The race foe
It was only after the Civil War that a nation of settlers began to look upon new arrivals as what we today call immigrants rather than emigrants. Whereas emigrant had been commonly used to refer to a settler, as historian Donna Gabaccia writes, immigrant had a largely negative connotation.28 Amid the rise of industrial capitalism, the United States violently subdued the last major armed indigenous rebellions and consolidated its transcontinental dominion, closing the mythic frontier. The rise of corporate power, however, also undermined the basis for white settler egalitarianism: independent free labor. Newly arriving immigrants from Asia were not considered co-participants in the project of American empire and so were scapegoated for the unfolding economic plight.29
In response to the economic turbulence brought on by industrialization, the late nineteenth-century Populist movement of the people against corporate rule overlapped with a separate nativist movement for limiting who constituted “the people” so as to exclude Asians. As Teddy Roosevelt described it, Chinese exclusion renewed the American promise of a free labor empire of white settlers that African slavery, by creating an alien domestic black population, had threatened: “The democracy, with the clear instinct of race selfishness, saw the race foe, and kept out the dangerous alien. The presence of the negro in our Southern States is a legacy from the time when we were ruled by a transoceanic aristocracy. The whole civilization of the future owes a debt of gratitude greater than can be expressed in words to that democratic policy which has kept the temperate zones of the new and the newest worlds a heritage for white people.”30 For many, slavery had created a race problem; after the Civil War, Chinese exclusion was the means to stop the creation of another.31
With the Spanish-American War, however, Roosevelt fought for and celebrated the creation of a transoceanic empire, the opening of a new frontier and new markets, as the United States seized the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. In Hawaii, American sugar plantation owners overthrew Queen Liliuokalani in a coup and won the islands’ annexation as a US territory. Imperialists justified military and economic expansion by appealing to American national and white racial exceptionalism, while many anti-imperialists opposed the war and annexation on the nativist grounds that it would bring non-whites into the country.32 The new phase of American overseas imperialism, as historian Paul A. Kramer writes, drew new “lines of race [that] would separate and bind those who ruled and those who were ruled.”33 The imperial contact with foreigners and the figure of the great white man astride the world, however, also strengthened the nativist idea that the great white race was at risk of contamination and in need of preservation.34 Fortification and expansion were both coterminous and in conflict. Both defined what it meant to be an American.
The ban on Chinese people was extended to bar them from the Philippines, now an American possession.35 It was followed by bans on other Asian nationalities, including one creating the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone, which prohibited entry to the United States of all but those from Japan and the Philippines. Filipinos were American nationals (to nativists’ dismay) by virtue of their colonial subordination.36 Meanwhile, Japanese were targeted aggressively for exclusion, indirectly in 1907 (as part of an agreement with Japan, whose government the United States sought to avoid angering) and by law in 1924.37 Remarkably, white opposition was motivated in part by Japanese Americans’ determination to pursue independent settler life, with families and farms. In response, Japanese people were targeted by alien land laws that barred them from owning farms.38 Japanese American economic independence posed a direct threat to white supremacy because whiteness was in large part defined by economic independence.
Only white settlers, “who maintained productive control over labor through land ownership or artisanal work, were truly independent and thus capable of participating in politics,” as legal scholar Aziz Rana writes. Other forms of labor were degrading, and those who performed them were deemed unworthy of free citizenship. But since such menial labor was necessary to the system, racialized groups like enslaved Africans and Chinese workers were required to perform that labor; indeed, it was precisely the consignment to menial labor that made those workers intelligible as racialized others. “This intrinsic connection between economic freedom and economic compulsion meant that for settlers to enjoy free labor, they had to compartmentalize degraded work along ethnic, racial, and gender lines. And once consigned to wage earning, tenancy, conscription, and various modes of peonage, social outsiders then found their status justified precisely because of their relationship to production”39 writes Rana. Or as W.E.B. Du Bois summarized the white perception of race as class and class as race : “Negroes are servants; servants are Negroes.”40
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, millions from southern and eastern Europe began to migrate into the booming industrial workforce.41 They were targeted in part because their dependency on wage labor made them seem unworthy for free citizenship and thus not entirely white. During an era of incredibly violent labor conflict, political and union radicalism could likewise only be attributed to a racial other. “There is no such thing as an American anarchist,” the journal Public Opinion intoned after the Haymarket riot of 1886. “The American character has in it no element which can under any circumstances be won to uses so mistaken.”42
According to Hirota, it was Massachusetts and New York’s immigration control targeting Irish paupers that “molded the legal and administrative frameworks of national policy for excluding and deporting foreigners,” thus enabling Chinese exclusion.43 Chinese exclusion, in turn, was a critical precedent, writes historian Erika Lee. It created “the models by which to measure the desirability (and ‘whiteness’) of other immigrant groups.” Italians, for example, were called “the Chinese of Europe” and “padrone coolies.”44
Chinese exclusion normalized racially targeted exclusion and created institutions to administer and enforce it. Indeed, the Immigration Act of 1882, passed the same year, was the first comprehensive federal immigration law.45 It barred entry to “any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” It was modeled on New York and Massachusetts immigration laws that had been struck down by the Supreme Court because they infringed on the constitutional power accorded to the president and Congress over international affairs.46 The Immigration Act of 1891 then provided the federal government with its first general deportation powers and gave immigration inspectors the unchallengeable power to exclude those they deemed “likely to become a public charge.”47 As would be the case with the late twentieth-century war on crime, the spectacular punishment of stigmatized minorities built repressive institutions that would target many others. Racism provided legitimacy to a system that oppressed the majority.
A nation of immigrants
World War I nationalism provided critical fuel to the movement against southern and eastern European migration. It unleashed an extreme variant of patriotism under the banner of “100 percent Americanism,” which rendered “hyphenated Americans” suspect. German language schooling was shut down. English was patriotism’s exclusive mother tongue.48 Assimilation rendered most European-descendant Americans white and thus Americans.
As the Russian Revolution excited fear of domestic insurrection, the new European migrants were viewed as a political threat. In 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched raids to round up and deport alleged immigrant radicals. The first Red Scare, writes political scientist Daniel Tichenor, “encouraged the brief yet crucial defection of key business groups from the pro-immigration camp,” paving the way for the national origins quotas’ massive immigration restrictions.49
But it was the Progressive Era’s congressional Dillingham Commission that first created “immigration as a ‘problem’” to be solved by government—in particular the “Jewish, Italian, and Slavic ‘new immigrants’” who were presumed to “be less assimilable and more ‘alien,’” as historian Katherine Benton-
Cohen writes. This model, she argues, implicitly designated Mexicans and Asians as entirely “other,” which helped “produce a racial subtext about ‘illegal aliens’ to the present day.” It was “a fact-finding body of unprecedented size and scale” whose reports, published in 1911, totaled twenty-nine thousand pages.50
The era’s elites held expertise in high esteem and many turned to eugenics to make the case for restriction (though the Dillingham Commission, Benton-Cohen writes, did not).51 Race science became conventional wisdom that shaped not only academic scholarship and policymaking but also popular political culture. At state fairs, eugenicists ran “fitter family” competitions to celebrate exquisite human stock, alongside the contests for livestock.52 The grim obverse to this form of “positive eugenics” was “negative eugenics,” which emphasized limiting the immigration and reproduction of those purported inferiors.
The restriction movement had wide appeal, though organized immigrants, the politicians who represented them, and business resisted it.53 But in contrast to the lead role played by white workers in the campaign for Asian exclusion, the push for southern and eastern European restriction was spearheaded by Harvard-educated Anglo-Americans at the Immigration Restriction League (IRL), founded in Massachusetts, a stronghold of anti-Irish politics throughout the nineteenth century, and focused on lobbying and social scientific research.54 Prominent Western nativists were often themselves immigrants, and they often targeted Asians on behalf of white people as a whole.55 By contrast, the patrician nativists at the IRL worried over the immigration of and high birthrates among southern and eastern Europeans. It would, as IRL vice president, “self-proclaimed” anthropologist, and leading conservationist Madison Grant put it in his book The Passing of the Great Race, trigger Anglo-American “race suicide,” a concept that his friend and fellow conservationist Teddy Roosevelt likewise embraced.56 Mercifully, American racial stock might be upgraded “not by killing off the less fit, but by preventing them from coming into the State, either by being born into it or by migration.”57 The nativist environmentalists who launched the contemporary movement in the 1970s alleged that immigration harmed nature; the conservationist eugenicists of Grant’s era believed that science could assist nature in making society more fit.58
Yet restrictionism was by no means an exclusive project of the Northeast elite. Some West Coast anti-Asian nativists offered their support. The AFL leadership, overcoming internal opposition, swung the organization behind restriction.59 In the late nineteenth century, the anti-Catholic and nativist American Protective Association had developed a mass base in the Midwest and Northeast.60 And then, in the 1920s, the rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan saw millions of white Protestants nationwide, often middle-class, join the organization. They called for “the restoration of ‘true Americanism’ and offered members a platform that demonized blacks, Catholics, Jews, Mexicans, Asians, and any other non-white ethnic immigrants while also condemning Communism, most other forms of leftist politics, and ‘base’ cultural influences such as alcohol, birth control, and the teaching of evolution in public schools.” The KKK unleashed murderous violence and counted governors and senators among its members—all as part of an organization that for its members was as wholesome and innocuous as today’s Rotary Clubs.61 In the South, elites had mounted a major campaign to recruit immigrants to settle in the region—an effort to economically modernize and solve labor shortage problems, replacing free black people and poor whites. But when that failed Southerners quickly embraced xenophobia on familiar racist grounds.62
The nativist campaign against disfavored Europeans soon won legislative victories. In 1917, a literacy test was adopted alongside the Asiatic Barred Zone, which didn’t work well because too many targeted migrants were literate.63 Far more consequentially, the Immigration Act of 1921 and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 created the national origins quota system to dramatically restrict immigration from eastern and southern Europe. The quota system was an astonishingly bureaucratic and statistically complex attempt to freeze US demography in place by using census data on Americans’ immigrant backgrounds to determine the number of visas allotted to people from various European countries.64 The more Americans who were classified as being from a given country, the more visas people from that country received. The Johnson-Reed Act extended the Asian ban to cover Japanese, excluding all “aliens ineligible for citizenship”: unlike restricted Europeans, banned Asians were denied the right to naturalize because of their race. As a result, they were banned even if they came from a non-Asian country.65 There were only a token number of visas issued to independent African nations, because black Americans were treated as though they had no national origins at all.66 For the duration of the quotas’ four-decade lifespan, immigrants from Great Britain, Germany and Ireland made up nearly three-quarters of the total.67
Race and immigration law were one and the same—with lethal results. In the face of Nazi terror, the US government actively restricted Jewish immigration, with the staunch support of the American Legion and other nationalist groups.68 White leaders of settler societies as far away as Australia and southern Africa followed American immigration race law.69 As did the Nazis. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler praised American immigration law for “excluding certain races from naturalization,” favorably comparing the United States against a racially defiled Latin America. He also called nativist and eugenicist Grant’s Passing of the Great Race “his Bible.”70
Racial bars to naturalization were not fully eliminated until the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act. Even then, Asians were assigned quotas based on both race and country of origin and provided only token quotas until 1965.71 It also maintained the national origins quotas, barred communists and homosexuals, and protected growers against sanction for employing undocumented workers. The right to exploit Mexican labor was ardently defended by leading nativists in Congress.72 The 1952 law was thus largely a reactionary one and was passed over President Harry Truman’s veto. When white Americans today say that their ancestors “came the right way,” this is, often unconsciously, the history they are referring to.
Chinese exclusion was only relaxed in 1943 when China became a World War II ally.73 Americans of Japanese descent were collectively imprisoned because they shared a bloodline with the enemy, at times transported and guarded by Border Patrol agents.74 The law that provided for the transition to independence of the Philippines simultaneously all but barred Filipino immigration; the 1910s mass migration of Filipino workers to Hawaiian sugar plantations and Western farms and canneries had prompted warnings of an “invasion” and a sexual threat to white women.75 Meanwhile, the New Deal state performed a quietly systematic mass assimilation—a second Homestead Act of sorts. The social-democratic policy program that made the mid-century middle class (secure jobs, subsidized homeownership, social insurance) was systematically denied to non-whites, effectuating the neat trick of making “white ethnic” families seem naturally American in contrast to others who could or would not assimilate. The suburbia that the postwar order built became the social base for California’s 1990s nativist revolt.
Organized white supremacists and nativists know the racist history of immigration law well, and take explicit inspiration from it. But most people have no clue: “colorblind” liberal immigration politics have taught most Americans that we have always been a “nation of immigrants.” It was President Lyndon Johnson who accelerated this collective forgetting of racist population politics in 1965, when he signed the Hart-Celler Act, eliminating the quota system. “Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers,” he proclaimed. “From a hundred different places or more they have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide.”76
The law’s origins are complex. It was passed in part because targeting the nationals of would-be allies for exclusion, like the repression of black people in the Jim Crow South, was a geopolitical liability. Immigration law met the demands of a liberal Cold War order in which the
United States struggled against the Soviet Union for the decolonizing world’s affections.77 Targeted groups like Italians had also made their way into white America and clamored for repeal.78 The quota system was replaced with one prioritizing family unification. In doing so, it favorably remade the United States’ image for the world, in the world’s image: that immigrants chose America was part of what made it exceptional. Johnson pointed to the diversity of US troops fighting and dying in Vietnam, a war that he insisted was not imperialist, and announced that the United States was wide open to Cuban refugees. And he made a point of emphasizing that the law’s significance was primarily symbolic and suggested that a white majority would remain unchallenged. “This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” said Johnson at a signing ceremony before the Statue of Liberty. “It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power. Yet it is still one of the most important acts of this Congress and of this administration. For it does repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice. It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation.”79
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