As President Trump shakes up the Department of Homeland Security and looks to take the agency in a “tougher” direction, it’s well worth re-examining a piece of American immigration history: the Chinese Exclusion Act.
First passed in 1882, and renewed under the Geary Act with even harsher terms 10 years later in 1892, the Chinese Exclusion Act is today seen as a serious misstep in United States policy mired in the same racism as the Jim Crow South.
At the time, lawmakers argued, groundlessly, that Chinese immigrants were stealing jobs from white workers, that they weren’t integrating into society, that they were dirty, and even that Chinese women should be considered prostitutes until proven otherwise.
Codified in law, this prejudice resulted in a shocking array of policies contrary to what we now consider American values. The Page Act, passed in 1875, barred Chinese women from entering the U.S. unless they could prove they weren’t prostitutes. The initial Chinese Exclusion Act barred new Chinese labors, paved the way for deportations, and prevented Chinese immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens. The Geary Act required that all Chinese laborers residing in the U.S. carry a special permit at all times, barred Chinese from being witnesses in courts (stipulating that a “credible white witness” was required), and determined that the Chinese were not entitled to bail in habeas corpus cases.
Those anti-Chinese laws would remain on the books for more than six decades, persisting until the U.S. was at war with Japan and China was an ally. Then, in 1943, blanket exclusion was replaced with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which set a quota of 105 Chinese per year. Explicitly racially motivated immigration laws themselves didn’t end until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
Although challenged in court several times, the Supreme Court upheld discriminatory immigration laws, although it did strike down attempts to bar Chinese Americans from birthright citizenship. Ultimately, it fell to legislators to change the law and bring an end to discriminatory immigration restrictions.
Fast forward to 2019. Once again, xenophobic rhetoric is making the rounds in Washington. Trump blasted some nations as “shit hole countries,” employed ethnic tropes to cast asylum seekers as gang members and criminals, and launched his campaign by lumping in all Mexican immigrants with rapists and criminals.
But that rhetoric, often dismissed as things that Trump just says, has found its way into policy — at least according to multiple federal judges.
The best example, perhaps, is the so-called “Muslim Ban,” barring refugees from several Muslim-majority countries. On the campaign trail Trump had proposed a literal moratorium on Muslim immigrants. Early court rulings pointed to that proposal as an indicator of the intent behind the actual ban.
The administration’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status for immigrants who came to the U.S. fleeing violence and disaster in Haiti, Sudan, Nicaragua, and El Salvador offers an even clearer example. When challenged in court, a judge went so far as to note in his opinion that there were “serious questions as to whether a discriminatory purpose was a motivating factor” in the administration’s decision to terminate their status. The judge blocked the order and, later, the Department of Homeland Security would drop its efforts to end their protected status.
These policies were, ostensibly, aimed at reforming what is clearly a broken asylum system. The problem, however, is that like the decision to end temporary status protection, the “solution” offered by the Trump administration is not based on facts. Although Trump has repeatedly cited the need for tough penalties for asylum seekers who won’t show up in court, Homeland Security statistics show that that is not true — asylum seekers, it turns out, mostly do show up.
Another solution, a long border wall, repeatedly touted by the Trump administration is likewise not based on factual considerations about border security, but instead the product of a desire to erect a physical monument to keeping “them” out. These are the political manifestations of attempts to keep certain groups out of the country.
Although not as overt as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which literally singled out an ethnic group for discriminatory treatment in its name, Trump’s immigration polices nonetheless reflect the racism and xenophobia in his rhetoric.
Of course, in modern America, courts have proactively taken on the abuses of Trump’s immigration policy. That’s in part because laws have changed since the Chinese Exclusion Act first entered into force and some things that would have been legal then are now prohibited by law.
Nevertheless, more than a century later, racial animus has again superseded facts and data on immigration in both rhetoric and policy, even as lesson plans teach the Chinese Exclusion Act as a dark spot on American history. Instead of letting these policies become a similar, at least partly illegal and definitely immoral, blemish on our country, we should remember the lessons of our own history.
