Question

I need to write a research paper and work cited about this topic: The United States immigration system has white supremacist origins that shape current policy.

Answer 1

The United States immigration system has white supremacist origins that shape current policy.

The President’s statements and policies suggest that he views U.S. national identity in racial terms and seeks to preserve the nation’s predominantly white identity. As a general matter, the President has parroted ideas of white cultural threat popular among white nationalists. For instance, on multiple occasions, Trump excoriated the removal of Confederate monuments as a threat to “our culture”

Identifying “our culture” with memorials erected to send a message of white supremacy in the name of a war fought to protect slavery. He gestured at the notion of a “white genocide”—a rallying cry of white nationalists worldwide—by tweeting support for South African far-right claims that white farmers were suffering from mass killings and land seizures in that country. Most notably, following the largest U.S. gathering of white supremacists in a generation, the President insisted that some who marched in Charlottesville were “very fine people.”

With respect to immigration, Trump has repeatedly disparaged various groups of nonwhite immigrants. He began his presidential campaign by denouncing Mexican migrants as “rapists.” He allegedly commented that Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS” and that Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts” after seeing the U.S. He repeatedly conflated Middle Eastern and Muslim immigrants with terrorists and falsely claimed that most people convicted of terrorism in the U.S. came from abroad. In addition, Trump has trafficked in age-old racist tropes, portraying immigrants as criminals, invaders,threats to women and even subhuman. On one occasion, Trump described unauthorized immigrants as “animals;” on another, he conjured images of vermin in describing immigrants as threatening to “pour into and infest our Country.” Perhaps most infamously, he reportedly railed against immigration from “shithole countries”—an apparent reference to Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations—and asked why the U.S. couldn’t get more people from countries like Norway.

The President’s comments on immigration to Europe even more strongly suggest that he views immigration as a cultural threat to the U.S.—not just an economic or security challenge. He called immigration to Europe a “shame” and stated that it had “changed the fabric of Europe” and that Europeans “are losing [their] culture." He railed against the German government, which had (at one point) welcomed Syrian refugees, calling it a “big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!" Lest some might read these statements as pertaining to Europe alone, Trump drew a direct connection to the U.S.: “We don’t want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen with us!”

Putting together the President’s claims of cultural threat from immigration with his vilification of nonwhite immigrants, these statements suggest support for white nationalist ideas. Even if certain remarks might be challenged as insufficiently proven or susceptible of non-racist meanings, the record as a whole cannot be read in race-neutral terms. Nor should the fact that non-racial motivations for restricting immigration can exist sanitize the reasons Trump has actually expressed for curtailing immigration.

White supremacy has a long and sordid history in the federal immigration laws. The immigration statutes openly discriminated on the basis of race starting in the late 1800s with the Chinese Exclusion laws.By 1917, federal law prohibited the entry of all people from the Asiatic Barred Zone. The immigration statute imposed racially-based national-origin restrictions until 1965. And from 1790 to 1952, the very definition of U.S. citizenship for persons not born within the U.S. depended on racial criteria: Federal law prohibited black people from naturalizing until 1870 and barred most other nonwhites from doing so until the 1940s.

Constitutional challenges to these racist laws largely failed. The Supreme Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion laws in the late 1880s, stating that, if “the government of the United States, through its legislative department, considers the presence of foreigners of a different race in this country, who will not assimilate with us, to be dangerous to its peace and security ,its determination is conclusive upon the judiciary.” Under the plenary power doctrine announced in the Chinese Exclusion cases, federal courts were to grant broad deference to the political branches to regulate immigration. The plenary power doctrine has subsequently operated, for the most part, to insulate federal immigration statutes from developments in constitutional law for over a century.

Challenges to facially neutral immigration statutes with a disparate impact on racial minorities must overcome not only the plenary power doctrine’s restrictive review, but also the inhospitable legal landscape for such claims under the Supreme Court’s equal protection jurisprudence. Even as to citizens, equal protection challenges based on race to facially neutral statutes require a showing of discriminatory intent, which in practice is extremely difficult to demonstrate.

While the Supreme Court has not recently considered an immigration statute that explicitly discriminates on the basis of race, its decision in Trump v. Hawaii suggests that plenary power would likely dominate its analysis. In June 2018, the Court upheld the Trump Administration’s Muslim Travel Ban excluding citizens of several predominantly Muslim countries, despite the President’s repeated expressions of animus towards Muslims.Applying a highly deferential standard of review to the plaintiffs’ Establishment Clause claim, the Court asked only whether the travel ban was “plausibly related” to the government’s declared objectives. That standard would appear to discount even compelling evidence of animus when the government can offer any alternative, facially legitimate explanation for a policy. Trump v. Hawaii concerned the entry of foreign nationals and a purported national security rationale—circumstances that do not apply in all immigration cases. Nonetheless, the Court’s full-throated invocation of deference—and its citation to classic cases upholding discriminatory immigration policies—does not bode well for equal protection claims.