The history of the USA has been from the first moment a history of deportations
Trump promised the largest deportation operation in the history of the United States. How does his fight fit into the history of the USA? We investigate it
This seems to be a recurring question in the history of the United States and one that resonates even more strongly since Donald Trump returned to power with his restrictive immigration policies.
Precisely with that question, Daniel Greene, assistant professor of History at Northwestern University in Illinois, titled an article published in that country's Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
“Although the United States has welcomed millions of immigrants, the country's history is also full of examples of immigration restrictions,” he noted in “What does it mean to be a land of immigrants?“.
In 1958, then-senator and future president John F. Kennedy wrote the essay “A Nation of Immigrants,” in which she highlighted the fundamental role of immigrants in shaping the country and proposed the need to reform its immigration policy.
The phrase “A Nation of Immigrants” has become popular over the years in different areas of American society.
“We tell ourselves stories as a nation. One of them is that we are a land of immigrants. But, in times of crisis, we often find it difficult to deliver on the promises made in those stories,” Greene wrote.
“In fact, as historian Peter Hayes says in 'America and the Holocaust,' keeping immigrants out of the country has been 'as American as apple pie.'”
So, has the United States really been a A country open to immigration? Is Trump's current harsh policy so unusual?
A centuries-long debate
According to Greene, almost since the country's founding, Americans "have debated who should be included or excluded."
"As early as 1798,The Alien and Sedition Acts sought to deport immigrants and shut down some immigrant-owned printing presses for fear they would spread threatening ideas.”
Aviva Chomsky, a history professor and coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts, wrote in Le Monde Diplomatique in 2016 that “from its earliest moments, American history has been a history of deportation.”
“The United States was founded by a group of British people who exemplified English colonialism of a very specific kind: settler colonialism,” she tells BBC Mundo.
In traditional colonialism, the historian explains, the imperialists’ goal was typically to send “a small group of bureaucrats to establish their power over a native population,” but in settler colonialism the goal of the colonizers was “to eliminate the native population and form a new country, one made by the colonizers.”
And so, he points out, the struggle for independence was not really an anti-colonial struggle, but one that sought to strengthen the power of those who arrived as colonizers.
Many of those who led the independence cause were landowners, and there were also land speculators looking to increase their holdings.
“After they achieved independence, they continued with the colonial project, with their expansion, with slavery, with the deportation of indigenous populations, and the genocide against them.”
“In settler colonialism, the first deportations were of the native population to whiten the country and make a white country in a land where the majority of the population was native and black.”
The idea was to build “a country for some and that some is a racialized concept, a white concept.”
The differences
For Professor Chomsky, “when people say that the United States has always welcomed immigrants, they are hiding the reality of who was welcomed, under what conditions and why.”
And the fact is - she explains - in countries where there was settler colonialism, “colonizing immigrants were welcomed” to help populate the country.
“Until the Civil War, Africans were welcomed, who were brought there by force and without rights.”
The first major law to prohibit the Immigration to the United States occurred when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended the immigration of Chinese workers for ten years.
That legislation and "the restrictions that followed froze the Chinese community in 1882 and prevented them from progressing and assimilating into American society as European immigrant groups were able to do," indicates the report "Immigration" on the website of the United States Library of Congress.
Experts see this legislation as a starting point for understanding many aspects of American immigration policy throughout history.
For Gordon Chang, a professor at Stanford University, the legacy of these restrictions is that they were "the first directed at a specific ethnic group and confirmed the idea that the United States was a land where some races are preferred and others not."
"The idea that the United States is a land for all immigrants has always been a fiction, although a very popular and affectionate one," Chang noted in a 2017 BBC Mundo article.
A legal battle
In this so-called "era of exclusion" it was the case of a cook of Chinese parents that was key in consolidating the right to citizenship by birth as a law in the United States.
The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which had been ratified in 1868, established that all people born or naturalized in that country were citizens.
This amendment sought to end the discrimination that African Americans suffered in several states that denied them citizenship status.
Upon returning from a trip, the cook Wong Kim Ark, who had been born in 1873 in San Francisco, They barred him from entering the United States and detained him on the ship.
A group of lawyers filed a lawsuit claiming that his rights as an American were being violated.
The case reached the Supreme Court, which in a landmark 1898 ruling declared that Wong was a natural-born American citizen, regardless of his parents' immigration status or origins.
That verdict represented the triumph of a crucial principle for ensuring social integration and equality for the children of immigrants.
The right to birthright citizenship is currently being challenged by the Trump administration.
Experts like Chomsky see a connection between the establishment of the right to birthright citizenship and the initiation of measures to limit the arrival of some immigrants.
A path of restrictions
For Ana Raquel Minian, an associate professor of history at Stanford University, the Chinese Exclusion Act “threatened the very foundations of American citizenship” as defined by the 14th Amendment.
Furthermore, The ban on Chinese immigrants laid the groundwork for further immigration restrictions.
This is what he wrote in “America Is a Nation of Immigrants That Has Not Lived Up to Its Promise,” an essay in The New York Times.
“In the late 19th century, increasing numbers of Eastern and Southern Europeans began arriving in the United States. American lawmakers feared that these newcomers, considered racially inferior, would taint the country’s racial heritage.”
In response to this concern, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which introduced immigrant quotas according to their country of origin, "which gave preference to Northern and Western Europeans and almost completely banned entry to Asians."
That quota system ended with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, but also introduced other restrictive measures, such as quotas for immigrants from countries in the Western Hemisphere.
Recent History
One hundred and twenty-seven years after the historic ruling in the Wong chef case, President Trump believes that children of non-resident aliens born in the United States should not automatically receive U.S. citizenship.
Trump has promised to "keep Americans safe," "protect the homeland," and fight against irregular immigration. Six months after returning to the White House, the administration claims it has "restored law and order" to the immigration system.
During his election campaign, the Republican spoke of promoting the "largest deportation operation in the history of the United States."
Professor Chomsky argues that while the president may "differ from other politicians by openly expressing his antipathy toward certain types of immigrants," his policies are not new and to understand them we must, in part, go back to two Democratic administrations.
In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.
"That immigration reform It promoted the narrative of immigrants as criminals and happened in a decade in which the United States saw many reforms to the criminal justice system that drove mass incarceration,” the historian says.
“The criminalization of immigrants is the key and the common thread from Clinton to Obama and Trump, in relation to the idea that 'immigrants are dangerous and we need a legal structure to protect the population from these criminal immigrants.'”
The expert also recalls some of Obama's statements about his flagship DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals).
"When announcing it, Obama emphasized that these young people had been brought to the United States by their parents and that they were here 'through no fault of their own.' Saying that was a way of criminalizing the parents."
Another phrase was said in the context of deportations, and the expert recalls that Obama raised deportation rates to levels never seen before.
"He said that only criminals were being deported. He said: 'We want to deport criminals, not families.' The term delinquent and the term criminal are Scare tactics. What do they really mean? Crossing the border without papers once is not a serious crime, but crossing the border without papers twice is.”
“In the immigration context, what makes someone a criminal? It’s an alarmist word, one that instills fear, that only promotes anti-immigrant sentiment.”
Between myths, the necessity
In 2012, Chomsky published the book “They Take Our Jobs!” ("They're taking our jobs!"), in which he debunks 21 of the most widespread myths about immigration and immigrants.
In his research, he found that there are myths that are interconnected and that "fit into the general narrative" that immigrants take Americans' jobs, don't pay taxes, and use public services.
"Interestingly, some of these myths are contradictory: are immigrants working, or are they sitting back, not working, and just using social services?"
These myths have led some to believe that "immigration is bad for the economy" and that the arrival of immigrants worsens the situation for those living in the United States.
"Now It's clearer than it was when I wrote the book: the U.S. population is aging, but it's not just happening here, it's happening in most of the immigrant-receiving countries, which are also the richest countries, the beneficiaries of colonialism and industrialization."
Such countries "are trying to figure out how to get people to have more children because they need more young people, and the only answer is immigration."
"And we're very fortunate that it's happening simultaneously; that's what keeps our economy going, our schools open."
“Who is going to pay into Social Security? Who is going to take care of this aging population if the population is shrinking so rapidly?”
“I think we should understand migration flows as part of human history and understand that there is a need for workers in the United States.”
“People need to understand that, right now, countries that are experiencing large immigration need those immigrants to survive, and instead of criminalizing and exploiting them, we should be grateful to them.”
“We should be grateful that, as our populations age and decline, there are people who want to come here.”
A huge “asset”
But myths about the Immigration persists and in many cases is encouraged by political opportunism.
This is the belief of professors Ran Abramitzky, of Stanford University, and Leah Boustan, of Princeton University, authors of “Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success.”
An article about that book appeared in Time magazine in 2022, with the title “Why the Children of Immigrants Are the Ones Getting Ahead in America” and was signed by both professors.
“Using millions of records of immigrant families from 1880 to 1940 and from 1980 to the present, we discovered that, in the past and still today, the children of immigrants surpass their parents and climb the economic ladder. If this is the American Dream, then immigrants achieve it in a big way.”
Regardless of where they come from or what kind of skills or resources they arrive with, immigrants bring “an enormously beneficial asset to the American economy: their children.”
The data gathered in their research, they say, should allay the often-heard fears about the future of poor immigrants and the possibility that their children “will become trapped in low-paying jobs” and dependent on government assistance.
While the researchers highlight the obstacles to advancement faced by children who arrive in the United States illegally, they acknowledge that with just “a stroke of the pen,” politicians can change that situation.
The irony
And it is precisely the importance of families in the integration of immigrants that several experts highlight.
Hiroshi Motomura, an expert in immigration legislation and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA),believes that a constant in the history of immigration to the United States has been the key role of families in the process that leads immigrants to become productive members of society.
“Many of the 'immigrant success stories' that we have are of people who arrived with relatively few resources, or not necessarily with a stereotypically high educational level, but who succeeded thanks to the support of a family.”
He raised this issue in 2018 in an interview with American Public Radio (NPR), titled “What Does It Mean To Be A 'Nation Of Immigrants'?” (What does it mean to be 'A Nation of Immigrants?')
In his opinion, “the arc of American history has been one of generosity toward immigrants, alternating with periods of regression, of total repression. That has been the dynamic.”
The expert noted how some of the people who strongly oppose immigration would have been the ones discriminated against in earlier times.
“One can see it as hypocrisy or irony, but the truth is that it is also a sign that this country is moving forward. And those of us who discriminated against in previous generations have become so American that they may even discriminate against others.”
For Motomura, “The United States is, and will continue to be, a nation of immigrants,” is part of their character.
But he regrets that many of the extraordinary contributions of immigrants sometimes go unnoticed, which in some cases has led to extreme myopia “regarding what has made this country great.”