Immigration Policy
Donald Trump
Feature
January 30, 2017 issue
How Donald Trump Will Make America White Again
His plan for fixing the legal immigration system is simple and disturbing: Bring back 1890.
by Julianne Hing
January 4, 2017
The Nation
PHOTO: US Citizenship Ceremony
A new America: By 2065, nearly one in five US residents will have been born abroad, thanks to the 1965 immigration-reform law. (Reuters / David Ryder)
Donald Trump’s plans for undocumented immigrants are what get all the headlines. There’s the wall, of course, and his promises to dismantle deportation-relief programs for undocumented young people, known as Dreamers. There are his proposals to detain and deport millions of noncitizens. But lurking behind the president-elect’s frightening promises to crack down on people who live in the United States without documentation is a much larger ambition: to slow the nation’s massive demographic change by curtailing our legal-immigration system as well.
“Within just a few years, immigration as a share of the national population is set to break all historical records,” Trump said during an immigration address in Phoenix this past August. The goal of his presidency, he continued, would be “to keep immigration levels measured by population share within historical norms.” He added that the country ought “to choose immigrants based on merit—merit, skill, and proficiency. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
The reference to “historical norms” was an unusually circumspect choice of words for the president-elect, but it’s a phrase that ought to worry many. What Trump’s hint meant was a return to an explicitly racist immigration system put in place in the 1920s.
David FitzGerald, a professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego, described the thinking among early-20th-century US lawmakers, who were alarmed by the unprecedented waves of poorer, swarthier immigrants coming to the nation at the time. “There was a near-consensus among policy-makers of the day,” FitzGerald told me in a conversation this past summer, “that the more Northwestern European immigrants there were, the more they would improve the stock [of the US population]. And the more they were from Southern and Eastern Europe, [the more] they would degrade the stock and contribute to crime.”
So Congress created a system designed to curb immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. Through a series of laws passed in the 1920s, lawmakers set annual quotas for immigrants from European nations. Using the 1890 Census as a benchmark, they capped the number of future immigrants from any given country at just 2 percent of the foreign-born population from that nation living in the United States in that year. Pegging the quotas to the 1890 Census was important, since it represented a time before the large flow of Southern and Eastern European immigrants to the United States commenced. Until the system was reformed in the 1960s, immigrants from the United Kingdom, Germany, and Ireland were entitled to fully 70 percent of the visas under this quota scheme, according to the Pew Research Center. What’s more, the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924 completely barred immigration from East and South Asia.
These policies had their intended effect: a precipitous drop in the nation’s foreign-born population, from a high of 14.8 percent in the 1890s to its lowest level on record—less than 5 percent—in 1970. These pre-1890/post-1920s levels are presumably the “historical norms” to which Trump was referring on the campaign trail. In short, he was pledging to halt the demographic trajectory that the country has been on since the 1970s. In 2013, 13 percent of the US population was foreign-born. Current projections suggest that by 2065, nearly one in five people in the United States will have been born outside the country.
Trump’s reference to “historical norms” is a phrase that ought to worry many.
But slowing this trend will require Trump to do more than simply deport people who are here without authorization: It will mean slashing the numbers of those who immigrate legally as well. As it stands, there are two main avenues by which people can apply to become US residents. The first is through family: reunifying with family members who are US citizens already living in the country. The second is through “merit”: by happening to have the education and skills deemed attractive by US employers. After the election, Trump again stressed which of the two groups he’d prefer the legal-immigration system to serve.
“We’re going to have people coming in,” he told Time (in the same issue that anointed him “Person of the Year“), “but we’re also going to have them coming in based to a certain extent on merit.” That would mean inverting the current legal-immigration system. The immediate relatives of US citizens made up 41 percent of the roughly 1 million green cards issued in 2014. Those who came based on employer preferences? Just 15 percent of the total.
* * *
Trump’s perspective on immigrationreform is troubling not solely because of its inherent elitism, or the way in which it reduces immigrants to widgets of labor, mere economic actors. It’s also one more plank in the far right’s direct attack on the civil-rights era.
Everything about Trump’s rhetoric and the cabinet he’s assembling suggests that the new administration plans to push an immigration-reform agenda in the Republican-led Congress that will mirror the far right’s approach to the Voting Rights Act. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act is the landmark law that replaced the discriminatory national-origin quotas of the 1920s with a more egalitarian, family-focused system. There is widespread agreement that this law desperately needs an update: Its own system of allocating an equal number of visas to all countries has created an insurmountable backlog for those that account for the vast majority of applications, among other problems. Years’ worth of bipartisan efforts at reforming the system have failed. But Trump’s leading advisers and allies have articulated a “reform” agenda that would roll back, rather than update, the law.
When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act into law at the foot of the Statue of Liberty in October 1965, he acknowledged its racial-justice mission. The act “does repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice,” Johnson said. “It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American nation.”
And it is that correction, far more than the much-discussed presence of undocumented immigrants, that set the country’s enormous demographic shift in motion. White people will likely cease to be the majority in the United States by 2042.
Slowing demographic change by curbing legal immigration is one thing; stopping it is another.
So it’s perhaps not surprising that Trump has zeroed in on the legal-immigration system. His threat is more than just rhetoric: There already exists a clear blueprint for rolling back the 1965 law. Much of it comes from Senator Jeff Sessions, Trump’s pick for US attorney general, who has a long history as a hard-line anti-immigration zealot. In the last two decades, according to The Washington Post, Sessions has opposed nearly every immigration-reform bill that has included some pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. But he’s also fought to curb avenues for legal immigration. In a 2015 op-ed for the Post, Sessions called the current system “the primary source of low-wage immigration into the United States.” He opened the piece with a wistful recollection of the era of the national-origin quota system, presenting it as smart policy-making that protected American workers.
Trump has also repeatedly consulted with Kris Kobach, Kansas’s secretary of state and an architect of Arizona’s notorious 2010 anti-immigration law, SB 1070. Kobach has also served as counsel for the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, a far-right anti-immigration group that can be expected to play a prominent role in Trump’s Washington.
The federation released a position paper just after the election setting out its immigration-policy wish list for the new administration. In it, the group called on lawmakers to dramatically cut the numbers of those allowed to enter the country legally, decrying a system that admits “immigrants who already have family members in the country. We do not make immigration decisions based on whether or not an immigrant can contribute to our economy.” Lawmakers ought to “implement a merit-based immigration system,” the paper urged.
Once a fringe group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform has now been brought into the mainstream of political discourse. The group has often been deemed too xenophobic and racist even for many conservatives. Its postelection position paper also included calls to end birthright citizenship, which was granted as part of the 14th Amendment; penalize sanctuary cities; expand the immigrant-detention system and aggressively prosecute the act of entering the country without papers as a felony; and further deputize local police to enforce immigration-law violations. Now its suggestions are likely moving straight to the president-elect’s ear via Kobach.
Slowing down demographic change by curbing legal immigration is one thing; stopping it is another. Already, more babies of color are being born in the United States than white babies. Between 2012 and 2016, 3.2 million US-born Latinos turned 18; these citizens make up the bulk of the Latino electorate’s growth. Fifty years after the immigration law that paved the way for the demographic remaking of the United States, it’s not likely that shutting down legal immigration will stop the changes now under way.
But that doesn’t mean Donald Trump won’t try.
We, the undersigned, oppose and condemn in the strongest of terms President-Elect Donald Trump’s appointment of Stephen Bannon as chief strategist and senior counselor. Bannon’s anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic agenda deserves no place in the White House, let alone second-in-command to the most powerful office on the planet.
Steve Bannon
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Bannon was the executive chairman of one of the country’s most prominent far-right news sources, Breitbart News. Bannon has used his platform for constant and dangerous attacks against people of color, women, Muslims, LGBTQ people, immigrants, Jewish people, and people with disabilities.
As one of Trump’s first moves, the appointment affirms the President-Elect will follow through on the most dangerous promises that brought him to office, including a pledge to ban Muslims from entering the country and plans to forcefully deport immigrants by the millions.
Too few politicians have acknowledged the harm Bannon would inflict on this country. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and others have feigned ignorance when asked what they know about Stephen Bannon, a claim that stretches credulity. But whatever elected officials do or don’t know, we are certain of this: A man like Stephen Bannon cannot be allowed to drive US policy.
By fighting this appointment we are delivering a vital message to Trump: We will meet you in the streets and in the halls of Congress. We will meet you with our protests and campaigns. We will keep fighting for equality, dignity, and liberation. You have us to answer to.
Bannon’s appointment is not normal, and we will refuse to treat it as business as usual.
We demand Trump rescind this appointment before the damage is done; we demand congressional lawmakers take up their responsibility to protect all Americans from discrimination, bias and harm; and we call on all others of conscience to refuse to cooperate with the appointment of a white nationalist to one of the highest offices in the country.
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Dear MoveOn member,
I'm Benard Simelton, the Alabama State Conference president of the NAACP.
I was arrested last night while taking part in a nonviolent sit-in at Senator Jeff Sessions' Mobile office in Alabama to oppose his nomination for attorney general. He is wholly unqualified to be the nation's top law enforcement official, as demonstrated by his long and troubling record in opposition to civil and human rights.1
JEFF SESSIONS
Will you click here to sign and share my petition asking Congress to reject Sessions' nomination? It's urgent: congressional hearings to approve his appointment start next week.
Members of Congress must reject the nomination of Jeff Sessions as attorney general. As a known racist with a long record of opposing civil rights and equality, it is unimaginable that he could be entrusted to serve as the nation's top law enforcement official.
Sign the petition
As the highest law enforcement official, the attorney general has the responsibility to protect the civil and human rights of Americans of all races, colors, and genders. Senator Sessions is not that person and presents an extreme danger to the equality, diversity, and inclusiveness that the U.S. has achieved over the last decade.
There are just days left to urge your members of Congress to block the appointment of Sessions. Click here to sign the petition.
There are many reasons for Congress to block the appointment of Jeff Sessions:
He has a long history of opposing civil rights enforcement and making racist statements.2
He has championed voter suppression.3
He opposes hate crime protections for LGBTQ victims.4
He has opposed multiple efforts to address pay equity for women.5
He is a staunch opponent of legal immigration.6
...and so much more. In the words of U.S. Representative Luis V. Gutiérrez, "If you have nostalgia for the days when Blacks kept quiet, gays were in the closet, immigrants were invisible and women stayed in the kitchen, Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is your man."7Diversity, equality, and compassion make America stronger. We must stand together and resist any effort to divide us up and strip away the progress that we've made.
Click here to add your name to this petition, and then pass it along to your friends.
Thanks!
—Benard Simelton
Sources:
1. "Civil Rights Activists Arrested For Protest Over Jeff Sessions As Attorney General," NPR, January 4, 2017 http://act.moveon.org/go/7378?t=6&akid=175761.9442574.ee66sg
2. "Jeff Sessions’ Record on Civil Rights, Race Revisited After Trump’s Attorney General Tap," The Associated Press, November 19, 2016 http://act.moveon.org/go/7379?t=8&akid=175761.9442574.ee66sg
3. "Donald Trump’s atrocious attorney general pick: Jeff Sessions will roll back voting rights and civil rights," Salon, November 18, 2016 http://act.moveon.org/go/7380…
4. "Jeff Sessions Fought Against Hate Crime Protections for LGBT Victims," Mother Jones, November 22, 2016 http://act.moveon.org/go/7381…
5. "Senator Jeff Sessions’ Problematic Record on Women’s Rights," National Women's Law Center, December 20, 2016 https://act.moveon.org/go/7382…
6. "Sessions' Anti-Immigration Influence Will Go Far Beyond His Role as Attorney General," Mother Jones, November 18, 2016 http://act.moveon.org/go/7383…
7. "Trump picks Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general," Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2016 http://act.moveon.org/go/7384…
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