Let’s state this up front: immigration, documented or not, has never been a problem in the US. Ever. Indigenous folks could add a caveat to this, of course, but even a cursory glance at the history of US immigration law and border control reveals that is has always been about ethnic control and white supremacy, and never about safety or national security. Data shows that it turns out that people are people, and immigrants as a whole in no way represent an inherent deviation from standard population trends, certainly not as a negative impact.
Here’s the facts, which you can check for yourself if you can google out of your bubble: the US undocumented population had its peak under GW at about 12.3M people. Net undocumented population has decreased since to around 11.5M, but as many sources who study such things have explained ad nauseam, net undocumented immigration has been at or below zero for 20 years. The Right uses border “crossings” and “incidents” to scaremonger, but as new undocumented folks come in, others leave, and both Obama and Biden have robust removal numbers. Again, net immigration has been at or below zero for decades.
So why do we care so much about it?
Because racism is politically valuable, and that’s the list. It rears it’s moronic head only when white aggrievement reaches a saturation point where it is electorally advantageous to use the fascist myth of immigration to center power around White Supremacy. That’s it, that’s the list. Howling “it’s an invasion? 20 million invaders! Gang members and rapists!” feeds into a White Supremacist mythology and titillating fantasy of Crusader Oppression that fuels the identity cult of fascists looking for that imaginary enemy to justify their preemptive violence. It is not new, nor novel to US history.
The idea of restricted borders or limited immigration as defined and upheld in the US is a modern invention, born of a series of explicitly racist/White Supremacist laws designed to control the racial makeup of the country. It has been used to demonize and oppress as diverse groups as the Chinese, German/Austrian/Russian immigrants (leading up to Prohibition especially), the Irish, Catholics, and Jews (Israel was created in part to prevent the post-war Jews of Europe from immigrating to the US). It is an easy narrative to leverage fear of “invading hordes of the unwashed coming to kill us all” into political power, and falls directly in with the authoritarian playbook.
Travel to, and within, the US was almost completely unrestricted until the 20th Century. While port authorities handled trade, tariffs, and restricted goods, personal travel between territories, colonies, States, and other countries was largely unregulated. It’s worth remembering what year States like Utah (1896), Oklahoma (1907), New Mexico (1912), and Arizona (1912), which make up a significant area of the West and our border with Mexico, formally joined the Union. Border restrictions on trade or travel beyond taxation in that era simply wasn’t feasible, nor economically beneficial.
Historically, the data on immigrants and immigration shows no functional difference between the hundreds of years where this country had literally no borders – or ever changing ones – and any time after the post-WWI beginning of modern immigration controls.
The language of the 1917 Immigration Act and the later 1924’s Johnson-Reed Act, which established modern immigration laws, implicitly seeks to maintain the White Supremacy that has lain at the heart of immigration fears since the enforcing of Whites Only citizenship/naturalization laws in the 1700’s. The maintenance of White hegemony through population manipulation has been a constant discussion from the Founding. Ideas about who is and is not considered “civilized humans” can be seen across all eras.
Groups like the Immigration Restriction League sought to protect and promote an Anglo-Saxon “white culture” by banning Asian immigrants, and by imposing head taxes and literacy tests for prospective immigrants, to keep Southern and Eastern Europeans (and poor immigrants from the UK) out. These groups were explicitly White Supremacist, nativist, and Nationalist.
As the ex-Confederate States, still only a generation or two away from slavery, began to realign politically with the monied industrial powers of the Republicans instead of the working class Democrats they saw as being too egalitarian and supportive of civil rights, racist/White Supremacist narratives like restricting ethnic labor mobility became more effective and attractive to those looking to make inroads with what Nixon would later leverage as “the Southern Strategy”.
Later looking to break FDR’s hold on the political narrative and destroy the massively popular New Deal, Conservative groups began to stoke fears of “foreign invaders’ coming for the jobs and benefits that they hoped to paint as being for whites only. Armed with the fresh xenophobia of the post-WWII era, where interred Japanese families were kept in camps regardless of immigration status, they cast about for new demographics to demonize, to “other”, to turn the working class – who benefited hugely from the New Deal, from Teddy Roosevelt’s anti-trust crusades, and the growing infrastructure and education booms of the 50’s and 60’s – away from the Democrats and what was becoming the “Liberal Consensus”.
Nativist and White Supremacist Conservative groups like the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and White Citizens Councils began to not only oppose the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, but address immigration. This gives us the codification of the modern “Great Replacement Theory”, a nonsense nativist bugbear sold to working class whites. The idea is, dovetailing with these historic narratives of White Supremacy, that being American is a whites-only privilege that must be protected, and doled out only to the most deserving individuals of the “mud races” who have shown that they too will fight to pull the ladder up behind them, supporting white hegemony and power.
Conservatives in the 80’s held what we would consider very liberal idea on immigration. Reagan and GHW Bush supported amnesty, paths to citizenship, and increased labor mobility, tenets held by most economically minded Republicans at the time. More workers meant more labor availability at the height of American manufacturing, where competition from Japan and China were threatening US dominance, and where a glut of labor could keep costs down by suppressing wages and limiting trade union membership and collective bargaining power.
After the legislative failure of Newt Gringrich’s “Contract On With America” in ’94, an agenda supplied by our old friends at the American Nazi Party Heritage Foundation (it was effective in getting Republicans elected, but not much else), painting Democrats as “soft on crime” was the next step in defining a nonsense moral panic to get Republicans elected. Unfortunately, the Clinton Democrats – including former President Biden – were all too happy to go along with the racist narratives of “superpredators” and three strikes laws, and Republicans needed a new target dummy to leverage to foment white aggrievement, their bread and butter.
While GW echoed many of his fathers’ opinions on immigration as a whole, it was 9/11 that reawakened the sleeping giant of American racial hatred, this time against anyone from the Middle East. Securing our borders against terrorists became a reasonable security ask, and DHS was born. The effectiveness of border security, changed flight rules, and agent patrols are widely disputed (it is the old fashioned intelligence gathering and good ole police work that has led to most of the successes of the era), as is the need for the surveillance state implemented and extraordinary powers granted 25 years ago.
With the election of Barack Obama amidst the single greatest economic collapse in modern history, brought on by Republican greed and neoliberal deregulation/non-regulation of the financial markets, the racist Right saw their opening. Immediately stepping in to astroturf the populist rage engendered by the collapse of the global financial system, groups like American Crossroads (Ed Gillespie and Karl Rove), Freedomworks (The Koch Brothers), Americans For Prosperity (also the Kochs), and Americans For Tax Reform (Grover Norquist), were formed or focused to steer the burgeoning anti-elite/anti-capitalist movement away from working class issues and into virulent racism and authoritarian capitalism.
Blaming Obama for the failures of the Bush administration and of basic Republican economics was boilerplate deflection for the rich elites who were terrified that their number was finally up, but by once again raising the spectres of racial displacement and stoking fears and white aggrievement, they managed to get a movement founded on anti-big bank greed and working class suffering to support MORE free market nonsense, and elect MORE of the people who broke the fucking thing in the first place.
It’s not some stroke of genius. You just cannot go wrong relying on the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy’s ability to mobilize white male aggrievement.
Hey, we didn’t overcapitalize the mortgage system and the housing bubble in an unregulated feeding frenzy of exotic debt securities that we gleefully paid politicians to keep unregulated so we didn’t have to carry the risk on our books, the black guy just hates you and your white skin!
In steps The Donald, noted long time racist and soupbrained narcissist. Along with his Birther nonsense, he promotes several other bullshit fascist myths, pulling from fringe sites like InfoWars and their long association with Ron “the South was right” Paul style Libertarianism to bring back the old John Birch Society/Klan/WCC tropes of Great Replacement Theory. Suddenly, there is a whole infrastructure in society and online for the open expression of racist, misogynist, xenophobic discourse, a support network for white male aggrievement, and it’s narcissistic orange avatar.
In the world’s most predictable campaign strategy, the Right pivoted as a whole towards leveraging white outrage towards “those people”, any non-white person in the US, legally or not, now at risk of being kidnapped and renditioned to a foreign torture prison or country they never came from. It is a wholesale and unmasked ethnic cleansing program.
This is not solving for any real problem, this isn’t making us safer or our borders more secure. It is pure Fascist theater, a vicarious bloodsport to titillate the gooner Nazis and Boomer trolls on twitter. It is performative cruelty to reinforce the white male identity of the country’s shittiest white males and the random collection of weak, sociopathic dipshits that cheer the deportation of four year old cancer patients away from their home and care team, of asylum seekers and legal residents to countries they’ve never been to or whose return is a guaranteed death sentence.
It is 100% a Fascist, racist myth used solely for power centering and the manipulation of the shittiest people in our society, who have nothing to cling to but some long-debunked superiority fantasy. It was a vile, evil myth long before becoming the basis for an administration determined to destroy everything America has stood for, everything civilization stands for, everything humanity itself stands for.
Kelsoland.Institute 