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Epilogue: A New Era of Anti-Immigrant Hate and Immigration Restriction [1]
['Lee', 'Regents Professor', 'The Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair In Immigration History', 'The Director Of The Immigration History Research Center At The University Of Minnesota', 'President Of The Organization Of American Historians']
Date: 2022-09-01
On the centennial of the passage of the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 on May 19, 2021, immigration stories that could have easily been part of the news cycle one hundred years ago dominated the headlines. Americans were debating immigration. Migrants were making dangerous journeys to the United States, only to be turned away at the nation's borders. Foreigners were being blamed for bringing and spreading disease in the country.1
Of course, there were also significant differences. In 2021 the scale of both immigration and immigration enforcement was much larger than a century before. A new president was trying to undo many policies put in place by his predecessor, an individual who had made immigration restriction a cornerstone of his administration. Immigrant advocates were part of larger social justice movements that pushed not only for immigration reform but also for the decriminalization of immigration altogether.
But as the essays in this special issue make clear, the restrictionist regime inaugurated by the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924—as well as the xenophobia and racism upon which it was based—continues to be part of American society, politics, and laws well into the twenty-first century. Opponents to immigration are organized, and many state and national lawmakers support immigration restrictions and bans. Like their predecessors who supported the 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts, they also promote racist definitions of which immigrants are “good” and which ones are “bad” for the country. The past is not past. There is a direct link between then and now. As Alexandra Minna Stern's essay in this issue shows, contemporary white nationalists revived early twentieth-century xenophobia that equated nonwhite immigration with “white extinction” and emboldened a wave of far-right and white nationalism that helped send Donald J. Trump to the White House. Led by advisers such as Stephen Miller and guided by veteran anti-immigrant organizations, the Trump administration banned Muslims, separated families, reduced refugee admissions, built a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, implemented strict requirements for asylum seekers, and even crusaded against legal immigration. These policies represented “some of the most stringent immigration restrictions in modern times,” according to the Migration Policy Institute.2
Then came the global coronavirus pandemic.
Citing the need to protect the country's public health, President Trump limited immigration even more broadly. Policies banned the entry of almost every type of immigrant seeking to settle in the United States. Refugee admissions were suspended indefinitely. Asylum ended at the U.S.-Mexico border. All of the policies deliberately or disproportionately affected immigrants, refugees, and asylees from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. As infection and mortality rates soared, the economy stalled, and the Trump administration struggled to recover from its catastrophic handling of the pandemic. The president returned to the xenophobic playbook he used in the 2016 elections and identified immigrants as the cause of America's public health crisis. Immigrant scapegoating and immigration restriction became primary tactics in the federal government's response to the pandemic, exposing not only the broad scope of the Trump administration's anti-immigrant agenda but also the history and ongoing legacy of the 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts.3
One hundred years after the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 was passed, we find ourselves in a new era of unprecedented immigration restriction that seems devastatingly similar. As the historian Roger Daniels wrote of the 1921 and 1924 immigration acts, today's policies also restrict immigration in “blatantly racist ways that perpetuate … old injustices, and create … new ones.” What is happening around immigration has also had enormous repercussions for the United States more broadly. The same tactics that the president employed in his administration's war against immigration—demonization, propaganda, and extreme rhetoric—were used again to incite his followers to take matters into their own hands, attack the U.S. Capitol, and “stop the steal” as Congress met to formalize President-Elect Joe Biden's victory on January 6, 2021. Like a century ago, Americans' attitudes toward immigration and support of immigration restrictions reflect and reinforce a deeper and broader system of inequality that continues to threaten American democracy.4
The Trump administration's successful weaponization of the COVID-19 pandemic to drive immigration restriction was not new. The United States has a long history of tying foreigners to disease. American society and culture have been built upon what Alan Kraut has called the “double helix of health and fear”: the idea that many infectious diseases have foreign origins and that foreigners bring them into the United States. Irish immigrants were blamed for the 1832 cholera outbreak in New York. In 1900 the Chinese were thought to have brought bubonic plague to San Francisco. Italians were charged with carrying polio into New York City, and tuberculosis became known as the “Jewish disease.” In the Southwest, Mexicans were regularly accused of being responsible for outbreaks of contagious diseases such as typhus, plague, and smallpox.5
Xenophobia and racism have worked together to justify both new immigration restrictions and public health policies targeting the foreign-born. The 1891 Immigration Act allowed the U.S. government for the first time to deny entry to foreign nationals on health grounds—that is, those “persons suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease.” In 1903 the U.S. Public Health Service included a new category of excludable diseases. Immigrants found to have certain diseases or physical or mental defects were deemed “likely to become a public charge” and could also be barred. Over the years, more diseases and conditions were added to the government's no-entry list. Most were chronic, mental, or moral conditions rather than acute and short-lived ailments.6
While immigration exclusion based on public health concerns or medical grounds was neutral on its face, it disproportionately affected immigrants from southern, central, and eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Medical officers at both the Ellis Island and Angel Island immigration stations, for example, publicly admitted the need to restrict nonwhite immigrants as a way of protecting the welfare of the nation. These groups were subjected to more thorough examinations and were denied entry at higher rates than others. The “public charge” clause was also aggressively used as a tool of exclusion for certain populations such as South Asians when debarment was not allowed under general immigration laws. By 1915, 69 percent of immigrants were shut out on medical grounds. The 1917 Immigration Act consolidated the list of undesirables banned from entering the country, including “persons afflicted with contagious disease.” At the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S. health authorities used noxious, often toxic, chemicals to delouse Mexicans seeking entry into the United States. These public health exclusions helped lay the groundwork for the 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts by marking specific immigrant groups—Asians, southern and eastern Europeans, and Mexicans—as racially undesirable and dangerous.7
In the years leading up to the passage of the 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts, xenophobes and lawmakers continued to promote the connection between disease and immigrants to push for immigration restriction more generally. The powerful Immigration Restriction League (Irl) and eugenicist Madison Grant, for example, specifically argued that southern and eastern European immigrants brought disease, as well as crime, anarchism, poverty, and polygamy, into the United States. Promoting these “facts” through their writings, speeches, and lobbying, the Irl and Grant then claimed that immigrants were the primary cause of the country's social, economic, and political problems, and that the restriction or total exclusion of these dangerous populations was the only solution. The national origins quotas put in place as part of the 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts were the result of these deliberations and confirmed exclusions based on public health as well as on racial grounds.8
Forty years of record low immigration followed. At the same time, previously lethal contagious epidemic diseases became manageable through preventive vaccines and antibiotics. Still, into the mid- and late twentieth century, lawmakers continued to associate foreigners with dangerous germs, behavior, and ideas. A section of the 1944 Public Health Service Act authorized the U.S. Surgeon General to suspend the “introduction of persons or goods” into the United States “when doing so is required in the interest of public health.” The Cold War–era 1952 Immigration Act equated disease with criminal behavior, criminal behavior with poverty, poverty with addiction, addiction with immoral behavior, and immoral behavior with communism. It allowed the government to deny entry to a large list of individuals, including the feebleminded; the insane; people with epilepsy or other mental defects; drug addicts and alcoholics; those with leprosy or other contagious diseases; aliens found to have a physical defect, disease, or disability that would restrict their ability to earn a living; the impoverished; criminals; polygamists; prostitutes; homosexuals; contract laborers; and Communists, anarchists, or those subscribing to totalitarian political ideologies. During debates to lift the national origins quotas in 1965, lawmakers continued to connect immigration to disease. Republican representatives, in particular, argued that the reform bill championed by President Lyndon B. Johnson would welcome the “insane and diseased” and lead to “unlimited, non-quota Orientals and Negroes.”9
In the 1980s a resurgence of disease-related xenophobia was sparked by the advent of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (Aids) crisis. Tied to racial anxieties about post-1965 immigration from Latin America and Asia, and, as Carl Lindskoog's essay in this issue describes, the mass arrival of asylum seekers from Cuba and Haiti, old stereotypes of foreigners bringing dangerous infectious disease were revitalized and influenced public policy. In 1987 Aids was added to the list of excludable diseases. Four years later, human immunodeficiency virus (Hiv)-positive immigrants wishing to settle permanently were banned and individuals seeking refugee status were tested for Hiv. Like other diseases and medical conditions, medical exclusions based on Hiv status were particularly associated with groups that were already considered undesirable because of their sexual orientation (gays) or their race or national origin (Haitians and Africans). Racist and homophobic immigration policies followed, such as the quarantining of Hiv-positive Haitian immigrants at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in the 1990s.10
The United States' long history of connecting and conflating immigration with disease helped set the stage for what happened during the global COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2020. As news of the novel coronavirus spreading around the world dominated U.S. news, some lawmakers consistently used racist language such as “the Chinese virus” and “Wuhan virus” to refer to the disease. The most prominent was President Trump, who also repeatedly urged Americans to “blame China” for both the devastating loss of life and the economic challenges they faced.11
At the same time, the president used immigration restriction as a primary response to the pandemic. On January 31, 2020, President Trump issued the first of several travel bans blocking the entry of any foreign national who had been in countries where the virus was spreading quickly: China, Iran, the United Kingdom. Soon, the United States and Canada agreed to close their shared border to non-essential travel, and the Trump administration cut off non-essential travel with Mexico. The United States was far from alone in implementing travel bans, border closures, and other restrictions on mobility during the pandemic. The International Organization for Migration identified 130 countries that did so by March 2020. Compared to other countries, however, the United States seemed to focus on immigration restriction as a key response to the pandemic, even when public health experts questioned the efficacy of immigration bans to prevent the spread of an airborne virus.12
In March 2020 the administration expanded its immigration restriction efforts, with officials announcing plans to immediately return to Mexico all migrants and asylum seekers trying to cross the southern border. The policy was justified by invoking a little-known provision of U.S. health law, section 265, Title 42 of the 1944 Public Health Services Act, which allows the government to deny foreigners if they pose risk of spreading an infectious disease. By early April, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (Cbp) agents expelled nearly ten thousand migrants within a few months. Some included asylum seekers who were not given a chance to make their case, an action that ignored the 1980 Refugee Act and international law. Initially put in place for thirty days, the order was extended indefinitely. By February 2021, Cbp had carried out more than 520,000 expulsions.13
By late spring of 2020, the Trump administration had used the pandemic to restrict legal immigration. With an April 2020 proclamation, the United States became the first and only country to also use the pandemic to justify immigration restrictions to protect the jobs of its workers. Citing the pandemic, the president placed limits on legal immigration with orders that suspended the visa lottery, family visas for parents, adult children, and siblings of siblings planning to immigrate, and employment-based immigration visas. In justifying the new policy, Trump used his trademark “America First” nativism, saying that the United States needed to put “unemployed Americans first in line for jobs as America reopens, so important.” Echoing rhetoric used by restrictionist lawmakers in the 1920s, the president claimed that “it would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labor flown in from abroad.”14
While the Trump administration's scapegoating of immigrants during the COVID-19 pandemic repeated familiar patterns in the history of immigration restriction, its sweeping COVID-19 immigration policies must be understood as an extension of the president's long-standing anti-immigrant campaign. The Trump administration successfully weaponized the pandemic to enact widespread immigration restrictions that explicitly targeted or disproportionately affected nonwhite or “racially undesirable” immigrants under cover of the pandemic. On the same day that President Trump issued a proclamation blocking the entry of any foreign national who had been in China during the previous two weeks, for example, the Trump administration also expanded the 2017 “Muslim Ban” to bar citizens of Nigeria, Eritrea, Myanmar, and Kyrgyzstan from receiving visas that could lead to permanent residence. In addition, citizens of Tanzania and Sudan were prohibited from entering the visa lottery. While coronavirus infections continued to tick upward in the United States, officials did not just seek to limit the entry of new arrivals, they also implemented policies that limited the rights and benefits of immigrants already in the United States. The Justice Department created a Denaturalization Section to strip citizenship rights from naturalized immigrants. As a result, denaturalization case referrals to the department increased 600 percent. The administration's public charge rule also went into effect, allowing the federal government to deny visas or green cards to immigrants who were on public benefits or who were judged to potentially need them in the future. Intended to discourage people from naturalizing, this policy was eventually overruled. The Trump administration labeled these new immigration restrictions as necessary and urgent responses to the coronavirus pandemic, but as the New York Times found, they were part of an immigration restriction agenda that had been drawn up soon after Trump entered office. The pandemic provided the Trump administration with the perfect opportunity to implement the most sweeping immigration restrictions in American history, including over a thousand immigration-related actions that made immigration harder and reduced the number of immigrants coming to the United States. According to the Immigration Policy Tracking Project, many had been designed to be difficult to reverse, ensuring that President Trump's xenophobic regime would long outlast his presidency.15
Halting the flow of immigrants entering the country achieved an important long-term goal of the Trump administration. But scapegoating immigrants also served many other purposes, including using xenophobia and racism to rally his political base during an election year. Along with many of his political allies, the president deliberately applied racist labels such as “Chinese virus,” “Wuhan virus,” and “kung flu” to refer to the coronavirus. Combined with his “blame China” approach, the president made anti-Asian racism and Sinophobia central parts of the United States' pandemic response. Drawing upon a global narrative that had long tied Chinese people to disease, the president repeatedly characterized the virus as something that China had deliberately inflicted upon the world. His tweets, speeches, and interviews referring to the “China virus” and his administration's “relentless efforts to defeat the Chinese virus” extended his administration's foreign policy objectives related to China that already included a trade war and a cyberwar. But they also deflected attention from his administration's mishandling of the public health emergency as well as many other national crises, placing the blame on China instead.16
This anti-China and anti-Chinese rhetoric from the White House fueled racial violence against Asian Americans. From March 2020 to the end of September 2021, 10,370 hate incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders persons were reported. Asian Americans reported being beaten, harassed, stabbed, shunned, and otherwise assaulted. Many perpetrators blamed China and all Chinese-appearing people for the virus and its spread within the United States. Other harassers identified Asian people as the embodiment of the virus, often leading to physical assaults and threats. “I was at a gas station with my father. I was trying to buy some gum until a person told me, ‘Kid, you're a virus, go back to Asia, you Asian b****,’ one person reported from Fayetteville, Arkansas. “[I was] crossing the street in San Francisco when a man crossing from the opposite direction approached me, pulled down his mask, yelled at me, ‘Go back to your country!' and spit on my face before taking off,” one victim reported to StopAAPIHate, an organization tracking hate incidents. The deadliest incident occurred on March 16, 2021, when a gunman killed eight people at three Asian-owned businesses in the Atlanta area. At the same time, immigration to the United States continued to plummet. During the second half of fiscal year 2020, 92 percent fewer immigrants entered the country than during the first half of the year, the largest decline in immigration in the history of the United States.17
There are some signs of hope and change. President Biden came into office promising to dismantle what he described as the inhumane immigration policies of his predecessor. Early on, he reversed many Trump-era immigration executive actions, including the “Muslim Ban” and the travel bans targeting several African countries. He also rescinded the COVID-19 immigrant visa ban, scaled back immigration enforcement in the U.S. interior, expanded temporary protected status provisions for hundreds of thousands of individuals from multiple countries, and expedited the resettlement of Afghan refugees after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. Surveys showed that public support for immigration has increased. For the first time since Gallup began polling on the issue of immigration in 1965, the percentage of Americans who expressed public support for increased immigration exceeds the percentage who want decreased immigration. And 2020 census results reveal that while the pandemic led to significant drops in new immigration, immigrants and their U.S.-born children grew to 26 percent of the U.S. population and were proving both their power and value in the American economy, society, politics, and culture.18
Still, one and a half years into the Biden administration, many Trump-era policies remain in place. These include the “Remain in Mexico” program, which allows the United States to send migrants, many of them asylum seekers, who arrive at the United States without proper documentation, back to Mexico to wait out the duration of their U.S. immigration court proceedings. Expulsions at the border under Title 42 continued, demonstrating how, as Yael Schacher makes clear in her essay in this special issue, asylum seekers remain among the most vulnerable of migrants, especially under restrictionist regimes. Nearly all paths to asylum remained closed, and the U.S. Border Patrol recorded more migrant deaths (557) on the U.S. southern border in 2021 than in any prior year on record. As the country readies itself for the 2022 midterm elections, immigration is poised to remain as divisive a topic as it was during the Trump administration. Conservatives continue to use the threat of dangerous illegal immigration to rally voters. Even some moderate Democrats support keeping Trump-era border restrictions in place. President Biden's initial vision of a more compassionate immigration system seems far from becoming a reality.19
It is now indisputable that the xenophobia, racism, and white nationalism that fueled Trumpism have outlasted the Trump presidency and have had consequences beyond the realm of immigration. Repeating and reanimating early twentieth-century eugenicists' claims that nonwhite people will overtake the United States through immigration, reproduction, and the seizure of political power, Republican politicians, media pundits, and Trump supporters have moved the white great replacement theory, or white replacement theory, from the fringes to the mainstream. Motivated by the idea that immigrants and other nonwhites represented an existential threat to democracy and that the Democratic party is deliberately bringing in immigrants to disfranchise and “replace” white conservative voters, Trump supporters attempted to derail the certification of the 2020 presidential election in a domestic terror attack on U.S. democracy on January 6, 2021. On the year anniversary of the insurrection, a survey found that as many as 21 million adults sympathized with the rioters and believed in the great replacement conspiracy theory. As historians Kathleen Belew and Ramón Gutiérrez have shown, the rule of white supremacy continues in the twenty-first century, is openly embraced, and is entering into all parts of American society and politics in unprecedented ways.20
It is not the 1920s all over again, but so much of the racism, xenophobia, and white nationalism that characterized the United States one hundred years ago remains and has even been expanded and normalized. As the essays in this volume make clear, we must simultaneously look backward and forward to actively work toward their demise.
© The Author 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
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