Migration, Mobility & Borders: Week 4

National Insecurities: Immigrants and U.S. Deportation Policy Since 1882 - Molony (2012) KEY National Security/federal agencies/FBI Race/Gender impacting immigration policy Religion/Polygamy impacting immigration policy Introduction “Since 9/11, immigration concerns have intensified, leading to renewed debates about the relationship between immigration policy, national origins, civil liberties, and national security. Detention, deportation, and citizenship rights have been the subject of several highly publicized court cases during the past several years; beginning with the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld ruling.” (1) “Immigration reform efforts have also stalled, in large part because of the increasing contentiousness of rhetoric around immigration and religious pluralism … fueled by draconian local and state legislation” (1) “In the past few years, tensions between federal agencies such as ICE and local authorities have intensified throughout the US in regions such as Arizona, where there has long been a substantial immigration population.” (1) “Since the 1980s, state and local authorities have become increasingly unwilling to cede immigration control to federal authorities. These new state, county, and local laws have created innumerable problems that were not anticipated by the local and county boards and state legislators voting to support them. They include clashing and overlapping jurisdictions, labor shortages in regions adopting the new policies, a significant escalation in enforcement and court costs, and sharply rising costs incurred by detaining immigrants in local jails and prisons. Such policies expand the potential for racial profiling and other civil liberties-related legal challenges and liabilities and discourage targeted ethnic groups from relocating or establishing businesses in those areas, regardless of their citizenship status.” (1-2) “The association between business interests and immigration restriction measures arose from issues related to the Republican Party’s increasingly effective use of a ‘law and order’ platform beginning in the early 1980s, rather than from economic interests.” (2) “In those protests, immigrants employed the rhetoric of the modern American civil rights movement by invoking citizenship and human rights, specifically focusing on harsh immigration legislation that was under consideration by Congress that spring.” (2) “Although some Hispanic voters favor stricter immigration enforcement laws and policies, politicians do not wish to alienate this increasingly important voter bloc by supporting immigration laws that are viewed as unduly harsh by many in that community. Moreover, immigrants with permanent residence and third or fourth generation American citizens of Latin descent are concerned that should these laws be enacted they too will face a hostile 1 environment because of their racial identities. That change reflects, to a large extent, the greater political incorporation of Hispanics in the US” (2-3) The Intersection of Race and Gender “Immigrant rights in the US constitute a major element of a long historical debate over what constitutional and other protections are afforded to non-citizens, especially when the process of deportation or removal is defined as an administrative, not criminal, process and thus offers insufficient enumerated protections for those facing hearings possible expulsion.” (3) THESIS/ARGUMENT: “This book is a broad historical analysis of US immigration exclusion and deportation policy. It demonstrates the historical origins of many immigration policy issues in the US today. I argue that deportation policy has served as a social fitter, by defining eligibility for citizenship in the US and fundamentally examinetohow shaping the subsequent composition of the American population. I use an intersectional approach race, gender, religion, and class interacted with one another in the creation and implementation of immigration policy. Racial and gender ideologies and practices converged in ways that compounded the effects race and of each, although that process was uneven, differed by context, and changed over time. Historically, gender have had the most significant impact on the creation of immigration policy and its outcomes; but those factors have always been intertwined with larger social concerns about foreign policy and national security, the economy, scientific and medical issues, morality, and attitudes about class religion and citizenship.” (4) “I argue that, even when race was not an explicit basis of enforcement, immigrants were subject to regulation by racially based proxy methods, including the differential regulation of disease, economic status, and religious beliefs by the creation of new categories and definitions and by unstated assumptions.” (4) 1875 Page Law & 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act “Gender ideologies often interested with race to render nonwhite women particularly vulnerable to exclusion and deportation. The treatment of nonmarital sexual relations at the border was clearly regulated differentially on the basis of race. For much of the twentieth century, in appropriate sexual behavior, or immorality, was defined largely as female -- male clients, unmarried fathers, or ‘procurers’ were far less likely to be regulated at the borders than were their female partners.: (5) Difference between deportation and exclusion policies “Although federal immigration statistic based on race and nationality are difficult to analyze closely because of continually shifting definitions … some trends do emerge that confirm racial bias. From 1895-1904, immigrants who were from Asia, the Middle East, Mexico, and Italy had higher rates of exclusion than those from Northern Europe … Deportation rates remained lower than exclusion, at that point, and occurred only within a year of arrival” (6) 2 “Race was less instrumental in those deportations based on political and social ideologies … that trend [post WWI Red Scare deportations] reflected the federal authorities’ assumptions that those who were neither male nor white were not major political actors … women and nonwhites continued to be marginalized in radical and other nontraditional social movements … activists who were nonwhite and/or female who challenged prevailing economic and political ideologies in highly public ways were sometimes targeted for deportation.” (6-7) Deportation, Exclusion, and Repatriation “Countless other immigrants ‘voluntarily repatriated’ under threat of deportation, because they did not wish to endure detention or were not aware they could appeal their decision. But the complex question of consent blurs the distinction between voluntary return under such circumstances and mandated deportation.” (8) 1 - Deportation (7) 2 - Exclusion/Debarment (8) 3 - Voluntary Return/Repatriation (9) “Over time, the mechanism for exclusion and deportation expanded from an ad hoc, piecemeal process at the state level, rooted in European poor laws, to a national border-focused approach, to a sustained effort to regulate and police the activities of noncitizens sometimes for decades after their arrival.” (9) “... and the rise of the FBI and the expansion of its powers to regulate immigration-related matters.” (9) “The systematization of visa, passport, and communication channels remained rudimentary before the 1920s, a decade when the US Department of State ate established a visa system in the ports of embarkation and establishe professional consular officers.” (10) “By providing a mechanism to exert leverage over noncitizens who resided in the US, the threat of deportation contributed to the marginalization of immigrants and their stigmatization during periods of national crises … Deportation has been characterized by its unique administrative nature, its retroactivity, and a lack of proportionality between an offense and its outcome.” (10) The Emergence of a Federal Deportation Process “Control over the composition of a nation’s citizenry, its ideologies, and the shape of the industrial workforce increasingly became a transnational project, not simply one that occurred within the national borders … Although efforts began in the early national period, sufficient regulatory mechanisms and federal resources did not materialize until the end of the nineteenth century with the emergence of a modern industrial state and an enlarged role for the federal government.” (12) “The post-Civil War period also led to a major expansion in the power of the federal government and its regulatory power. Congress passed five major immigration laws from 1882 to 1921 that provided grounds for excluding immigrants upon arrival or for their deportation on the basis of poverty, mental and physical health, morality, or political beliefs.” (13) 3 “1911 Dillingham Commission Report was published under the auspices of the US Senate … laid the foundation for a federal immigration policy based on legislation enacted in 1921 and 1924 establishing a national quota system that sharply reduced the numbers of Southern and Eastern European and Russian immigrants.” (14) → Bureau of Immigration → Immigration and Naturalization Service → Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS within DHS) “... the historical evolution of the name of the agency changed with regulation of immigration and naturalization and its continually shifting administrative jurisdiction … those changes also demonstrate the increasingly contested nature of immigration in the US and the federal government’s role in its regulation.” (14) “The Bureau of Information (later FBI) under the influence of J. Edgar Hoover, who eventually headed the agency, claimed a major stake in regulating immigration to deport those whom they deemed subversive political threats” (16) “2003 … was established under the newly created DHS, in response to the events of 9/11. The agency regulating immigration is now charged with preventing terrorism in the US, and its enforcement powers have expanded enormously as a result of the passage of the Patriot Act, as well as earlier enforcement efforts designed to strengthen the federal government’s power and ability to deport non-citizens.” (16) Historiography & Whiteness Scholars “I agree that context was important in framing racial identities, a point that scholars of whiteness often emphasize. Historians have discussed how class, education, language, and region of settlement all in fluence the treatment of nonwhites in any given era, as did how they were classified in state and federal censuses, immigration statistics, and other official documents … glaringly absent from most of these works, however, is a systematic analysis of how racial construction or identity was shaped by gender, especially economic roles of men and women.” (22-23) “Another issue that I find problematic about the historical literature on whiteness is the assumption that Europeans and others learned about racism, and its use as a strategy for economic mobility and social acceptance, only within a US context.” (23) “Deportation and other immigrant regulation policies are by definition state-specific—they are highly influenced by a nation’s system of government, including the role of the judiciary, race relations, the role of activists, media representation, and public attitudes and ideologies. Policies are also influenced by the history of settlement and the labor systems that emerged. Immigration, however, occurs in a wider global context that includes economic development and displacement, labor demands, shifting national boundaries, international relations priorities, and more recently, terrorism.” (27) #1: Women, Sexuality, and Economic Dependency in Early US Deportation Policy 4 “Bressi’s case (1909) neatly captures the relationship between sexual morality issues and women’s economic roles that emerged in the context of the US’s rapidly industrializing society. By the early 20th century, growing public concerns over nonmarital pregnancy and prostitution (commonly referred to as ‘white slavery’) helped to shape immigration policies of concern to exclusion and deportation of female immigrants arriving in the US. That scrutiny of female immigrants occurred in an era in which American citizenship itself was being contested on several levels.” (29-30) “Thus, concerns about immigrant women reflected larger social debates about who was fit for American citizenship and how the large influx of immigrants would shape American society and its institutions. Moreover, settlement house workers and other Progressive reformers widely perceived immigrant women, in their roles as mothers or potential mothers, to be the primary transmitters of critical cultural and moral values to the next generation.” (30) “The 1875 Page Law first addressed concerns about immigrant women’s morality by placing major constraints on the immigration of unmarried women from China, casting them as likely to engage in prostitution.” (31) “The ‘likely to become a public charge’ (LPC) provision was a modern incarnation of traditional Anglo-American poor laws, which reinforced prevalent views about women’s economic vulnerability and dependency on male wage earners.” (30-31) 1903 President Roosevelt → “race suicide” “The practice of scrutinizing single women constitutes an important aspect of my larger argument that even when written as gender-neutral, immigration laws and policies concerning morality, economic independence, and public health had divergent effects on men and women.” (44) “Concerns about the sexual morality of female immigrants intersected with concerns over their economic roles in the new industrial economy, as well as with prevailing middle-class views of immigrant women and their children as dependent on male breadwinners whom they were married. When immigrant women did not conform to such American social norms, they became highly vulnerable to exclusion or deportation proceedings.” (47) “As we have seen, patrolling women’s sexuality and economic status at the borders reduced migration opportunities for women in general, subjected them to intense scrutiny by the state, constructed the contours of their personal relationships, and in some cases permanently separated them from their infant children.” (49) #2: Differential Regulation: Sexuality 1909 Marcus Braun, Bureau of Immigration, investigation in Europe regarding nonmarital pregnancy and prostitution; the US has stronger morals than Europe in terms of sexuality and nonmarital sex “Immigration officials’ conclusions about prostitution were also shaped by eugenicist ideologies of the era. The notion that some women were hypersexualized and engaged in prostitution to satisfy their sexual appetites, rather than for economic reasons, was a well-known cultural stereotype in the era.” (58) 5 “Braun’s brief discussion of Berlin’s gay prostitution scene suggests he finds it an interesting but not particularly significant discovery that falls outside the purview of his major charge: preventing the importation of female prostitutes to the US.” (62) #3: Gender, Dependency, & PLCs “Just as immigration policies regulating marriage have striking parallels to current federal policy that promotes marriage have striking parallels to current federal policy that promotes marriage as a means to economic independence, the PLC provision has links to recent federal social welfare policy. Although the LPC provision has links to recent federal social welfare policy. Although the LPC provision was used to exclude or deport both men and women, it had especially profound effects on the ability of single, immigrant women to travel to the US in search of employment.” (103) #4: Loathsome or Contagious: Bodies, Disease, & Eugenics “... federal government officials began focusing on medical examinations as a crucial aspect of immigration regulation … the close association between immigrants and contagious disease had been well established in the US before the era of federal immigration regulation.” (105) “As eugenic theories took hold in the US, concepts of public health encompassed an increasingly broad notion that moved far beyond the idea pf preventing the transmission of communicable disease to that of ‘fitness’ for citizenship, a concept that has had significant social, moral, psychological, and physical dimensions. When the federal mechanism allowed for the inspection, exclusion, and deportation of immigrants on the basis of their physical condition.” (107) “The intersection of public health measures and eugenics ideology at the borders during the first two decades of the twentieth century led to the development of new, nonmedically based diagnoses, such as poor physique and presentility, that were used to keep out those perceived to be physically unfit for strenuous manual labor or those who arrived from regions where the population was deemed unfit for US citizenship … medical diagnoses became an effective proxy to regulate immigrants on the basis of racial and religious differences.” (132-133) #5: Clash of Civilizations 6 1965 Hart-Cellar Law → increase in religious diversity of immigrants “When religious beliefs and cultural practices are closely regulated at the borders, it has major effects on the religious and racial composition of a nation, as well as profound ideological and political implications, even while religious freedom is espoused as a national value.” (134) “In this chapter I analyze the Bureau of Immigration’s exclusion and deportation decisions about members of four major groups: European Mormon immigrants, Turkish Muslims, Hindus, and Theosophists.” (135) “As early as 1883, US government officials had discussed the practice of polygamy as a basis on which immigrants might be classified as undesirable, laying the foundation for efforts to exclude some immigrants from the US.” (137) THE DOUBLE STANDARD FOR WOMEN, MARRIAGE WAS GOOD EXCEPT IN THIS CASE: “Antipologymany reformers condemned Mormon polygamists in the 1870s. In her petition to Congress for women’s suffrage in Utah, Angela French Newman criticized Mormons for exploiting immigrant women who were ‘wholly ignorant of our language or laws, or the significance of the franchise, with the odor of the emigrant ship still upon their clothing.’ Though European, such wives were ‘as far removed from our idea of womanhood as the earth is removed from the sun.’ Such fear of polygamy gave rise to the inclusion of polygamists as one of the excludable classes of immigrants in the 1891 immigration law.” (139) Double standard as well for the economic/political interested of STATE under William Jennings Bryan “The US had significant economic interests in Turkey, so there was a strong desire as the part of STATE to protect that diplomatic relationship and to address any matters that might harm existing negotiations.” (140) In 1913, STATE and immigration makes Muslims exempt from the polygamy questioning (141) These arguments are also similar to those made regarding theosophy as a “challenge to the primacy of the nuclear family.” (155) “Federal immigration authorities regulated the practice of new religious traditions in the US by monitoring the flow of peoples who espoused those beliefs in ways that rendered it more difficult for the diffusion of beliefs to occur. By interrogating immigrants in some groups about their religious beliefs in ways that differed from those in more mainstream groups, the US government’s early regulation efforts effectively hampered the development of new religious communities in the US.” (161) #6: Deportation Based on Politics, Labor, Ideology 7 “Though the US had benefited from territorial and corporate expansionism in the late 19th century, its leaders were far less comfortable with the importation of new ideas and movements from regions beyond Western Europe … popular transnational social movements, including those advocating economic and racial justice, were viewed as destabilizing factors in the US.” (196) “Noncitizen immigrants were denied constitutional rights to freedom of expression, the full rights to their religious beliefs, and the ability to organize social and economic movements, especially when those ideologies have been transitional in origin.” (197) “Ultimately, Hoover’s determination to eradicate political radicalism, combined with his unchecked use of intimidation and success in increasing the scope and power of the FBI, limited the efficacy of those reasoned arguments.” (197) #7: Immigrants’ Rights as Human Rights “This chapter argues that debates about immigrants’ rights in the US, especially in the context of deportation, are vital to understanding the historical origins of international human rights policies that emerged following WWII.” (198) “ Nishimura Ekui v. US (1898), Judge Horace Gray stated in his opinion that the judiciary could not order the entry of aliens who were neither citizens nor residents and that ‘the decisions of executive or administrative officers, acting within the powers expressly conferred by Congress, are due process of law’ thereby reinforcing the plenary powers doctrine in immigration cases.” (202) “Deportation and exclusion, like a double helix, run in separate lines but cross at critical points … over time, judicial decisions began to reflect greater distinctions between the exclusion and deportation process. Ultimately, each process evolved to encompass a particular set of rights.” (203) “One of Oppenheimer’s major conclusions was that the deportation process created a harmful conflict of interest because it involved the collapsing of investigatory, prosecutory, and judgement functions under one agency … outlined many of the legal issues and challenges facing immigrants who encountered the deportation process.” (204) “Oppenheimer emphasized that most deported immigrants were not convicted criminals but had violated immigration law on a technicality. Because of the significance and irrevocable nature of the deportation act, he recommended that a presidential pardon be allowed in certain cases.” (206) “In reviewing the immigration regulation, inspection, and deportation process, Oppenheimer carefully examined the Bureau of Immigration’s administrative structure. He reported that the immigration inspectors were not trained nor did they undergo a character investigation. Though applicants needed to pass a short written exam, there were no educational requirements.” (206) 8 “In 1907 the Immigration Bureau issued a regulation telling inspectors ‘not to lend their aid in causing the arrest of aliens upon charges arising out of personal spite or enmity, unless the truth of such charges is clearly established.’ By 1911, the policy that discouraged the use of information gained through spite or retribution by immigrants’ acquaintances was no longer in force.” (207) “By analyzing which rights have been extended to immigrants and which were withheld, we can better understand the meanings of American citizenship, the legal privileges it confers, and ongoing debates over which human rights exist independently of one’s legal status, citizenship, or nationality.” (229) Conclusion “Federal agencies, first in the BI (FBI), employed surveillance and immigration enforcement measures against socialists, anarchists, communists, and pan-African activists.” (231) OPPENHEIMER SECURITY HEARING (1954) The Oppenheimer security hearing was a 1954 proceeding by the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) that explored the background, actions, and associations of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American scientist who had headed the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, where he played a key part in the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. The hearing resulted in Oppenheimer's Q clearance being revoked. This marked the end of his formal relationship with the government of the United States, and generated considerable controversy regarding whether the treatment of Oppenheimer was fair, or whether it was an expression of antiCommunist McCarthyism. Doubts about Oppenheimer's loyalty dated back to the 1930s, when he was a member of numerous Communist front organizations, and was associated with Communist Party USA members, including his wife and his brother. These associations were known to Army Counterintelligence at the time he was made director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in 1942, and chairman of the influential General Advisory Committee of the AEC in 1947. In this capacity Oppenheimer became involved in bureaucratic conflict between the Army and Air Force over the types of nuclear weapons the country required, technical conflict between the scientists over the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb, and personal conflict with AEC commissioner Lewis Strauss. The proceedings were initiated after Oppenheimer refused to voluntarily give up his security clearance while working as an atomic weapons consultant for the government, under a contract due to expire at the end of June 1954. Several of his colleagues testified at the hearings. As a result of the two to one decision of the hearing's three judges, he was stripped of his security clearance one day before his consultant contract was due to expire. The panel found that he was loyal and discreet with atomic secrets, but did not recommend that his security clearance be reinstated. 9 The loss of his security clearance ended Oppenheimer's role in government and policy. He became an academic exile, cut off from his former career and the world he had helped to create. The reputations of those who had testified against Oppenheimer were tarnished as well, and Oppenheimer's reputation was later partly rehabilitated by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The brief period when scientists were viewed as a "public policy priesthood" ended, and thereafter would serve the state only to offer narrow scientific opinions. Scientists working in government were on notice that dissent was no longer tolerated. 10