How Laws Around Immigration and Migration Impact Belonging
Photo Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals. Photos: Bell & Daldy, Isaac Newton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: Migration and Movement Is a Human Experience
This week’s focus: Racial Literacy 101, or facts we should know about history, and how it connects to race and culture, but likely weren’t taught.
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1700 words, an estimated 7-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
This month, we’re examining how migration and movement is a human experience.
Last week, in our newsletter Migration is a Human Experience, A Brief History of Our Global Diaspora, we examined how humans were on the move, or migratory and nomadic, for the vast majority of our collective history. Migration is not new, or a specifically current event. What is relatively new, however, are the geopolitical borders, and the laws and policies that grant or deny immigration based on race, and other identity-based factors.
We also mentioned that when discussing the movement of people, especially with children, starting with the global diaspora may provide a more humanizing lens to launch the discussion. We may ask: How is migration part of the human experience? And eventually move into: How do modern ideas around immigration — including laws and policies — shape how we perceive who gets to belong?
Today, we’re going to unpack a brief historical, legal construction of immigration and migration in the U.S. to better understand how laws can impact our sense of belonging — and to underscore that the path to “legal” immigration and citizenship is not as straightforward, or equal and accessible, as some may think.
When Were People Indigenous to the U.S. Considered Citizens?
For thousands and thousands of years, and perhaps up to 30,000 years ago, people have lived in the Americas (or, since time immemorial for those who embrace the creation story of Turtle Island).
Across millenia, people who are Indigenous to the Americas were stewards of the land — they developed, cultivated, and traded corn across long distances, they moved earth with their hands to form temples and cities, such as Cahokia.
Before European colonization and the geopolitical borders of the United States existed, hundreds — if not over one thousand — Native nations spread across the North American continent, with some total population estimates surpassing 100 million people.
After the founding of the United States, people who were Indigenous to the Americas, and to the land that they and their ancestors lived on for tens of thousands of years, were not largely, legally considered citizens of that same soil until the “Indian Citizenship Act” was passed in 1924. However, the act did not provide full access to citizenship rights.
According to Native American Rights Fund, “While the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 ensured that all Native Americans born within the United States had citizenship, the Act failed to fulfill the promise of citizenship because Native Americans were not also granted voting rights. It would be decades before all 50 states granted Native American citizens the right to vote.”
While many would argue that those who were Indigenous to the land that would eventually become the United States indeed “belonged” here, it wasn’t a legal reality until well into the 20th Century.
How may that have impacted the way Indigenous people were treated and (mis)represented by non-Native people not just through historical texts but across other sectors — in media, such as in television and movies; in popular culture, such as being dehumanized and stereotyped as sports mascots; in educational systems, including boarding schools?
How does the history of denying Indigenous People equal access to land, citizenship and other rights impact their ability to access rights today, and how others may view their sense of belonging?
Native Americans were not the only racial, ethnic, or cultural group to be denied citizenship or access to equal rights. Unfortunately, there were many.
A Brief History of U.S. Laws — Immigration, Migration, and Citizenship
After the United States was founded in the late 1700s, the government passed laws that granted or denied rights based on race — including immigration and migration, or the movement of people even within the U.S., and citizenship and the legality of marriage. We’ve included a brief historical timeline to underscore the connection between race and who was denied or granted legal “belonging.”
Immigration, Migration, and Forced Removal
In 1619, 20 Africans were forced into enslavement in Jamestown, Virginia, marking the beginning of “forced migration” and the enslavement of people of African descent in what would become the United States.
The 1790 Naturalization Act stated that a foreign-born person could be a U.S. citizen if they were “free and white,” and of “good character.”
The “Fugitive Slave Act” of 1793 made it legal for enslavers to “capture and return” people who were formerly enslaved across state lines, limiting the movement of people who sought the basic right to freedom. (In 1850, the “Fugitive Slave Act” was revised to increase federal action, compel the participation of U.S. citizens, and impose harsher penalties to those who were seeking their own freedom.)
In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the “Indian Removal Act.” While many resisted, tens of thousands of Native Americans were forcibly removed from their lands, and “relocated” to federal territory west of the Mississippi River.
In 1848, the United States — through military force — annexed nearly half of northern Mexico, moving the U.S. border further south. As a result, people who were of Mexican citizenship in this land area were technically living in the U.S. at that point. Many lost rights to and ownership of their land, and were not granted U.S. citizenship, even though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had promised such an arrangement.
Until the 1800s, U.S. immigration policy was mostly handled by the states. The 1882 Immigration Act made immigration a federal issue. In the same year, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, which was the first law to ban immigrants based on nationality or race. For over six decades, from 1882 to 1943, the act essentially banned all immigration of Chinese laborers.
The 1910s marked the beginning of “The Great Migration,” or the mass migration of about six million Black Americans, who — over the course of decades — relocated to escape racial violence and a lack of economic opportunity in the rural south to urban centers in the north, midwest, and west (though forms of racial discrimination continued in new urban centers, such as the “race riots” of Chicago in 1919).
The Immigration Act of 1917, restricted immigrants — including some from Europe — by requiring literacy tests and enforcing other parameters, such as the “Asiatic Barred Zone,” which denied south and southeast Asians from entering the U.S. An anti-communist ideology also flourished at this time, resulting in limited immigration from Russia, and the deportation of around 5,000 Russians from the U.S.
In 1917, the U.S. granted citizenship to people in Puerto Rico — which became a U.S. territory in 1898 — but banned them from voting in presidential elections. To this day, Puerto Ricans who “live on the island” cannot vote in U.S. Presidential Elections.
In 1921, The Emergency Immigration Act, “drawing on eugenics research,” restricted immigration, limiting quotas to three percent of the racial and ethnic population estimates of the 1890 Census, which favored European immigrants over other nationalities, or racial and ethnic groups.
The Immigration Act of 1924 set even more quotas, decreasing the immigration of different groups of people, such as southern Europeans and eastern Europeans, “Arabs,” as well as people with specific religious beliefs, including people from Roman Catholic-majority countries and many Jewish people.
In the 1930s and in the 1950s, the U.S. government led forced deportations of Mexican Americans, including many who were U.S. citizens. The campaign during the Eisenhower era marked the “largest mass deportation in American history” as 1.3 million people were forcibly removed from the U.S.
In the 1940s, the U.S. government sent 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps. Two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens.
In 1943, Congress repealed many of the laws that banned immigration from Asia, but quotas were set extremely low (specifically 105 immigrants were allowed from China, 100 immigrants from the Philippines, and only 100 immigrants allowed from India).
The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 abolished the previous quota system based on national origin, establishing a new immigration policy based on family reunification and skilled laborers.
Citizenship & Its Impact on Marriage & Family
Anti-miscegenation laws — or laws that banned interracial marriage — were also passed. As early as 1691, the colony of Virginia outlawed interracial marriage. Other colonies (and later on, states) followed. By 1913, 30 out of 48 states outlawed interracial marriage. In 1967, the Supreme Court decision of Loving v. Virginia overturned the ban on interracial marriages — at that point, 16 states had still outlawed it.
Laws were also passed that would retract a woman’s citizenship if she married someone who was “foreign.” For example, in the Expatriation Act of 1907, Congress stripped U.S. women of their citizenship status if they married any “foreigners,” with a particular focus on revoking U.S. citizenship from women who married “Asian immigrant men.”
In regard to citizenship, it took the passing of the 14th Amendment for Black Americans to largely, legally receive citizenship, and for many Asian Americans and Pacific Islander Americans, citizenship wasn’t granted until the passing of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952.
Throughout U.S. history, it’s clear that the path to legal, documented immigration and citizenship was not granted to all, and was not granted equally. Race was used as a tool to grant and/or deny such access.
The Social Impact of Who Legally Belongs
How does the history of laws around immigration, migration, and citizenship impact current-day rhetoric around who gets to belong? Are some people more dehumanized, or humanized, than others?
While the history may be challenging to read or fully understand, if we don't begin to unpack it, then we are at risk of supporting ideas — like the binary around belonging, or that some people are inherently “legal” or “illegal,” or “alien” — as the natural order of things, instead of viewing this rhetoric as the consequence of social, political constructs.
Knowing the origins of biased and limited narratives can help us understand where stereotyped, dehumanizing thinking may come from, and recognize the need to expand how we tell the human story.
Migration and movement is ancient. Geopolitical borders are new. The next time you embark on a discussion of immigration or citizenship, consider how the past informs the present — and how it may impact how you frame who gets to, and who doesn’t get to, belong.
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