

"Although Trump’s immigration policies are intended to be perceived as crueler than those of his predecessors (and some of them are), they are merely the latest instantiation of a centuries-long American tradition: laws meant to exclude people of color and privilege whiteness.

This story begins with the very first immigration act in the United States, the 1790 Naturalization Act, which limited the right to citizenship in the nation to “free white persons” ie landowning white men.

...The first race-based restriction was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese people from migrating to the United States and greenlit the deportation of those in the country without authorization. ...The 1882 Act cannot be thought of as simply a relic of the past – it is here that we get the category of the “illegal”, deportable, immigrant, whose race makes them unworthy of co-presence.

The race-based restrictions expand through the1924 Walter Reed Act that established racial quotas, by limiting the number of people who could arrive in the country to 2% of the population in the 1890 census – a time in which few non-European immigrants were in the United States. It continued to ban immigration from Asia and denied admission to the US to anyone who could not become a citizen (ie who wasn’t white).

As the historian Mae Ngai argues, this act came to define race in America by forcing the law to articulate a global racial hierarchy of “white” and “non-white”. In the lead up to its passage, “white” as a category was adjudicated through canonical cases. In 1922, a Japanese man was told his light skin did not qualify him as white because he wasn’t “caucasian”, but the following year a Sikh man was told that while he was “caucasian” via the race science of the time, he wasn’t white in the eyes of the “common man”.

....The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolished racial quotas, but its sponsors attempted to preserve the nation’s whiteness by making family reunification the mechanism for the US migration system, thinking that because people from “Africa and Asia have very few relatives here, comparatively few could immigrate from those countries”.

Link

Add its attacks on DEI, the Trump administration may well represent the most racist presidency since Woodrow Wilson.

 

[MamboDervish]

"Although Trump’s immigration policies are intended to be perceived as crueler than those of his predecessors (and some of them are), they are merely the latest instantiation of a centuries-long American tradition: laws meant to exclude people of color and privilege whiteness.

This story begins with the very first immigration act in the United States, the 1790 Naturalization Act, which limited the right to citizenship in the nation to “free white persons” ie landowning white men.

...The first race-based restriction was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese people from migrating to the United States and greenlit the deportation of those in the country without authorization. ...The 1882 Act cannot be thought of as simply a relic of the past – it is here that we get the category of the “illegal”, deportable, immigrant, whose race makes them unworthy of co-presence.

The race-based restrictions expand through the1924 Walter Reed Act that established racial quotas, by limiting the number of people who could arrive in the country to 2% of the population in the 1890 census – a time in which few non-European immigrants were in the United States. It continued to ban immigration from Asia and denied admission to the US to anyone who could not become a citizen (ie who wasn’t white).

As the historian Mae Ngai argues, this act came to define race in America by forcing the law to articulate a global racial hierarchy of “white” and “non-white”. In the lead up to its passage, “white” as a category was adjudicated through canonical cases. In 1922, a Japanese man was told his light skin did not qualify him as white because he wasn’t “caucasian”, but the following year a Sikh man was told that while he was “caucasian” via the race science of the time, he wasn’t white in the eyes of the “common man”.

....The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolished racial quotas, but its sponsors attempted to preserve the nation’s whiteness by making family reunification the mechanism for the US migration system, thinking that because people from “Africa and Asia have very few relatives here, comparatively few could immigrate from those countries”.

Link

Add its attacks on DEI, the Trump administration may well represent the most racist presidency since Woodrow Wilson.

Thanks for the post. As a person who must be considered to be just about as White as they come (all three of my genetic tests reveal me to be almost exclusively of Baltic and North Sea heritage, with Viking and Northern European dominance dating back well over 1,000 years) I must admit to being genuinely embarrassed by how cowardly White people in America are. I can't help but wonder what the **** my fellow White folks are so afraid of. Nobody has ever even suggested, let alone attempted to force them to mate with America's minorities. Somebody should tell whitey that being cowards is a really bad look, and adds nothing flattering to their global image.