Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684) (5 page)

Americans and Europeans currently assume that freedom to travel is their birthright. “Over much of the world today citizens of many countries can travel freely,” Jared Diamond asserts confidently. “To cross the border into another country, either we arrive unannounced and just show our passport, or else we have to obtain a visa in advance but can then travel without restrictions.”
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What he really means is that citizens of the former colonial powers (and also, generally, postcolonial elites) can travel freely. These same countries routinely deny entry to people, especially poor people, from their former colonies. Freedom to travel, then, is still a privilege reserved for those in control.

Americans and Europeans also rarely question their right to send troops and establish governments in their former colonies. Iraq and Afghanistan, they implicitly believe (like Puerto Rico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and so on), simply can’t govern themselves without a US and European presence. People from all of those former colonies, however, also need to have their mobility severely restricted. Countries like the United States established themselves by driving out nonwhites or non-Europeans or non-Christians, and establishing rule over nonwhites, non-Europeans, and non-Christians in the Global South. Now, they argue, they need to erect militarized borders to prevent the descendants of those nonwhites from infiltrating, at the same time that they continue to send their citizens to those countries as occupying armies, aid workers, investors, tourists, or students.

FROM RELIGION TO RACE

Columbus and those who traveled with and after him were heirs to a medieval Spanish tradition that used religion as the main principle for organizing and categorizing people. Muslim Spain, from 711 to 1492, like many other medieval and earlier (and some later) empires, was based on the idea of
convivencia
, or religious tolerance, among Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities. Not so Christian Spain. The
reconquista
, or reconquest, of the Iberian peninsula by Christians drew on the spirit of the Crusades: to drive out and destroy the infidels.

Spanish Christian ideas about religion were much more essentialist than the way most people think about religion today. Religion was thought to be defined by blood. The Spanish developed elaborate theories of lineage based on what was called Christians’ purity of blood. Jews’ and Muslims’ blood was considered to be stained. Even if they converted to Christianity, they would continue to bear the stain of their non-Christian ancestry. So-called New Christians were viewed with suspicion and periodically repressed or expelled.

Ideas about mobility—who belonged where—were based on religion. The Spanish conquest in the Americas began the same year—1492—that the last Muslims and Jews were driven out of the Iberian Peninsula, and the Spaniards took their ideologies with them. Spanish Christians were already transporting and enslaving Africans with the rationale that they were not Christian. They debated the humanity of the native peoples of the Americas, in the end deciding that they were, in theory, capable of being converted to Christianity and, therefore, not to be enslaved.

Capable of being converted or not, though, the indigenous inhabitants clearly did not have pure blood. In the Americas, Christian Spaniards’ struggle to assert, define, and justify their so-called purity of blood began to take on a more racial cast. The term purity came to mean the absence of African or indigenous ancestry.

In the elaborate legal hierarchy of Spanish America, racialized castes proliferated by the eighteenth century. Spaniards born in Spain were the purest, because there was no chance that their ancestry could have been compromised with indigenous or African admixture. People of (supposedly) 100 percent Spanish ancestry born in the New World occupied a space on a rung lower, and from there, the ranks descended all the way down to enslaved Africans and tributary Indians, with multiple mixtures in between.

Emerging ideas about race were also part of an elaborate system of legal status and access—or lack of access—to rights in society. People defined as belonging to the lower races were prohibited from spaces reserved for the privileged and subject to special taxes and forced labor. Purity of blood could also be purchased. Suspicious or inferior ancestry could be erased for a fee, thus strengthening the relationship between race and social status.
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British colonizers in North America were heirs to some of the same broad European cultural mores as the Spanish, but their colonial enterprise was also infused with a form of Protestant, northern European ethno-nationalism exemplified in the “Black Legend.” Promoted by British and Dutch thinkers and artists like Theodore de Bry, the Black Legend depicted the cruelties of Spanish conquest and attributed them to Spanish Catholicism and the Spanish racialized character. British and Dutch colonialism, in contrast, was conceived as a benign project.
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Religion was a key factor for the British in defining who they were as a people and justifying their right to conquer, dominate, and exclude. Legal scholar Aziz Rana argues that, for the British, the original “savages” were the Catholic Irish. The conquest of Ireland served as a “test case” or “rehearsal” for subsequent British conquest in the Americas. In Ireland, the British refined their rationale for land expropriation. If the natives didn’t cultivate the land according to British standards or did not accept British religious dictates, they lost their rights to the land itself.
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In the American colonies, British ideas about race grew from and eventually came to supersede those about religion. In King Philip’s War (1675), colonists slaughtered Native Americans, Christianized or not.
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By the 1700s, white indentured servants were moving off the plantations and being replaced by African slaves. As whites took advantage of the economic rewards of freedom, they also began to impose laws that protected their privileges and their access to slave labor—the first racial laws that targeted free blacks solely on the basis of race. Thus, by the 1700s, free blacks had become “a segregated and separate caste” in American society.
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Just as religion became a palimpsest for race in the first centuries of European colonialism, the race/religion complex likewise became a palimpsest for what came to be called the nation. New ideas evolved from, and were shaped by, what came before. When the United States declared itself an independent nation, race was the key factor in determining who belonged to the polity. Emerging European nation-states, too, based their legitimacy on what Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities” of peoples connected primordially, ethnically—essentially, racially or by blood.
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FROM RACE TO NATION

Racially based ideas held considerable sway well into the twentieth century, even as policies and ideologies came to replace race with nation as the prime rationale for legal domination, discrimination, and restrictions on mobility. The abolition of racially based slavery, most analysts now agree, led to an upsurge in racially exclusive and repressive policies and attitudes throughout the Americas. Not until the late twentieth century, with Europe’s rejection of Nazism and the dismantling of the racial regime in the United States, did overtly racialist thought lose its legitimacy. Precisely in this recent period, the use of nationality as an excuse for discrimination and persecution rose to new prominence. It was not a new concept or justification, but it emerged, perhaps, in full ideological flower, after generations of germination.

What we think of as countries today—also known as nation-states—first emerged in Europe several centuries ago. The idea of the nation-state was that the country was the manifestation of a historical unity or essence of the people that lived there—the nation. Older, multicultural empires like the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman gave way by the twentieth century to a proliferation of countries or states, each claiming to represent a people or nation.

In the United States, rights and access that used to be assigned on the basis of religion or race were gradually transferred to citizenship status. Racial restrictions on immigration and citizenship were replaced by national restrictions. Historian John Torpey wrote that gaining a monopoly over “legitimate means of movement” was precisely how emerging nation-states established their claims to sovereignty.
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To examine the different components of this second shift—from race to nation—let us look for a moment at the evolution of controls on mobility in the United States. In the nineteenth-century United States, private individuals and subnational localities held the right to control freedom of movement, especially that of enslaved and even free blacks. National membership was overtly based on race: until 1868, citizenship was restricted to whites. The Dred Scott decision in 1857 reiterated the primacy of race as a justification for deprivation of rights, but also of individual rights to control mobility. Until the civil rights acts of the 1960s, racial controls on physical access and individual, local, or institutional controls on access prevailed. School and bus segregation may be the best-known examples, but sundown towns, in which blacks were allowed to work but not remain after sunset, also hung on until 1968.
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Explicitly
national
manifestations of control of movement emerged in the late nineteenth century, imbued with racial ideas. The first restrictive immigration laws in the United States conflated race and nation. Chinese exclusion in 1882 was based on race: as “racially ineligible to citizenship,” the Chinese should be excluded from entering the country as well. The quota system that restricted southern and eastern European immigration—and virtually proscribed non-European immigration—starting in 1921, likewise relied on racialized notions of nationality: Italian was as much a race as an official citizenship status.

Even as national citizenship became more important in the early twentieth century, race continued to play an important role in determining status and access to rights. Hiroshi Motomura uses the term “intending citizenship” to explain the privileges granted to white immigrants in the nineteenth century. Although not formally citizens, by virtue of their race they were accorded privileges of access to the benefits of society, including the right to vote and virtually automatic naturalization. Aziz Rana elaborates by distinguishing formal citizenship from “free citizenship”—the latter available only to whites. Mexicans, after 1848, and blacks, after 1868, were accorded formal citizenship, but still denied the right to vote, to own land, and to move freely.
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New immigrants from Europe—Motomura’s “intended” citizens—were accorded all of those rights, even when they were not yet formally citizens. Thus, race frequently trumped nationality in determining access to rights.

As the twentieth century progressed, national citizenship more and more joined race as a primordial legal identification and determinant of status. For example, voting laws were changed to prohibit noncitizens from voting. Instead of being considered automatically part of the country on the basis of their whiteness, European immigrants came to be considered foreign because of their immigrant status.
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For the first time, white Europeans were treated as legally other and subordinate, the way conquered and racially differentiated peoples—African and Indian—had been since the first days of British settlement. Noncitizens were also told that, like Africans and Indians, they were no longer in charge of their own mobility. State authorities now had the right to exclude or deport them.
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The 1924 immigration legislation illustrates some of the ways that national citizenship was coming to stand in for race. Asians were excluded as “aliens ineligible to citizenship” based on the same legal ideas that had previously excluded African Americans. The new legal category of national origins was invented for Europeans.
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They were defined as implicitly belonging to the white race, but having so-called nationalities or ethnicities that did not preclude assimilation into the United States. Mexican and Chinese nationalities, though, became legally defined as nonwhite. So while race and nationality were separated for European Americans (i.e., a person could be both white and Italian), they became one for Asians and Mexicans; their nationalities were essentially legislated to be nonwhite races.
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These legal changes complicated racial categories by overlaying them with nation. If Chinese and Mexican became races, the very meaning of race was changing fundamentally, its power giving way to nation. If Congress and the courts had to resort more and more to nationality as a pretext for the denial of rights, it was precisely because racial justifications were being chipped away, at least in the legal sphere.

During most of the twentieth century, legal subjection by race and by immigration or citizenship status coexisted. By the end of the twentieth century, though, differential legal treatment on the basis of race had fallen from international favor. Formal abolition of racial discrimination may not have created actual racial equality, but it did dismantle and delegitimize legal structures of discrimination, including racialized restrictions on freedom of movement. Facilities formerly justified as separate-but-equal were abolished, along with sundown towns. Federal antidiscrimination law prohibited long-standing practices that denied access to jobs, spaces, and benefits on the basis of race.

But just as the first round of antiracialist legislation after the Civil War led to a surge in anti-immigrant legislation—aimed at racially defined unwanteds—so did the second round after World War II. If citizenship were to be granted to all by birth, as per the Fourteenth Amendment, then race could no longer be explicitly used to deny citizenship. So nationality stood in for it, and citizens of countries like China lost their right to immigrate. If formal citizenship was to be made real—if citizens could no longer be excluded from jobs, landownership, voting, and other rights on the basis of race—nationality could once again be mobilized as a method of exclusion. In 1965, numerical immigration restrictions were applied for the first time to the Western Hemisphere. Mexicans could no longer be discriminated against for belonging to the Mexican race; now they would be discriminated against for their nationality, their Mexican citizenship, their lack of US citizenship, or their illegality.