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“ T H E Y TA K E O U R J O B S ! ”

“ T HE Y TA K E O U R J O B S ! ”

And 20 Other Myths about Immigration

AVIVA CHOMSKY

b e a c o n p r e s s b o s t o n

beacon press 25 Beacon Street

Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892

w w w.beacon.org

Beacon Press books

are published under the auspices of

the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

Printed in the United States of America

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This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper

ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.

Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Chomsky, Aviva.

“They take our jobs!”: and 20 other myths about immigration / Aviva Chomsky.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8070-4156-7

1. United States—Emigration and immigration—Public opinion. 2. United States—

Emigration and immigration—Government policy. 3. Immigrants—United States—

Public opinion. 4. Public opinion—United States. I. Title.

JV6455.C46 2007

304.8'73—dc22 2007005025

C O N T E N T S

A Note on Terminolog y · vii

Introduction · xi

p a r t o n e · I M M I G R A N T S A N D T H E E C O N O M Y Myth 1. Immigrants take American jobs · 3

Myth 2. Immigrants compete with low-skilled workers

and drive down wages · 11

Myth 3. Unions oppose immigration because it harms the

working class · 30

Myth 4. Immigrants don’t pay taxes · 36

Myth 5. Immigrants are a drain on the economy · 39

Myth 6. Immigrants send most of what they earn out of the

country in the form of remittances · 46

p a r t t w o · I M M I G R A N T S A N D T H E L A W Myth 7. The rules apply to everyone, so new immigrants need to

follow them just as immigrants in the past did · 53

Myth 8. The country is being overrun by illegal immigrants · 58

Myth 9. The United States has a generous refugee policy · 64

p a r t t h r e e · I M M I G R AT I O N A N D R A C E Myth 10. The United States is a melting pot that has always

welcomed immigrants from all over the world · 77

Myth 11. Since we are all the descendants of immigrants here,

we all start on equal footing · 91

Myth 12. Today’s immigrants threaten the national culture

because they are not assimilating · 103

Myth 13. Today’s immigrants are not learning English, and

bilingual education just adds to the problem · 110

p a r t f o u r · H O W H A V E U . S . P O L I C I E S C R E AT E D I M M I G R AT I O N ?

Myth 14. Immigrants only come here because they want to enjoy

our higher standard of living · 121

Case Study: The Philippines · 133

p a r t f i v e · T H E D E B AT E AT T H E T U R N O F T H E M I L L E N N I U M

Myth 15. The American public opposes immigration, and the

debate in Congress reflects that · 149

Myth 16. The overwhelming victory of Proposition 187 in

California shows that the public opposes

immigration · 162

Myth 17. Immigration is a problem · 166

Myth 18. Countries need to control who goes in and out · 171

Myth 19. We need to protect our borders to prevent criminals

and terrorists from entering the country · 180

Myth 20. If people break our laws by immigrating illegally, they

are criminals and should be deported · 184

Myth 21. The problems this book raises are so huge that there’s

nothing we can do about them · 188

Epilogue · 194

Timeline · 199

Acknowledgments · 210

Notes · 211

vii

A N O T E O N T E R M I N O L O G Y

Migration/immigration. Migration refers to any movement of humans (or animals) from one area to another. Immigration

refers to such movements by humans when they involve

crossing established state boundaries and are regulated by

the governments of the territories they involve. So immi-

gration really exists only under the modern state system.

First World/Third World. The term “third world” was coined in the 1950s as part of an anticolonial analysis that explained

the poverty of many of the world’s regions as a legacy of their

colonial past. It contrasted the situation of the former col-

onies to that of the “first world” industrialized powers, and

the “second world,” or socialist bloc, countries.

Modernization theorists compared “underdeveloped”

or “less developed” countries to “developed” countries, im-

plying that “development” was a discrete process that all

countries would go through at their own pace. Scholars from

the dependency school responded that underdevelopment

and development were two sides of the same coin: under-

development was not a starting state but rather a result of

colonial exploitation. Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underde- veloped Africa critiques the term and the theory behind it.

Other economists oƒered “industrialized” and “non-

industrialized,” and later added “newly industrialized” or

NICS (newly industrialized countries, referring usually to

Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). But the

deindustrialization of the first world, and the very diƒer-

ent nature of the industrialization now going on in the third,

makes these terms problematic.

Despite the radical changes in the global economic and

social order since the 1950s, the concepts of First World and

Third World still oƒer considerable power for understand-

ing the roots and nature of global inequality.

Latino/Hispanic. Although the terms are often used inter- changeably today, they have very diƒerent histories. Most

people of Latin American origin in the United States have

historically identified themselves ethnically by the country

they come from (i.e., as Mexican, Dominican, Colombian,

etc.). During the 1960s, in the context of anticolonial revo-

lutions abroad and African American and Native American

organizing at home, a Chicano movement and a Puerto

Rican or Boricua movement also emerged in the United

States. These movements identified with the indigenous

peoples of their homelands. “Chicano” referred to Mexican

Americans’ ancestry among the Mexica indigenous people;

“Boricua” referred to the Taíno name for the island of Puerto

Rico. They used the concept of internal colonialism and an-

alyzed their historical situation in the United States as that

of colonized minorities, rather than immigrants.

It was in this context that the U.S. government began

a n o t e o n t e r m i n o l o g y

viii

a n o t e o n t e r m i n o l o g y

to utilize the term “Hispanic.” To some, especially in the

Southwest, it was a term that tried to depoliticize their iden-

tity, and in particular to erase the indigenous and African

origins of many Latin Americans. In the Mexican North

(now the U.S. Southwest), “Hispanic” tended to be used by

Spanish-origin elites to distinguish themselves from Mex-

icans of African and indigenous origin, and many Chicano

activists found the term oƒensive. On the East Coast, where

Puerto Rican migrants saw their country’s resistance to

Anglicization as an important part of their identity and

ethnic pride, the term “Hispanic” tended to be taken on

more readily as an acknowledgment of the importance of

the Spanish language to Puerto Ricans.

“Latino” came into common usage in the 1980s, as an al-

ternative to “Hispanic.” More Latin Americans from diƒer-

ent parts of the continent were entering the United States,

and people of Mexican and Puerto Rican origin were be-

coming more and more geographically dispersed through-

out the country. The term “Latino” grew out of the same

political consciousness as “Chicano” and “Boricua,” but ex-

panded it to all Latin Americans, acknowledging the com-

mon historical experience of colonization and oppression of

people of Latin American origin in the United States.

By the year 2000, though, the term “Latino” had lost

much of its radical edge. Mainstream newspapers began to

adopt it, and the 2000 census oƒered “Hispanic or Latino”

as a category.

Some scholars and activists point out a further awkward-

ness built into the term “Hispanic”: because it encompasses

all things (or people) related to Spain or the Spanish lan-

guage, it creates a category of people that includes those

from a European country—Spain—and Spanish-speaking

Latin America, but not people from Brazil or Haiti. It might

be a logical category for studying literature (“Hispanic lit-

erature”), but it is not one that makes a lot of sense in look-

ing at immigrants or ethnicity in the United States.

a n o t e o n t e r m i n o l o g y

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Today’s immigration debate is rife with myths, stereotypes,

and unquestioned assumptions. I—and we all—hear re-

marks such as: “Immigrants take our jobs and drive down

wages.” “W hy don’t they learn English?” or “I’m not against

immigration, only illegal immigration.” After twenty years

of teaching, writing, and organizing about immigration, it’s

clear to me that many of the arguments currently being cir-

culated are based on serious misconceptions not only about

how our society and economy function, but also about the

history of immigration, the law, and the reasons for immi-

gration.

All you have to do is read the papers or listen to the radio

to notice that people seem to be extremely distraught and

angry about immigration. Immigrants are blamed for a host

of social ills and compared unfavorably to previous genera-

tions of immigrants. Since they are legally deprived of many

of the rights that U.S. citizens enjoy, including the right to

vote, elected o~cials and the general public can marginal-

ize, blame, punish, and discriminate against them with

little repercussion. Noncitizens make easy targets and con-

venient scapegoats.

A lot of our assumptions and opinions about immigra-

tion today are based on a set of beliefs about this country’s

past. These beliefs are formed by our social studies and his-

tory classes, by our textbooks, by our politicians, and by our

media—indeed they are so pervasive that they almost per-

meate the air we breathe. Yet they are also fundamentally

distorted. They represent a sanitized version of history that

can undermine our ability to analyze the world we live in

today. In analyzing the issues surrounding immigration

today, this book will often turn to the past to revise some of

the fallacies that have shaped the way we view our society.

Most U.S. citizens believe that this country is founded on

principles of equal rights. They acknowledge that through-

out history many groups were excluded from access to rights

—Native Americans, people of African origin, women. But

the story of U.S. history is generally told as one of gradual

expansion of rights to new groups of people, until finally,

with the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, the last rem-

nants of discrimination and exclusion were presumably

removed.

To those included in the circle of rights, the exclusion of

others has always seemed justified, so much so as to be vir-

tually beyond the bounds of discussion. W hen the founding

fathers wrote that “all men are created equal” it was quite

obvious to them that women were not created equal to men, and that “all men” meant “white men.”

W hen Patrick Henry reportedly declared, “Give me lib-

erty, or give me death!” he assumed that liberty was some-

thing reserved for whites. A slaveholder himself, Henry

admitted that slavery was morally problematic, but “Henry’s

i n t r o d u c t i o n

xii

understanding of the discrepancy between his words and

his deeds never led him to act diƒerently,” notes sociologist

James Loewen. “I am drawn along by the general inconve-

nience of living here without them,” Henry explained.1

In every generation, people have found rationales for

systems of social and legal inequality. Native Americans had

no rights in the new country, so their land could be taken for

white settlement. Africans had no rights, so it was all right

to enslave them. Women had no rights, and their labor was

generally unpaid. Contract workers had few rights, and their

labor was underpaid. Immigrants, as well as workers in

other countries, have also been deprived of rights—yet their

low-paid labor provides the cheap products that our econ-

omy depends on.

Today, a large and growing portion of our population

lives without the full rights of citizenship. Noncitizens work,

pay taxes, go to school, and raise families; they live in our

cities and towns; they participate in religious, sports, and

community events; they serve (in disproportionately large

numbers) in the military. But both the law and popular opin-

ion deem them somehow diƒerent from the rest of us, and

not eligible for the rights and privileges that 90 percent of

the population enjoys.

As of March 2005, more than 35 million people, a little

over 10 percent of the total U.S. population, were foreign

born. Most of these people had legal permission to be here,

but about a third of them did not. About one-third of

all foreign-born people (documented and undocumented)

came from Mexico, the largest source of immigrants. Over

i n t r o d u c t i o n

xiii

half came from Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole

(including Mexico). Another 18 percent came from East

Asia. The top ten sending countries were Mexico (10.8 mil-

lion); China (1.8 million); the Philippines (1.5 million);

India (1.4 million); El Salvador (1.1 million); Vietnam

(996,000); Cuba (948,000); the Dominican Republic

(695,000); Canada (674,000); and Korea (672,000).2

During the 1990s the number of immigrants increased

rapidly. In 1990, only 19.8 million reported foreign birth. In

2000, the figure was 31.1 million.3 (These figures do not in-

clude the 3.4 million Puerto Ricans who lived in the conti-

nental United States according to the 2000 census. They

are U.S. citizens, although they are also Latin Americans.)

Although one wouldn’t guess it from the increasing anti-

immigrant agitation in the 2000s, immigration actually

slowed significantly after the end of the 1990s.4 Nativism, or

anti-immigrant racism, responded as much to other trends

in society as to the actual number of immigrants coming in.

The current influx of immigrants is often compared to

the last large and sustained wave, which occurred between

1860 and 1920, when the rate of foreign-born persons in the

population ranged from 13 to 15 percent. Because the total

population was smaller, this higher percentage represented

a smaller number of people. Prior to the 1980s, the highest

year for the foreign born was 1930, when 14.2 million peo-

ple reported foreign birth. Most of these immigrants came

from southern and eastern Europe.5

During the 1860–1920 immigration wave as well as dur-

ing that of the late twentieth century, immigration was ac-

i n t r o d u c t i o n

xiv

companied by nativist reactions. Nativists worried that im-

migrants would fail to assimilate, would undermine the per-

ceived linguistic, cultural, and racial homogeneity of the

country, would take American jobs, and would lower wages.

Commentators in various forums warned that the newcom-

ers would bring disease and crime. Today, Arthur Schle-

singer worries about the “disuniting of America,” while

Samuel Huntington fears the “challenges to American na-

tional identity.”6 They seem to be echoing the California at-

torney general who wrote in 1930 that “only we, the white

people, found [America] first and we want to be protected in

our enjoyment of it.”7

W hile there are many parallels between the two waves

of immigration, there are also some significant diƒerences.

Ideas about race have changed significantly over the course

of the century. In the nineteenth century overt racism was

widely acceptable in the mainstream; today it is not. By the

late nineteenth century, the academy sought to provide bio-

logical and scientific research proving the existence and

nature of racial diƒerence. Scholars of all stripes dedicated

themselves to classifying the globe’s population according

to their supposed racial characteristics. Europeans were

divided into the “Anglo-Saxon race,” the “Slavic race,” the

“Mediterranean race,” and many others. Popular and legal

thought varied as to whether the latter belonged to the

“white” race or not.

The relationship of race to nationality has shifted in slip-

pery ways, and is in fact still in flux. Ideas about race in the

United States have been shaped by immigration, and have

i n t r o d u c t i o n

also shaped the way people think about immigration. Every

U.S. census has used diƒerent categories to identify race.

Until 1930 Mexicans were “white,” then the 1930 census

designated “Mexican” as a separate race. Today, most peo-

ple inside the academy and outside agree that race and ideas

about racial diƒerence are social constructs rather than

scientific facts. Even the census itself acknowledges that

racial categories “are sociopolitical constructs and should

not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in

nature.”8

The U.S. economy has changed drastically between the

two periods of immigration. In the 1890s, the United States

was industrializing rapidly, and most new immigrants went

to work in the mines, mills, and factories of the new indus-

trial economy. In the 1960s, the country was undergoing

deindustrialization, and the mines, mills, and factories

were closing, creating a “rust belt” in the very regions that

had previously been a magnet for immigrants. The deindus-

trialized economy still created a demand for immigrant

workers, but in the service industry: “cleaning—all kinds of

cleaning,” as one immigrant worker, who ran his own small

house-cleaning business, described it to me. Immigrants

now clean houses and o~ce buildings. They clean hospitals

and restaurants. They clean people, clothes, and cars.

The new wave of immigrants was also diƒerent because

they came from countries in Latin America and Asia that had

a history of U.S. interventions and political and economic

domination. In this respect, postindustrial immigration to

i n t r o d u c t i o n

xvi

the United States was not unique. European countries were

experiencing the same phenomenon. Industrialization had

been accompanied, every where that it occurred in the late

nineteenth century, by colonial expansion—military, polit-

ical, and economic. (Sometimes this expansion took the

form of direct colonial rule; sometimes it consisted of in-

formal means of control.) Deindustrialization, in the late

twentieth century, was accompanied by immigration from

former colonies. These diƒerent events were part of an

interconnected historical process, and to understand the

diƒerences between the two waves of immigration, we need

to understand the entire historical process.

These issues of race and the global economy were also

interrelated. People who were colonized were considered

racially diƒerent in ways that left very deep roots in the

modern world, and colonialism also left long-term eco-

nomic consequences. W hen people of color from the col-

onies migrated to Europe and the United States in the late

twentieth century, these deep racial and economic colonial

roots were coming to the surface.

Many societies have struggled with the question of what

makes a person eligible for rights. Does everybody have

rights, simply by virtue of being human? Or are rights re-

stricted to a select group of people in a society, who are

defined as “citizens”? And if rights are dependent on citi-

zenship, how is it decided who is a citizen?

After World War II there was a widespread repudiation

of the kind of legalized discrimination that many believed

i n t r o d u c t i o n

xvii

led to the horrors of Nazism. The Universal Declaration of

Human Rights, passed by the United Nations General As-

sembly in 1948, upheld the idea that there was no justifi-

cation for governments excluding certain groups of people

from rights. The Declaration asserts in Article 2 that “Ev-

eryone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in

this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as

race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opin-

ion, national or social origin, property, birth or other

status,” and in Article 6 that “Everyone has the right to

recognition every where as a person before the law.”9 The

declaration is unambiguous: rights apply to all people. The Universal Declaration embodies an expansive no-

tion of rights. In addition to many of the rights protected by

the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Universal Dec-

laration defines and guarantees social and economic rights

like the right to work, the right to equal pay, and the right to

education, food, housing, and medical care.

The U.S. Constitution is a bit more ambiguous about

what rights belong to all people and what rights belong only

to citizens. The law has always been utilized to exclude some

people from rights—often to the advantage of employers,

who can then exploit those who are excluded. W hen we look

at the past, we generally decry exclusionist ideas and laws.

(The Nuremberg Laws, for instance, excluded Jews from

rights in Germany.) There is no real logic to excluding peo-

ple from rights based on immigration or citizenship status.

Citizenship was based on race during most of the history of

i n t r o d u c t i o n

xviii

the United States and has historically been employed as a

way to justify discrimination.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security provides a

“civics lesson” to help those people who are eligible for cit-

izenship prepare for the test they’ll have to take as part of the

process. One question reads “W hose rights are guaranteed

by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?” The answer is

unequivocal: “All people living in the United States.” The

lesson goes on to elaborate:

One reason that millions of immigrants have come to

America is this guarantee of rights. The 5th Amend-

ment guarantees everyone in the United States equal

protection under the law. This is true no matter what

color your skin is, what language you speak, or what

religion you practice. The 14th Amendment, ratified

after the Civil War, expanded this guarantee of rights.

No state would be able to abridge, or block, the rights

of any of its citizens.10

The reality is a bit more complex. United States law has

always been, and still is, restrictive about who deserves

rights. Until the Civil War, federal statutes took for granted,

and upheld the notion, that citizenship and rights should be

based on race, and that rights depended upon citizenship,

which was reserved for white people. The distinction was not

between the native born and immigrants, as it is today, but

rather between whites—who were citizens—and nonwhites,

i n t r o d u c t i o n

xix

who were not. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1868,

for the first time extended citizenship to “all persons” born

in the United States—except Native Americans:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States

and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of

the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall

abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the

United States; nor shall any State deprive any person

of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;

nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal

protection of the laws.

The Amendment thus expanded citizenship by partially

separating it from race for the first time. Before this, citi-

zenship was restricted to whites, and rights were restricted

to citizens. But citizenship was not completely separated

from race yet. First, the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”

clause excluded Native Americans, even those born in U.S.

territories. Second, anybody born in the United States was automatically a citizen—but only white people could be nat- uralized as citizens. The 1870 Naturalization Act extended the right to naturalize to Africans and people of African de-

scent—but they were not the only non-“white” people in the

United States.

Citizenship was particularly denied to Asians—by 1882

they were prevented from coming to the United States at all,

in part to ensure that nobody of Asian descent would gain

i n t r o d u c t i o n

citizenship by virtue of being born here. Chinese people

were not permitted to naturalize until 1943. Even then, they

were subject to an immigration quota of 100 per year. Fil-

ipinos and (Asian) Indians were granted the right to become

citizens in 1946, and the “Asiatic barred zone” established

in 1917 was finally abolished in 1952. It was not until 1965,

however, that the 100-per-year quotas were lifted for Asian

countries.

The Fourteenth Amendment’s second sentence extends

rights even more broadly than the first: no person—appar- ently, citizen or noncitizen—can be denied equal protection under the law. The apparent contradiction in the Amend-

ment left it up to the courts to rule on what it meant in

specific cases. The U.S. Supreme Court has given contradic-

tory rulings. Two important decisions argued that citizen-

ship status could not be used to deprive people of rights. In

1971, Graham v. Richardson prohibited states from discrim- inating against legal immigrants in granting welfare bene-

fits; in 1982, Plyler v. Doe ruled that all children have a right to public school education regardless of legal status. Other

decisions, though, allowed states to discriminate, and the

1996 welfare reform incorporated unambiguous discrimi-

nation against legal immigrants.11

Most Americans assume that voting rights and citizen-

ship are identical, and that restricting voting rights to citi-

zens is natural and reasonable. But even this relationship is

far from clear-cut. “For a good part of our country’s history,”

explains political scientist Ron Hayduk, “voting rights were

determined not by citizenship, but by whether or not one

i n t r o d u c t i o n

xxi

was a white, male property holder. Thus, women and post-

emancipation blacks—who were considered citizens—could

be denied voting rights. In fact, alien suƒrage . . . actually

buttressed the privileging of propertied, white, male Chris-

tians.”12

The Constitution allows states and municipalities to de-

termine voting criteria. Until the 1920s, many of them per-

mitted noncitizens to vote. It was in the context of particular

political struggles—and large-scale immigration after 1850

—that states began to exclude noncitizen immigrants from

voting.

Hayduk explains:

In the Civil War era, Southern states resented immi-

grants’ opposition to slavery. In many states, wartime

hysteria and the Red Scare after World War I made

Americans want immigrants to “prove” their loyalty

before receiving the privilege of voting. And in others

—like Texas during the women’s suƒrage struggle—

ending the immigrant vote was a way for political status

quo supporters to counteract the broadened electorate

that came with the 14th Amendment (voting rights

for African-American men) and 19th Amendment

(voting rights for women).13

Restrictions on immigrants’ voting rights went along

with other restrictions—“literacy tests, poll taxes, felony

disenfranchisement laws, and restrictive residency and

i n t r o d u c t i o n

xxii

voter registration requirements—all of which combined to

disenfranchise millions of voters.”14

Many European countries, and even municipalities in

the United States, allow noncitizen voting as a matter of

course. Noncitizens live in communities, they pay taxes and

use services—why should they be excluded from political

participation in the place where they live? Conversely, some

citizens are denied voting rights. In most states citizens

who have been convicted of a felony cannot vote. Residents

of Washington, D.C., could not vote in presidential elections

until 1964, and Puerto Rican residents still can’t. And citi-

zens who live in these two areas have no congressional rep-

resentation.

An analysis of the 2000 census showed that in eighty-

five California cities, over 25 percent of the adult population

is disenfranchised because they are not citizens. In twelve

of these cities, noncitizens are over 50 percent of the adult

population. “A substantial number of persons, who con-

tribute to our economy and our government’s revenues, are

being denied political representation,” explains the general

counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund.15

If the Fourteenth Amendment is taken literally, then it

is routinely violated in the United States today. Noncitizens

are openly denied equal protection, and some of them— those who are undocumented—are denied any protection under the law. Their very existence is termed “illegal.” In

many ways, their situation is comparable to that of African

Americans prior to the 1870s, and again after the 1890s

i n t r o d u c t i o n

xxiii

when Reconstruction’s attempts to make citizenship real

for African Americans were unraveled. Undocumented

persons, and even legal immigrants, may be physically pres-

ent in the United States, but they are not treated equally

under the law.

Just as in every period of U.S. history, the law today dis-

criminates by excluding large sectors of U.S. society from

its protection, and from the concept of equal rights. Rather

than race, ethnicity, or gender—which have been discred-

ited as reasons for excluding portions of the population

from access to citizenship—today the dividing line is gener-

ally place of birth. Unlike in the past, there is no blanket

prohibition on citizenship for any group of people. Never-

theless, many people in the United States are denied the

right to become citizens, and denied the rights that go along

with citizenship.

Just as it seemed obvious to those in power in the past

that race, ethnicity, and gender were legitimate reasons to

exclude portions of the population from rights, many Amer-

ican citizens today believe passionately in the need to divide

the population between citizens and noncitizens, and im-

migrants between those deemed “legal” and those deemed

“illegal.” That those classed as the latter categories should

be denied rights, and that large groups of people should be

denied the right to become citizens or to become “legal,” is

considered self-evident.

Although the exclusion itself is rarely questioned, re-

sentment against immigrants and attempts to further mar-

i n t r o d u c t i o n

xxiv

ginalize them are rampant in today’s society. The suggestion

that noncitizens, too, are created equal is virtually absent

from the public sphere. However, claims that immigrants

take American jobs, are a drain on the American economy,

contribute to poverty and inequality, destroy the social fab-

ric, challenge American identity, and contribute to a host of

social ills by their very existence are openly discussed and

debated at all levels of U.S. society.

In a series of short chapters, this book seeks to disman-

tle the myths that inform the major debates about immigra-

tion in today’s United States. To address issues ranging from

“America is a nation of immigrants” to “immigrants take

American jobs,” it draws on immigration history, critical

race studies, labor history, Latino and Asian studies, analy-

ses of globalization, and other academic areas to show how

the parameters and presumptions of today’s debate distort

the way we think about immigration.

Each chapter seeks to identify and challenge the as-

sumptions that underlie some of the prevailing arguments

about immigration. The book challenges the way we under-

stand U.S. economic and immigration history. I argue that

since before this country was founded, its economy has been

global. The prosperity of some within our borders has always

depended on the cheap labor of others from both inside and

outside our borders. This cheap labor has been justified

and guaranteed by excluding certain workers from the cat-

egories of people who are aƒorded rights. Although race is

seldom directly invoked in anti-immigrant discourse today,

i n t r o d u c t i o n

xxv

I argue that race is so deeply tied to ideas about citizenship

and immigration that it is central to the discussion. I con-

clude with an attempt to imagine what a humane immigra-

tion policy would look like, and how creating a humane

immigration policy would connect to other changes at a na-

tional and global level.

i n t r o d u c t i o n

xxvi

PA R T O N E

I M M I G R A N T S A N D T H E E C O N O M Y

Some of the most widespread myths about immigration

have to do with its eƒects on the economy. Immigrants

are blamed for causing or exacerbating a wide variety of

economic ills, from unemployment to low wages to the

underfunding of government services. It’s undeniable that

many Americans feel economically pinched and vulnera-

ble, and that the numbers of Americans in this situation

are increasing. But what role does immigration really play

in the larger picture of the U.S.—and the global—economy?

m y t h 1

I M M I G R A N T S TA K E A M E R I C A N J O B S

“Immigrants take American jobs” is one of the most com-

mon arguments brandished to justify the need for a restric-

tive immigration policy. There are two main fallacies in

the argument. They are fallacies that serve a purpose. In the

pages that follow I will explain the two fallacies, and explain

why, although they are so problematic, so many of us none-

theless believe them.

The first fallacy lies in the very concept of “American”

jobs. In fact, today’s economy is so globally integrated that

the idea of jobs having a national identity is practically use-

less. In many industries, employers seek to reduce costs by

employing the poorest, most vulnerable people. They do

this by moving to parts of the world where poverty and in-

equality create a vulnerable labor force, and by supporting

policies that create poverty and inequality at home—includ-

ing immigration policies that keep immigrants coming, and

keep them vulnerable. So we’ll look at what the concept of

“American jobs” really means.

The second fallacy is closely tied to the first: the notion

that immigration and immigrants reduce the number of

jobs available to people already in the United States. In

fact, immigration plays a much more complex role in the

employment picture, and many diƒerent factors aƒect em-

ployment and unemployment rates.

Most analyses point to two major structural develop-

ments in the U.S. economy as the main causes of the shift-

ing employment pattern in the late twentieth century:

deregulation and deindustrialization. Deregulation of ma-

jor sectors of the economy and cutbacks in federal social

spending under the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and his

successors went hand in hand with a rise in plant closures

and outsourcing.

Not only did jobs disappear in this period, but the nature

of jobs in this country underwent a shift. High-paying

manufacturing and government jobs evaporated, and many

of the new jobs that were created were low-paying jobs in

the service sector, at places like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart.

Again, this is part of a larger structural change in the U.S.

economy and the way it is integrated into the global econ-

omy. Immigration makes up just a very small part of this big-

ger picture.

Generally, businesses seek to keep their expenses as low

as possible, to achieve the greatest profit margin possible.

One way of doing this is by moving workers, and moving

production, around the globe. In the early days of the indus-

trial revolution, factories brought workers to the point of

production. Some came from local rural areas to the new in-

dustrial cities, while in the United States some came from

halfway across the globe.

In today’s economy—sometimes called the “postindus-

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

trial” economy—it’s been industries as well as workers that

have relocated. The global economic restructuring since

World War II has created what some have called a “new

international division of labor.”1 Low-paid workers in the

Global South used to produce and export raw materials,

which fueled the industrial revolution in the north. The

cheap raw materials produced by these workers—with great

profits for investors—contributed to the prosperity of the

United States and Europe, which was based partly on the

artificially low prices made possible by their labor.

In the postwar restructuring, the industries started to

move to the south to take advantage of the low wages there.

People in the south still produced items for export to the

north—but now they exported manufactured goods as well as

raw materials.

The New England textile industry was one of the first

to experiment with plant relocation, shifting its production

to the U.S. southeast starting at the very beginning of the

twentieth century in search of lower costs. By the end of

the century, the trend had spread to almost all industries.

Just as the U.S. working class began to share fully in the

benefits of industrialization in the mid-twentieth century,

U.S. businesses increased their search for cheaper workers

abroad. As early as the 1940s, the U.S. government was col-

laborating with businesses on ways to re-create the low-

wage, high-profit system that was being undermined inside

the United States by the rights achieved by factory workers.

Their first experiment was in Puerto Rico. Dubbed “Opera-

tion Bootstrap,” it oƒered incentives to U.S. businesses to

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

transfer the most labor-intensive portions of their opera-

tions to the island. The island government oƒered land,

loans, buildings, and infrastructure to companies willing to

take the risk.

The Puerto Rican program was so successful—for busi-

nesses—that it was soon extended to Mexico. The U.S. and

Mexican governments turned once more to A. D. Little,

a consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that had

helped set up Puerto Rico’s Operation Bootstrap, to design a

similar program for Mexico. The Border Industrialization

Program went into operation in 1965.

It was an ingenious move. Since it was getting harder and

harder to deprive workers of rights inside the United States

because of popular mobilizations, unions, and laws protect-

ing workers and their right to organize, companies found it

more and more attractive to move the jobs across the border,

to where U.S. laws did not apply. It worked so well that by

the 1970s the U.S. government was extending this strateg y

to the Caribbean, and later on to Central and South America

and Asia. The North American Free Trade Agreement, or

NAF TA, which went into eƒect in 1994, pushed it even fur-

ther. U.S. manufacturing industries began a wholesale move

abroad in search of the country that would oƒer them the

lowest wages, the most docile (or nonexistent) unions, and

the least regulation of their activities.

Workers in countries like Mexico, El Salvador, and the

Dominican Republic have seen a flood of foreign invest-

ment in oƒshore production—often called maquiladora production, referring to the system whereby companies

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

outsource the most labor-intensive part of the production

process. Workers in these countries gain in some ways when

Nike, Liz Claiborne, or Dell opens a factory there. They gain

because jobs are created; but they also lose because the new

jobs are dependent on employers’ keeping wages, benefits,

and government regulation low. If workers, or governments,

start to demand a greater share of the profits, the company

can simply close down and move to a cheaper location.

This phenomenon creates what some analysts have

termed the “race to the bottom.” Workers and governments

compete with each other to oƒer businesses lower taxes,

lower wages, and a more “business-friendly environment”

in order to attract or preserve scarce jobs. The competi-

tion may be more devastating in already poor Third World

countries, but it’s going on in the United States as well, as

communities pour resources into schemes to attract busi-

nesses.2

By maintaining and exploiting global inequalities, the

U.S. economic system has managed to create a high-profit/

cheap-product model. But it is unsustainable, both morally

and practically. In practical terms, we saw the results in

the 1930s: if workers aren’t paid enough to be consumers,

there will be no market and production will crash. The New

Deal tried to remedy this by restructuring the division of

resources and putting more money into the hands of the

working class. Industry responded by accelerating its move

abroad. But the high-profit, low-wage system is no more

sustainable globally than it was domestically.

As for the second fallacy—that the number of people de-

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

termines the number of jobs—at first glance, it might seem

logical: there is a finite number of jobs, so the more people

there are, the more competition there will be for those jobs.

By this theory, periods of population growth would also see

rising unemployment rates, while periods of population de-

cline would see falling unemployment. How can it be, then,

that a recent study by the Pew Hispanic Foundation of em-

ployment patterns throughout the United States over the

past decade found that “no consistent pattern emerges to

show that native-born workers suƒered or benefited from

increased numbers of foreign-born workers”?3

Clearly, the relationship between population size and the

number of jobs available is not quite as simple as it might

seem. In fact the number of jobs is not finite, it is elastic, and aƒected by many factors. Population growth creates jobs at

the same time that it provides more people to fill jobs, and

population decline decreases the number of jobs at the same

time as it provides fewer people to work at them. Population

growth creates jobs because people consume as well as pro-

duce: they buy things, they go to movies, they send their

children to school, they build houses, they fill their cars with

gasoline, they go to the dentist, they buy food at stores and

restaurants. W hen the population declines, stores, schools,

and hospitals close, and jobs are lost. This pattern has been

seen over and over again in the United States: growing com-

munities mean more jobs.

The number of people in a given community is not the

only thing that aƒects the number of jobs, though. Some

people work in jobs that directly service the local commu-

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

nity, and those jobs are directly aƒected by population

growth or decline. But many jobs produce goods and ser-

vices that are consumed elsewhere. Automobile plants in

Detroit, or fruit farms in California, or garment factories

in El Salvador, or call centers in Bangalore, depend on

global, not local, markets.

As has become painfully obvious in recent decades,

businesses that service a global market don’t generally have

a strong commitment to the local community. A factory may

provide jobs in Detroit for a decade, or a century, and then

close and move elsewhere for reasons that have nothing to

do with the size of the population in Detroit. In fact popula-

tion loss often follows job loss—when a factory closes, peo-

ple, especially younger workers, leave a community because

they lose their jobs—and then local businesses also start to

close, because the population can’t support them anymore.

Pretty much all of us live, work, and consume in both a

local and a global economy. The local economy may be more

visible, but we eat grapes grown in Chile, drive cars assem-

bled in Mexico, and pump them with gas from Kuwait or

Colombia. And people in the United States produce goods

and services that are sold abroad. The United States imports

and exports over $100 billion worth of goods and services

every month.4 So jobs in the United States have a lot to do

with the global economy, not just what’s happening locally.

Between 1920 and the 1970s, the unemployment rate in

the United States generally hovered between 4 percent and

6 percent. The exception was the Depression in the 1930s (a

period of very low immigration), when unemployment sky-

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

rocketed to over 20 percent. The rate dropped again by the

1940s with the Second World War. Starting in the late 1970s

it rose, peaking at almost 10 percent in the early 1980s, and

remained between 5 percent and 8 percent for the rest of the

twentieth century and into the twenty-first.5 Many factors

have influenced the fluctuations in the unemployment rate

over the years. Immigration rates, though, do not appear to

have any direct relationship at all with unemployment rates.

During the period from the 1870s to the 1910s there was

a very high rate of immigration into the United States. World

War I, and restrictive immigration legislation in 1917, 1921,

and 1924, cut way back on the number of arrivals. The

Depression of the 1930s, with its devastating rates of unem-

ployment, occurred when hardly any immigrants were com-

ing into the country. The deportation of thousands of people

of Mexican origin from the Southwest during the decade did

little to aƒect employment rates in that region (unless you

count those employed to carry out the deportations). Un-

employment during the Depression, like unemployment

today, simply had very little to do with immigration.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

m y t h 2

I M M I G R A N T S C O M P E T E W I T H L O W - S K I L L E D W O R K E R S A N D D R I V E D O W N WA G E S

Wages in the United States have indeed been falling with re-

spect to prices, and with respect to profits, since the 1960s.

In 2006, wages and salaries made up a smaller proportion

of the country’s gross national product than at any time

since the government started collecting those statistics in

the 1940s, while corporate profits rose to record highs.1 The

gradual gains made by the working class during the first half

of the twentieth century were being chipped away in the sec-

ond half—just as immigration rates began to rise again. W hy

did this happen?

If you look only at the small picture, it indeed seems

to be the case that immigrants and low-skilled citizens are

competing for the same jobs. Businesses certainly want this kind of competition—it means they can find people willing

to work for low wages. And, businesses argue, low wages

keep prices low.

It’s true, if you look at the U.S. economy as a whole, that

prices for some kinds of products have gone down and

that people in the United States are consuming a lot more

of those products. Clothing and electronics are two good ex-

amples of how manufacturers and retailers have been able

to use low wages and deregulation—both inside the United

States and outside—to keep prices down. And U.S. con-

sumers are buying lots of those things. Most of the clothes

and electronic devices we buy are produced outside of the

United States in factories that pay low wages, in places where

governments keep taxes and other expenses low. So compa-

nies can keep prices low for consumers while still making a

profit.

If prices for some consumer products, especially those

produced abroad, are kept low, prices for other kinds of

goods and services are rising in today’s economy. A lot of

the things that are getting more expensive are basic human

needs—things like health care, housing, and education.

Middle-class and even low-wage workers in the United

States may benefit from cheap shoes, cell phones, and iPods,

but at the same time they are finding it harder and harder to

buy a house, get the health care they need, or send their kids

to college.2

W hat’s going on? And what does it have to do with immi-

gration?

Study after study has shown that since the late 1970s, the

distribution of wealth in the United States has become more

and more skewed. By the end of the century the richest 1 per-

cent of the population owned about 30 percent of the coun-

try’s wealth, and the top 5 percent controlled 60 percent of

the wealth.3

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

True, immigration also increased during the last decades

of the century. But this does not prove that immigration was

the cause of the growing inequality. Coincidence does not

prove cause and eƒect. Rather, the same global economic re-

structuring that exacerbated inequality in the United States

also contributed to increasing immigration. In fact, we could argue that cause and eƒect are reversed: increasing inequal-

ity created demand for immigrant workers and thus spurred immigration.

Rising inequality, concentration of wealth, and cheap

products all go together. To understand how and why immi-

gration fits into the global economy, we need to understand

how this system works.

Products can be produced cheaply when business ex-

penses—things like wages, benefits, taxes, infrastructure

costs, and the cost of complying with health, safety, and en-

vironmental regulations—are low. Businesses have always

wanted to keep their costs down—that’s why they tend to

oppose regulations such as those listed above, which add

to their expenses. Inequality helps them keep costs down in

several ways.

First, when workers are poor and lack legal protections,

they are more willing to work long hours for low wages. So

businesses benefit when there exists a pool of workers with-

out economic or legal recourse. This is one of the reasons

why early industries relied on immigrant workers; why agri-

culture in the United States has used slavery, guest workers,

and immigrants; and why businesses tend to oppose restric-

tions on immigration today. It also helps to explain why

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

deregulation of the economy, and even why increasing re-

pression and criminalization of immigrants, actually cre-

ates greater demand for immigrant workers.

In a democracy, it’s hard to justify deliberately keeping

part of the population poor and excluded by legal means.

Racial slavery was one means used to do precisely that until

the 1860s. Temporary guest-worker programs, Jim Crow

laws, and other forms of legalized discrimination—in the

North as well as the South—were other methods that kept a

supply of workers without rights available until the 1960s.

In the western United States, legal restrictions against U.S.

citizens of Mexican origin served the same purpose as Jim

Crow did in the South. It’s no coincidence that in periods

when rights have been expanded to previously excluded sec-

tors of the population, businesses have sought new sources

of exploitable labor.

Sociologists have used the concept of the dual labor mar- ket to explain how this system has worked throughout the history of the United States (and other industrialized coun-

tries). The primary labor market refers to jobs that are regu- lated. Workers are protected by laws that establish living

wages, health and safety standards, and benefits. Their jobs

are long term and secure. Their right to organize unions is

accepted and protected by law.

The secondary labor market consists of jobs that are gen- erally not regulated. Wages are low, and working conditions

are dangerous and often harmful to workers’ health. Not

only are the jobs unpleasant and poorly compensated, they

are also dead end: there is little or no room for advancement.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

Poor working conditions are often justified with subtle or

overt prejudice against the people who work in those jobs:

they are seen as less intelligent, less deserving, and congen-

itally suited for the kind of work they do. Often they are not

citizens. Until the 1930s, most factory work fell into this

category.

W hy would people acquiesce to working under these

substandard conditions? Inequality helps to provide the

answer, in some obvious and some less obvious ways.

Let’s look at the obvious ways first. Inequality maintains

a population of poor people who lack access to resources,

and who may have little alternative but to accept jobs under

the worst of conditions.

But inequality works on a regional and global, as well

as a local, level. These larger inequalities help to explain

why industrial societies have tended to rely on immigrants, rather than the domestic poor, to fill jobs in the secondary

sector.

The southern and eastern European immigrants who

filled the factories and the mines and the Latin American

and Asian immigrants who now fill the sweatshops, the

fields, and the lower ends of the service sector share several

characteristics that are related to regional inequalities.

First, the dollar is worth more in the home country than it is in the United States. Immigrants tend to believe that the United States is a country of fantastic wealth, where hard

work can bring unbelievable reward. And they’re right: 26.3

percent of Mexicans, 46.4 percent of Filipinos, and 90.8

percent of Nigerians live on two dollars or less per day in

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

their respective homelands.4 These people know that they

could earn more in the United States.

Of course, the cost of living in Mexico, the Philippines,

and Nigeria is much lower than the cost of living in the

United States. The minimum wage, or subminimum wage,

that a Mexican worker might earn in the United States

wouldn’t be enough to support a family here—but it can

mean the diƒerence between utter dispossession and dig-

nified survival, or between minimal survival and hope for

the future, in Mexico, Nigeria, or the Philippines.

This brings us to the second piece of the puzzle: immi- grants are willing to accept conditions abroad that they would never accept at home. Many people immigrate planning to spend a brief period of time working abroad, living under

the most onerous conditions, and earning money that can be

used to help those who remain at home, and then to return

home themselves to purchase a house, buy land, or start a

business. Migrant workers who come with this intention are

not terribly concerned about their living conditions while

in the United States—they are often willing to work fifteen

hours a day, live six to a room, forgo any social life, and eat

out of tin cans in order to save as much money as possible

and return home as quickly as possible.

Immigrants do jobs that American citizens wouldn’t do—

in Mexican president Vicente Fox’s notorious words, “jobs

that not even blacks want to do”—because they are not trying

to live a decent life in the United States.5 They couldn’t, on

their meager wages. Their frame of reference is their much

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

poorer home country, and what seem like unlivably low

wages here are worth a lot more there.6

Over time, however, even these migrants’ frame of ref-

erence changes. Some do return home with their savings,

but others begin to set down roots in their new land and

bring or establish families here. World War I, and the sub-

sequent immigration restrictions, accelerated this pro-

cess for European immigrants, who could no longer return

home. As they begin to assimilate into the new society, im-

migrants are no longer willing to work for substandard

wages and conditions. They begin to struggle to better their

conditions in their new home.

For the European immigrants in the early part of the

century, this process was in general successful. The growing

strength of labor unions, combined with federal legislation

that began to regulate the conditions of work, changed the

conditions of factory work during the 1930s and 1940s.

Instead of being dangerous and underpaid, the assembly

line became the basis of a middle-class lifestyle. Industrial

workers could buy houses and cars, take vacations, and send

their children to college.

Some sectors of the economy were excluded from the

New Deal reforms of the 1930s and 40s, though, and re-

mained in the secondary labor market. The main areas left

out of the reforms were agriculture and domestic service.

(As of 2006 the National Labor Relations Act still excludes agricultural and domestic workers.) Since these were the

sectors where most of the workers were and are people of

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

color, especially African Americans and Mexican Ameri-

cans, most analyses conclude that the New Deal reforms,

while not explicitly mentioning race or privileging white

people, in fact had the result (and probably the goal) of re-

inforcing racial inequality and the dual labor market.

Other federal reforms of the middle of the century also

contributed to hardening preexisting racial inequalities.

The GI bill of 1944, for example, helped millions of people

from the working class get access to higher education—but

most colleges and universities in the United States still ex-

cluded blacks. Federal housing loans and mortgage policies

also exacerbated racial inequality, since racial covenants,

written and unwritten local codes, and lending policies

clearly excluded nonwhites.

W hen southern and eastern European immigrants came

to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twenti-

eth centuries, they were not considered white—at least not

fully white. They went to work in the factories and in the

mines under abominable conditions. Because they were

poor, because they were marginalized as noncitizens and as

newcomers, and because legislation protecting the rights of

factory workers was in its infancy, businesses were able to

use them as a secondary labor market to build their indus-

tries. African Americans and Mexican Americans were even

further legally marginalized because racial segregation and

discrimination were widespread and encoded in the law.

The mid-century reforms extended rights to European

immigrants at the same time as they drew the lines more

firmly against people of color, whether immigrants or citi-

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

zens. People of Mexican origin—including many who were

U.S. citizens—were deported in massive waves in the 1930s,

just as the New Deal was beginning to improve the condi-

tions of work in the factories. The continuous expansion of

rights described in the introduction needs to be qualified

with the continuous exclusion from rights that accompanied

it. Each period of expansion and reform has been accompa-

nied and/or followed by a redefinition of exclusion. And ex-

clusion guaranteed the continuing existence of a pool of

workers for the secondary labor market.

The bracero program established in 1942 created a new legal way for Mexican workers to be used as a secondary

labor market. They were brought into the country on tem-

porary visas that defined them as “arms” rather than people

(bracero comes from the Spanish word brazo, or arm) and treated essentially as indentured servants of the businesses

that hired them. In the northeast, a similar recruitment

program brought Puerto Ricans—who, like African Ameri-

cans, were citizens, but second-class citizens—to work in

the farms and fields.

In the 1960s, the formal system of racial segregation in

the United States was dismantled, and a new wave of gov-

ernment programs ranging from a~rmative action to food

stamps tried to redress the results of centuries of legally en-

forced racial inequality and exclusion. The Voting Rights

Act, moreover, acknowledged that blacks had been excluded

by administrative means from full citizenship. The bracero

program was also tacitly acknowledged to be a violation of

people’s rights. According to a former U.S. commissioner

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

of immigration, “its failings could no longer be reconciled

with civil rights-era sensibilities about how people should

be treated in a democratic society.”7

There was a diƒerence, though, between African Amer-

icans, who were slowly, tortuously, accorded the rights of cit-

izenship, and immigrants. For some immigrants, rights also

slowly expanded, and opportunities for citizenship opened.

Explicit racial exclusion of blacks from citizenship was dis-

mantled through a series of steps beginning with the Four-

teenth Amendment in 1868 and continuing through the

Voting Rights Act in 1965. Along the way, the racial barriers

to Asian citizenship were dismantled as well, on a slightly

diƒerent schedule.

But the imposition of numerical quotas on Mexico and

other Western Hemisphere countries for the first time, also

in 1965, led to a huge rise in the numbers of “illegal immi-

grants” who did not have access to this expansion of rights.

And the new wave of globalization of labor, begun by Oper-

ation Bootstrap in Puerto Rico in the 1940s and 50s and

expanded with the Border Industrialization Program in

Mexico in 1965, created new mechanisms for corporations

to have access to workers who were excluded from demo-

cratic rights. Both of these U.S.-designed programs created

privileged industrial export zones and invited U.S. factories

to relocate in them.

But people of color who were citizens were still subject

to social barriers, and people of color who were immigrants

faced new structures, like the national quotas still in place

today, that shut them out. Many new post-1965 immigrants

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

from Latin America and Asia were as definitively excluded

from citizenship, or from the rights of citizenship, as previ-

ous generations of people of color had been. The category of

immigrants classed as “illegal” mushroomed because of the

way the law was designed, and because of the increasing eco-

nomic demand for immigrant workers.

The 1965 law dismantled the national origins quotas,

which were by then universally seen as discriminatory. In

their place, it created a uniform quota system of 20,000 per

country for the Eastern Hemisphere, and a 150,000 ceiling

for the Western Hemisphere—that is, Canada, the Carib-

bean, and Latin America. (This was changed in 1976 to

implement the 20,000-per-country quota for Western

Hemisphere countries as well.) Preference went to family

members of people already in the United States.

The family preference system reinforced the phenom-

enon of chain migration from poor countries. It was based

on the humanitarian idea of family reunification, but its im-

plications went far beyond that. It meant that immigration

became structured by circles of relationships with individ-

uals in the United States. It meant that countries with strong

recent histories of immigration, like Mexico, quickly over-

flowed their quotas, because lots of Mexicans had family

members in the United States and could take advantage of

the priority given to close relatives of people (legally) in the

United States. In contrast, countries without a large pres-

ence, like Paraguay, scarcely filled their quotas.

The uniform quota system also embodied its own forms

of discrimination. Huge countries like China and India had

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

the same quota as tiny countries—so a would-be immigrant

from, say, Oman, had a much higher chance of receiving a

visa than one from a more populous country. And diƒerent

sets of historical factors (which will be discussed below)

meant that the “demand” for visas in some countries was

very low, while in others it was very high. So some countries

never reached their limits, meaning that it was very easy for

their citizens to obtain visas.

For other countries, there were far more than 20,000

applicants. This meant that if you didn’t fall into a prefer-

ence category, that is, if you didn’t have family members in

the United States or particular job skills, your chances of

getting a visa were virtually nil. Even for people with close

relatives who were citizens or permanent residents of the

United States, the wait could be years or even decades.

One problem at the root of the new quota system is that

it dealt with countries, rather than with people. At the same

time that it claimed to end discrimination based on national

origin, it still made national origin the decisive factor in de-

termining whether an individual could receive permission

to come to the United States or not. By treating all countries

equally, it treated people unequally. A person’s chances of getting permission to come to the United States no longer

depended on his or her race—now it depended on how large

his or her country of origin was, and on how many others in

that country wanted to come.

Furthermore, the 1965 law ignored the long-standing

economic integration, and in particular the labor migration,

between Mexico and the United States. Migrant networks

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

and systems that had roots even older than the bracero

program didn’t disappear when the program ended, and the

jobs Mexican migrants had filled, mostly in seasonal agri-

cultural work, didn’t vanish either. Because it placed such a

low cap on Mexico at the same time that the bracero program

ended, the law vastly increased the numbers of “illegal”

migrants. Abolishing the bracero program without creating

any other legal mechanism to allow Mexicans to work in

the United States turned people who had formerly worked

legally into “illegal immigrants.” One hundred years after

slavery was ended, continuing legal distinctions among

people ensured that secondary labor market employers

would have an ample supply of workers—workers who could

not turn to the law to protect their rights in the workplace.

The structures of exclusion were compounded by the

global inequalities that made immigrants, as people who

had a dual frame of reference (the home country and the

United States), more likely to accept, rather than challenge,

their exclusion.

Domestic reforms of the 1960s may have extended full

legal citizenship to African Americans, but structural in-

equalities, and the secondary labor market, persisted. By

the 1970s an economic assault on the poor of all races began

to unravel the social safety network established in the pre-

vious decades. And the connection of rights to citizenship was reinforced. Growing numbers of Latin American and

Asian immigrants created a new pool of noncitizens who

could be treated as workers without rights.

The unraveling of the social safety network, combined

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

with deindustrialization, severely undermined the primary

sector of the labor market. But as the primary labor force was

contracting the secondary labor force was expanding. As

women entered the workforce in larger numbers and peo-

ple had to work longer hours to support a middle-class

lifestyle, many of the services connected to the reproduction of the labor force moved out of the home and into the private

sector. Fast food, child care, elder care, and home health

care became rapid-growth sectors. These were jobs that

could not be moved abroad. But if workers without social and

economic rights might be recruited, they could provide a

low-wage labor force.

Economist Nancy Folbre calls this aspect of the economy

the “invisible heart”—as opposed to the “invisible hand”

that classical economists argue governs the marketplace.

The paid world of work and business, she explains, couldn’t

exist without the unpaid, invisible network of care provided

mostly by women. The economic shifts that began in the

1970s both demanded more working hours outside the

home and cut back on public services and benefits, creating

what Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild have termed

a “care deficit” in the first world.8 Much of the new wave of

immigrants that began after 1965 moved in to fill this care

deficit.

The changing economy created other secondary-sector

jobs too. New systems of subcontracting enabled some jobs

to slip from the regulated to the unregulated sector. Facto-

ries threatened to close unless unionized workers gave up

their gains of the past fifty years to compete with low-cost

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

workers abroad. U.S. cities tried to woo in industries by

oƒering them exemptions from the regulations and taxes

that had been part of the redistributive model of the mid-

twentieth century. So conditions in the primary sector of the

workforce deteriorated at the same time that jobs were being

lost to outsourcing.

Some of these changes chipped away at the social and

economic rights that workers had attained through decades

of struggle and legislation. Prisons and security also became

growing employers as larger portions of the population were

pushed into economic hopelessness.

There were some moves that stripped African Americans

of political rights, too. Criminalization of drug use and dra-

conian sentencing laws and patterns contributed to the as-

tonishing statistic that in 2003 nearly one-fourth of African

American men in their thirties had prison records—while

only slightly over 10 percent had college degrees.9 Over five

million Americans are legally disenfranchised because of

felony convictions, including 13 percent of African Ameri-

can men.10 W hile still technically citizens, they are deprived

of one of the essential rights of citizenship in the United

States: the right to vote. (Other U.S. citizens also have re-

stricted voting rights: Puerto Ricans on the island can’t

vote in presidential elections and have no representation in

Congress; citizens living in Washington D.C. could not vote

in presidential elections until 1964, and still have no repre-

sentation in Congress.)

Immigrants, however, have no political rights to begin

with. If we frame our discussion by talking about countries

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

and nationalities, it may seem logical that people should

have rights only in the country where they are citizens. But

if we frame the discussion by talking about workers and their

rights, we see a diƒerent pattern. For centuries, the United

States and other industrialized countries have institution-

alized inequalities by granting rights to some people but not

to others. People without rights may be slaves, they may be

colonial subjects, they may be racial and ethnic minorities,

or they may be immigrants, or they may be people in or sub-

ject to another country. In all cases, though, governments

have made sure that there are people without rights to fulfill

business’s need for cheap workers and high profits. W hen

one group of workers has gained rights, historically, busi-

nesses—with government help—have simply looked else-

where to define or create a new group of rightless workers.

Exclusionary citizenship has allowed the United States to

maintain a fiction of equal rights while also making sure that

employers have access to workers without rights. From the

very founding of the country, the idea that “all men are cre-

ated equal” coexisted with the fact of slavery, and the exclu-

sion of large numbers of people physically present in the

United States from the rights of citizenship. This contradic-

tion continues to characterize U.S. law and society: many

people who are physically present here are still excluded

from the rights and privileges of citizenship. Keeping some

people outside of the bounds of equality and citizenship

served employers’ need for cheap labor in the past, and con-

tinues to do so today.

So let’s return to the original question: do immigrants

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

compete with low-skilled workers for low-paying jobs? Yes.

But the reason that this competition exists is because too many people are deprived of rights. The proposals for immi- gration reform that are circulating today do nothing to ex-

pand the rights of those currently excluded—in fact they do

just the opposite. Further restrictions on immigration will

not lower the numbers of immigrants—as long as the de-

mand for labor is there, history has shown that immigrants

will keep coming. And further restrictions will only com-

pound the problem of immigrants’ lack of rights. The an-

swer to the low-wage problem is not to restrict the rights

of people at the bottom even more (through deportations,

criminalizations, etc.) but to challenge the accord between

business and government that promotes the low-wage,

high-profit model.

W hen historians look at the evolution of workers’ rights

in the United States, they often point out that the institution

of slavery, and the subsequent dispossession and disenfran-

chisement of African Americans there, put the South far

behind the North in the growth of labor organizing and the

gains in workers’ rights. W hite workers in the South may

have clung to their status of legal and racial superiority, but

in fact the entrenched racial inequalities undermined the

socioeconomic status of poor whites as well. It is hard to or-

ganize unions when there are lots of even poorer people

eager for your job, and it’s hard to organize for social justice

when you’re focused on preserving your slight advantage

over those below you.

It’s important to understand, though, that it wasn’t the

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

presence of African Americans—or the fact that they were African American—that made it hard for poor whites to

bring about social change. It was the institutions of slavery

and racial exclusion, the disenfranchisement and disposses- sion of African Americans, combined with white racism, that prevented poor southern whites—as well as blacks—

from achieving social justice and equality. Likewise, it is not

the presence of immigrants that lowers the wages and living standards of citizens—it is the fact that immigrants are

deprived of rights, combined with anti-immigrant racism,

that creates the obstacles to improving the lives of poor

people.

Decisions and policies made by governments and by cor-

porations are the main factors that determine wage levels.

Global—and local—inequalities allow economies to sustain

a low-wage, secondary-sector labor market. Both immi-

grants and poor people in general, inside and outside the

deindustrializing countries like the United States, are the

common victims of the lavish lifestyles of the wealthy and

the profits of corporations.

If we look back at history, the greatest challenges to the

low-wage, high-profit model have come through federal

legislation and social movements, including labor organiz-

ing. W hen governments oƒer businesses freedom from reg-

ulation and deprive workers of rights, low wages and high

profits flourish, and democracy suƒers. W hether the excuse

is race, or economic status, or nationality, a portion of the

U.S. population has always been disenfranchised. Business

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

may benefit from this system, but the population as a whole

does not. Expanding democratic rights downward benefits

everyone, especially those at the lower end. The contradic-

tion between the rights of immigrants and the rights of cit-

izens who are poor is more apparent than real.

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

m y t h 3

U N I O N S O P P O S E I M M I G R AT I O N B E C A U S E I T H A R M S T H E W O R K I N G C L A S S

Unions in the United States have not always opposed immi-

gration. But the mainstream union movement in the United

States in the twentieth century did—until the 1990s. The

reasons had to do with how the U.S. union movement came

to define its goals and its place in U.S. society.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the American

Federation of Labor (AFL) competed with other, more rad-

ical unions. The Industrial Workers of the World (IW W )

promoted a social justice agenda and tried to organize the

most dispossessed workers. It sought profound social and

economic change. The AFL, in contrast, basically accepted

the social order. It concentrated mainly on trying to organize

and improve the conditions of the most skilled workers—

creating what some have called an “aristocracy of labor.” By

the middle of the century, with the growth of the Congress of

Industrial Organizations (CIO) and its later unification with

the AFL, this evolved into the creation of a “private welfare

state” for union workers.1

W hile some of its European counterparts sought a larger

public agenda of improving conditions for the working

class, the AFL-CIO concentrated on improving conditions

for union members. Rather than fighting to raise the min-

imum wage or create a national health-care system, the

AFL-CIO sought to improve benefits for organized workers

through their contracts with their employers. The priv-

ileged position of (mostly white) union workers actually

depended on the existence of the dual labor market—

domestically and globally—that produced goods and ser-

vices cheaply. That is, some get low wages so that others can

enjoy cheap products.

The IW W rejected the way citizenship was used in the

United States to deprive some workers of their rights. At its

founding convention in 1905, “Big Bill” Hay wood began

his remarks by explaining, “I turned over in my mind how

I should open the convention. I recalled that during the

French Commune the workers had addressed each other as

‘fellow citizens,’ but here there were many workers who were

not citizens so that would not do . . . I opened the convention

with ‘fellow workers.’ ”2

Contrast this to the stance taken by Samuel Gompers, the

president of the AFL, in the same year. “Caucasians,” he

announced proudly, “are not going to let their standard of

living be destroyed by Negroes, Chinamen, Japs, or any oth-

ers.”3 As David Roediger explained, “They opposed entry of

‘the scum’ from ‘the least civilized countries of Europe’ and

‘the replacing of the independent and intelligent coal min-

ers of Pennsylvania by the Huns and Slavs.’ They wrote of

fearing that an ‘American’ miner in Pennsylvania could

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

thrive only if he ‘latinizes’ his name. They explicitly asked

. . . ‘How much more [new] immigration can this country

absorb and retain its homogeneity?’ ”4

The United Mine Workers of America argued that labor

unions needed to uphold “Caucasian ideals of civilization”

and used its journal to warn continually against the “yellow

peril.”5

Gompers became an anti-imperialist in the case of the

Philippines, not because of any solidarity with the Philip-

pine independence movement or opposition to colonial

expansion, but because of racism. “We do not oppose the de-

velopment of our industry, the expansion of our commerce,

nor the development of our power and influence which the

United States may exert upon the destinies of the nations of

the earth,” he explained. The problem was the “semi-savage

population” of the islands—he did not want to see it incor-

porated into the United States.6

“If the Philippines are annexed,” he demanded, “what is

to prevent the Chinese, the Negritos and the Malays coming

to our country? How can we prevent the Chinese coolies

from going to the Philippines and from there swarm into the

United States and engulf our people and our civilization? . . .

Can we hope to close the flood-gates of immigration from

the hordes of Chinese and the semi-savage races coming

from what will then be part of our own country?”7

As Vernon Briggs shows, “At every juncture, and with no

exception prior to the 1980s, the union movement either di-

rectly instigated or strongly supported every legislative ini-

tiative enacted by Congress to restrict immigration and to

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

enforce its policy provisions.”8 Until 1917, those immigra-

tion restrictions were purely race based, forbidding first

Chinese, then Japanese, then all Asian immigration.

Over the course of the first decades of the twentieth

century, though, the AFL, gradually and grudgingly, began to

accept the new European immigrant workers into its fold.

“Although self-interested, wary, and incomplete, the AFL

opening to new immigrant workers initiated a process that

could transform ‘semiracial’ typing of already arrived new

immigrants . . . Although specifically defending (and equat-

ing) ‘white’ and ‘American’ standards of wages, consump-

tion, and working conditions, the more hopeful came to

regard it as possible that some new immigrants could be

taught those standards.”9 Workers who could not be encom-

passed within this new definition of whiteness, however,

were still excluded.

Southern and eastern European workers established

themselves as white, as Irish workers had before them, by

embracing rather than challenging the racial hierarchy. The

Irish “learned to distinguish themselves in racial struggles

and to establish their claim as ‘whites.’ They did so by taking

up arms for the white Republic against the blacks in the

Philadelphia race riots and the New York draft riots of 1863.

They also took part in the anti-Chinese movement in Cal-

ifornia.”10 Michael Rogin argues that first the Irish, then

southern and eastern European immigrants, established

their claim to whiteness through adopting white racism,

specifically through the use of blackface: “Blackface . . . dis-

tanced the Irish from the people they parodied. Demon-

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

strating their mastery of the cultural stereotype, Irish min-

strels crossed the cultural border . . . Blackface brought Irish

immigrants into the white working class, freeing them from

their guilt by black association.”11

The Democratic Party opened itself to Irish immigrant

workers on a pro-slavery platform before the Civil War, to

“counterbalance the numerical advantage of the Northern

free states and maintain slavery by the assimilation of the

Irish into the white race.”12 The party became “a coalition of

urban machine constituents and southern Negrophobes.”13

Union policies like “father-son” clauses in the building

trades and apprenticeship and seniority systems helped to

maintain racial exclusivity in the AFL and later AFL-CIO

well into the 1960s.14 The federation opposed the NA ACP’s

attempt to have domestic and agricultural workers included

under the Wagner Act in 1935.15 It worried that the 1964 Civil

Rights Act would challenge its history of discrimination and

fought to have past discrimination exempted from the Act’s

purview.16

The exclusionary system worked fairly well for many

white workers until the restructurings of the 1970s began.

But in the 1970s the New Deal social compact began to fall

apart. Businesses accelerated their shift abroad, and gov-

ernment began to dismantle the New Deal social welfare

state. It took the AFL-CIO until 1993 to come to terms with

the fact that the old system was unrecoverable—and that its

survival depended upon reaching out to immigrant workers.

At its 1993 convention the federation adopted a resolution

criticizing those who “exploit public anxiety by making im-

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

migrants and refugees the scapegoats for economic and

social problems.” “Immigrants are not the cause of our na-

tion’s problems,” the resolution stated. It a~rmed the rights

of immigrants, whether documented or undocumented, and

encouraged unions “to develop programs to address the

special needs of immigrant members and potential mem-

bers” and collaborate with “immigrant advocacy groups and

service organizations.”17

The “New Voices” leadership that took over the federa-

tion in 1995 continued the trend away from exclusiveness

and the “private welfare state.” The new leadership categor-

ically rejected the idea “that immigrants are to blame for the

deteriorating living standards of America’s low-wage work-

ers.” Rather than focusing on immigrants as the problem, it

proposed “increasing the minimum wage, adopting univer-

sal health care, and enacting labor law reform as the reme-

dies for the widening income disparity in the nation.”18

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

m y t h 4

I M M I G R A N T S D O N ’ T PAY TA X E S

Immigrants, no matter what their status, pay the same taxes

that citizens do—sales taxes, real estate taxes (if they rent or

own a home), gasoline taxes. Some immigrants work in the

informal economy and are paid under the table in cash, so

they don’t have federal and state income taxes, or social

security taxes, deducted from their paychecks. So do some

citizens. In fact every time the kid next door babysits, or

shovels the snow, he or she is working in the informal

economy.

Much of the service sector operates in the informal

sphere. Nanny jobs and housecleaning jobs—which tend

to be held primarily by women—generally use informal ar-

rangements whether the workers are citizen or immigrant,

documented or undocumented. But increasingly, jobs that

used to be in the formal sector—like factory jobs—have sunk

into the informal sector through elaborate systems of sub-

contracting. Textile and apparel manufacturing are partic-

ularly notorious in this regard.1

There are some benefits for employers, and for con-

sumers, from this informal sector. Employers can pay lower

wages than those required by law. Consumers receive access

to cheap products and services provided by these low-wage,

untaxed workers.

But workers in the informal economy don’t fare so

well. They don’t have access to any of the worker protections

that come with formal employment, like minimum wage

or health and safety regulations. Workers in the informal

economy can’t get unemployment insurance or workers’

compensation and generally get no benefits from their em-

ployer (like health insurance or sick leave or vacation time).

It’s hard to calculate exact numbers for the informal

economy because, by definition, it’s unregulated. One re-

cent study in Los Angeles estimated that immigrants made

up 40 percent of the city’s population, and one-fourth

of these were undocumented. The informal economy ac-

counted for some 15 percent of the city’s workforce, and un-

documented workers were concentrated there: 60 percent

of workers in the informal economy were undocumented.2

Many immigrants work in the formal economy, in which

case they have all of the same tax deductions from their pay-

checks as citizens do. Undocumented immigrants who work

in the formal economy generally do so by presenting false

social security numbers. The Social Security Administra-

tion estimates that about three-fourth of undocumented

workers do this.3

Public commentary about this practice is often quite

angry. In fact, though, the only ones who lose anything when

workers use a false social security number are the workers

themselves. Taxes are deducted from their paychecks—but

if they are undocumented, they still have no access to the

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

benefits they are paying for, like social security or unem-

ployment benefits.

Even with a false social security number, the federal and

state taxes that are deducted from a worker’s paycheck will

go into federal and state coƒers. Social security payments

are either credited to whoever’s number was used, or, if a

worker uses a number that doesn’t belong to anybody, they

go into the Social Security Administration’s “earnings sus-

pense file.” As of 2005, Social Security was receiving about

$7 billion a year through false social security numbers—

allowing it to break even, because that’s about the same

amount as the diƒerence between what it paid out in ben-

efits and what it received in payroll taxes. According to the

New York Times, “illegal immigrant workers in the United States are now providing the system with a subsidy of as

much as $7 billion a year.”4 Yet these workers will never be

able to receive Social Security benefits.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

m y t h 5

I M M I G R A N T S A R E A D R A I N O N T H E E C O N O M Y

This is a complicated question that requires us to define “the

economy.” Generally, those who say immigrants are a drain

on the economy are referring to the myth that immigrants

use more in public services than they pay in taxes. In fact the

majority of immigrants, being of prime working age and in-

eligible for many public services, tend to contribute more

to the public sector than they actually use. However, many

of the services they do tap into are local services (schools,

transportation, libraries), and the new wave of immigration

coincides with federal cutbacks to these services, placing

a greater burden on local governments. (The native born, it

should be said, also tend to use more in local services than they pay in local taxes.)

Several state-level studies have tried to assess the level

of state and federal taxes that immigrants, documented and

undocumented, pay compared to the level of state and fed-

eral services that they receive. Early studies in California

and in the Southwest as a whole and more recent studies in

the Southeast, which is seeing the highest rates of immigrant

population growth now, have come to similar conclusions.

Immigrants, documented and undocumented, are more

likely to pay taxes than they are to use public services. Un-

documented immigrants aren’t eligible for most public

services and live in fear of revealing themselves to any gov-

ernment authorities. Documented immigrants are eligible

for some services—but even they hesitate to use them, since

they fear that being seen as a public charge will make it

harder for them to stay, apply for citizenship, or bring fam-

ily members. Nationally, one study estimates that house-

holds headed by undocumented immigrants use less than

half the amount of federal services that households headed

by documented immigrants or citizens make use of.1

There are some government services that both docu-

mented and undocumented immigrants do benefit from:

public schools, emergency medical care, and the public

safety system (e.g., police, prisons). These are known as

“mandated services,” which federal authority requires state

government to provide to all people, regardless of immigra-

tion status.

The only kind of public service that immigrant house-

holds use at higher rates than natives is food assistance pro-

grams such as food stamps, WIC, and free or reduced-cost

school lunches. However, it’s not the immigrants them-

selves who use this aid—they’re usually not eligible—but

rather their U.S.-born children, who are citizens.2

The Georgia Budget and Policy Institute estimates that

undocumented immigrants in the state pay between $1,800

and $2,400 a year in state and local taxes, including sales,

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

property, and income taxes (for those who file W-2 forms

with false social security numbers). This brings from $200

to $250 million into state and local budgets.

“Do undocumented immigrants pay enough in taxes to

cover the services used?” the report asks.

For undocumented immigrants, the answer is unclear.

However, for legal immigrants, studies have shown that

first-generation immigrants pay more in federal taxes

than they receive in federal benefits. The same does not

hold true for state taxes and services, however, as first-

generation immigrants often use more in services than

they pay in taxes. However, the descendants of the first-

generation immigrant correct that pattern and con-

tribute more in taxes at both the federal and state level

than they consume in services at both levels. Each gen-

eration successively contributes a greater share due

to increased wages, language skills, and education.3

Similarly, in Colorado undocumented immigrants were

found to pay about $1,850 in state and local taxes if they

were working on the books, and $1,350 (in sales and prop-

erty taxes) if they were working under the table. Thus the

estimated 250,000 undocumented immigrants in that state

were paying $150 to $200 million in state and local taxes,

covering about 70 to 85 percent of the approximately $225

million they used in state and local services.4

If immigrants don’t make heav y use of social services

and they do pay taxes, then why don’t their taxes cover all of,

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

or more than, the services they do use? Mostly because they

earn such low wages that their tax payments are lower than

those of people who earn higher wages. Low wages mean that

less is withheld for income taxes, and it means that they have

less money to spend, so they pay less in sales and property

taxes than people who earn more. In fact, our progressive

system of income taxes is designed to take a greater chunk of

the income of a high earner than a low earner. So if immi-

grants are paying less, it’s because they’re earning less.

A Florida study found similar results: new immigrants

tend to have lower levels of education and lower earnings

—and thus pay less in taxes—than the U.S. population as

a whole. Within fifteen years, immigrants’ earnings—and

their taxes—have caught up.5

Since the 1990s, economists have started to use a more

complex model for evaluating the eƒects of immigration

with respect to taxes and public services. Instead of just

looking at the cost of educating the children of immigrants,

for example, they also look at the potential future tax rev-

enues of those children. This approach, called “generational

accounting,” is based on the notion that when government

spending exceeds tax revenues—that is, when the govern-

ment operates at a deficit, as is currently the case—future

generations essentially have to pay back the debt. So the

numbers of new immigrants in future generations will af-

fect how the costs of the debt are distributed—more immi-

grants means less burden on the native born.6

From the perspective of businesses, employing immi-

grant workers, and workers in other countries, brings some

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

special advantages. Again, a comparison to slavery is en-

lightening. Slaveholders generally preferred to purchase

slaves of prime working age and strength. They discovered

that it was cheaper to continually import new slaves and

overwork them to death rather than having to pay for the re- production of their slave labor force. Brazilian slaveholders found that they could recover the cost of purchasing a slave

with two years of harsh labor, so that any amount of time that

a slave survived after that was pure profit. The average was

three more years—and the profit could then be used to buy a

new slave worker.

W hen the slave trade was abolished—at the beginning

of the nineteenth century in the United States, much later

in the century in Brazil and Cuba—slaveholders had to shift

their strategies. In order to maintain a slave population,

they had to foster reproduction. This meant that they had

to invest more in their existing slaves. They had to provide

for children who were too young to work, and for the women

or elders who cared for the children. They had to increase

the level of subsistence so that slaves would not die within five years.

Immigration and outsourcing (moving production

abroad) fulfill the same logic, from the perspective of busi-

nesses. The New Deal social compact put the burden on

businesses to give back to their workers, and to society, in

order to support the reproduction of the labor force. Wages,

benefits, and taxes were all ways in which businesses con-

tributed to social reproduction.

If businesses could find a new source of workers that was

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

reproduced outside of the United States and the New Deal

social compact, however, they could save money. If a worker

is born and raised in Mexico, works for a U.S. enterprise (ei-

ther in Mexico or in the United States) between the ages of

twenty and forty, then returns to the home community, it is

the Mexican family, community, and institutions that bear

the costs of reproduction. The U.S. company gets just what

the slaveholder got: workers in their prime working years,

with no investment in the society that raised them or that

will care for them as they age.

Of course some immigrants, even if they originally in-

tended to work for a short time and return home, end up

staying. Over time, they lose those special immigrant qual-

ities that make them willing to work for low wages in sub-

standard conditions. In other words, they become more like

citizens: they need to work for wages, and in conditions, that

will sustain their life here. The opportunities for upward

mobility that European immigrants enjoyed may no longer

exist, but immigrants do shift in the kinds of jobs they will

do, the kinds of conditions they will accept—and the amount

of taxes that they pay.

As workers leave the secondary sector—whether because

they return home, grow older, or set down roots here—em-

ployers remain avid for new immigrants to replace them. A

significant exception to the model of economic improve-

ment over time is undocumented immigrants. Unlike “le-

gal” immigrants (refugees, legal permanent residents, and

those who become naturalized citizens), whose incomes in-

crease significantly in proportion to their time in the United

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

States, undocumented immigrants tend to remain on the

margins of the U.S. economy. Even those who had been in

the United States for ten years or more in 2003 had a family

income of only $29,900—as compared to natives, whose

family incomes averaged $45,900, refugees at $45,200,

legal permanent residents at $44,600, and naturalized cit-

izens at $56,500.7

It’s not surprising, then, that 39 percent of undocu-

mented immigrant children live below the poverty line, and

53 percent lack health insurance.8 The results of the 1986

Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted am-

nesty to a significant portion of the undocumented popu-

lation then in the United States, are also clear. Once they

achieved legal status, migrants were able to improve their

levels of education and income.9 By maintaining arbitrary

status diƒerences and excluding millions of people from

legal rights, and by ensuring that immigrants will continue

to arrive, and that some will continue to be classed as “ille-

gal,” U.S. policies guarantee the existence of a permanent

underclass.

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

m y t h 6

I M M I G R A N T S S E N D M O S T O F W H AT T H E Y E A R N O U T O F T H E C O U N T R Y I N T H E F O R M O F R E M I T TA N C E S

Remittances are a very important part of the global econ-

omy. They often account for a larger portion of poor coun-

tries’ income than foreign aid does. (“Remittances” refers

to money that immigrants send home to family members

in the home community.) In 2004, immigrants from Latin

America sent over $30 billion to their home countries—in

2005, over $50 billion.1

In 2004, 10 million Latin American immigrants—some

60 percent of the Latin Americans living in the United

States—sent home remittances, usually ranging from

$1,000 to $2,500 a year, or 10 percent of their annual in-

come. (The total income of Latin American immigrants in

the United States is $450 billion.) Although only 10 percent

of what an average immigrant earns here, the money sent

home represents from 50 percent to 80 percent of the

household income for those at home in Latin America.2

Ninety percent of immigrants’ wages are spent in this coun-

try. Citizens, too, of course, spend some of their earnings

abroad—directly, if they travel, or indirectly, if they purchase

imported goods.

Because of the complex nature of the global economy, it’s

very hard to untangle exactly who benefits from every dol-

lar spent. For example, if you buy a cup of coƒee at Star-

bucks, you’re paying for rent on the building, workers’

wages, baristas’ wages, maintenance workers’ wages, man-

agers’ salaries, and utilities (and everything that goes into

producing the utilities, including perhaps the importation

of coal, oil, or gas), plus various forms of insurance, adver-

tising, the furniture, the music, the mugs, and the many

people involved in the production, processing, trading, and

shipping of coƒee, not to mention the shareholders in all of

these diƒerent enterprises, and the executive o~cers and

their retirement packages . . .

How remittances are spent is also very complex. A

significant—though shrinking—portion goes to the institu-

tions that process the financial transactions. In the 1990s

the cost of sending money to Latin America was almost 20

percent of the amount sent, though this declined to slightly

under 10 percent after 2000.3 Still, local banks and transfer

companies, all of which employ people, are one beneficiary.

Some portion of the remittances goes directly to family

members and is spent on food, health care, clothing, home

improvement, and education. This kind of spending can

have both local and global eƒects, since many of the prod-

ucts and materials used in these areas are imported. W hen

the money is spent locally, it can also help to improve the

local economy.

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

In some ways, remittance money is more e~cient than

foreign aid at improving people’s lives in ways that reduce

migration. Foreign aid often comes with strings attached.

Sometimes it has to be spent on products, or machinery,

made in the country that gives the aid. Sometimes it has to

be spent on “development” projects that actually make the

lives of the poor worse—like a dam, or a mine, that displaces

people from their homes, or like subsidized corn that floods

markets and bankrupts poor farmers.

Some remittance money goes to hometown associations

that are involved in diƒerent types of development projects

like building schools, water systems, or sports facilities. (In

Spanish these are sometimes called organizaciones de pueblo, clubes de oriundos, or clubes sociales comunitarios.) The Mex- ican government has been particularly active in using in-

centives to channel money into economic development. In

perhaps the consummate irony, the state government of

Guanajuato has implemented a program of joint ventures

with hometown associations to develop garment maquila-

dora factories in migrants’ home communities. These fac-

tories produce clothing for foreign companies that in turn

export to the United States. As of 2000, six of these fac-

tories had been established, with plans in the works for

sixty more.4 Other studies have shown that U.S. companies

choose Guanajuato as a site for building factories because,

with such a large proportion of families relying on remit-

tances, they are able to pay lower wages there than in other

parts of Mexico.5

Remittances can have other contradictory eƒects too. In

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

El Salvador, one study found that a significant portion of re-

mittances is spent on imported consumer goods. Imports

rose from 27.7 percent of El Salvador’s GDP in 1990 to 42

percent in 2004. So rather than creating jobs, the system

creates new incentives to migrate, since only families who

count migrants among their members can aƒord this kind

of consumption.6

Remittances, then, are one element in an extremely in-

tegrated global economy. If we look only at the flow of re-

mittances, it looks like a lot of money is leaving wealthy

countries and going into poor countries. But if we look at the

global economy as a system, remittances are just one small

piece of a very complex, multidirectional flow.

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e e c o n o m y

PA R T T W O

I M M I G R A N T S A N D T H E L AW

The U.S. Declaration of Independence asserts that humans

are endowed with “unalienable rights,” and that if a gov-

ernment deprives them of such rights, “it is the right of

the people to alter or to abolish it.” Henry David Thoreau

cautioned against “undue respect for law” and urged his

readers to rely instead on conscience. He decried the

“thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in eƒect do nothing to put an end to them.”

“W hen a sixth of the population of a nation which has

undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a

whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a for-

eign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is

not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize,”

he declared in Civil Disobedience. (He was referring to the U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1846.)1

In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther

King too insisted that laws be judged from the standpoint

of conscience and morality. “A law is unjust,” he wrote, “if

it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied

the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the

law.” He was talking, of course, about laws enforcing segre-

gation made by southern legislatures for which blacks were

denied the right to vote. He could just as well have been

talking about laws that discriminate against immigrants,

a minority in a country that denies them the right to vote.

(Some have even argued that all the world’s citizens

should be allowed to vote in U.S. elections, given the

degree of U.S. political, military, and economic power

around the globe. “Every action of the US President aƒects

my life deeply in political, economic, social and cultural

terms,” wrote Indian journalist Satya Sagar in 2004, in an

only partly facetious essay explaining why U.S. elections

should be opened to all.)2

Much of the current anti-immigrant agitation stems

from the idea of the sanctity of the law, and abhorrence

of the crime that immigrants commit when they violate

immigration law. This section will examine the arbitrary

and discriminatory nature of immigration law and argue

that the legal categories it creates have historically been

informed by racism and politics, rather than humanitari-

anism, justice, or the idea that all men (or all people) are

created equal.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

m y t h 7

T H E R U L E S A P P LY T O E V E R Y O N E , S O N E W I M M I G R A N T S N E E D T O F O L L O W T H E M J U S T A S I M M I G R A N T S I N T H E PA S T D I D

One of the most oft-repeated—and most puzzling—com-

ments regarding the debate on immigration goes something

like this: “I’m not against immigration, but I’m against ille-

gal immigration. New immigrants should play by the rules,

like our parents and forebears did.”

The sentiment reveals a lot about how we’ve been taught

to think about U.S. history: we’ve been taught to think of

this as a country of white, voluntary immigrants. The history

of people who don’t fall into that category is incidental,

rather than central, to the story we learn in school. “The

rules,” though, were diƒerent for Europeans than for Af-

ricans, Asians, and Native Americans. For the latter, “the

rules” meant enslavement, exclusion, and conquest.

W hat the people (generally of European origin) who

point to “the rules” ignore, moreover, is that when their par- ents and grandparents came to the United States, they in fact

did exactly what so-called “illegal” immigrants are doing

today. They decided to make the journey, and they made it.

All they had to do was get together the boat fare. The rules

were diƒerent then. U.S. law explicitly limited citizenship

and naturalization to white people. Nonwhites, however,

were denied both entry and citizenship. Through a complex

process of omission and commission, the law dictated open

immigration for white people and restricted immigration

for people of color. Immigration and naturalization law cre-

ated, in the words of Aristide Zolberg, “a nation by design.”1

Between 1880 and World War I, about 25 million Euro-

peans immigrated to the United States. They did not have

visas or passports. A very small number of them—about 1

percent—were turned back at Ellis Island because they were

deemed to be criminals, prostitutes, diseased, anarchists,

or paupers.2 There were no illegal immigrants from Europe

because there was no law making immigration illegal for

Europeans.

It wasn’t until 1924 that numerical restrictions were

placed on white European immigration, creating a situation

in some ways similar to today’s, in which would-be immi-

grants had to compete, before they left home, for the few

available visas to come to the United States. The restrictions

placed on Europeans, though, pale in the face of those that

the 1924 legislation placed on non-Europeans: as “aliens

ineligible to citizenship” because they belonged to the “col-

ored races,” they were excluded altogether. Although the

1924 quotas did not apply to the Western Hemisphere—

Congress couldn’t figure out what “race” Mexicans actually

belonged to—the legislation also invented the concept of the

“illegal immigrant” and created the Border Patrol to keep

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

Mexicans out. (I describe these restrictions in more detail

in the section on immigration and race below.)

The last major immigration reform, in 1965, finally re-

moved the racially defined quota system, and replaced it

with a uniform quota system for all countries. But the new

laws of 1965 were only one factor leading to the huge in-

crease in immigration from Latin America and Asia.

Even more important has been the acceleration of what

we now call “globalization.” Today’s globalization builds on

structures developed during the centuries of colonialism

that preceded it. One aspect of globalization in the second

half of the twentieth century has been a huge population

movement from the former colonies into the lands of their

former colonial masters. In order to comprehend this global

phenomenon, we have to look at the socioeconomic and

cultural legacy of colonialism.

In broad strokes, the European colonialism that shaped

the modern world could be described as the conquest of

people of color by white people, the massive transfer of

natural resources out of the colonies and into the colonial

powers, and the dispossession of formerly self-su~cient

native inhabitants as their lands were taken for the export

economy. Modern colonialism began with Spanish and Por-

tuguese expansion in the 1400s, followed by northern Eu-

ropean expansion in the 1600s and 1700s. By the end of the

1800s the European countries had carved up much of Africa

and Asia, while the United States was extending direct and

indirect rule into the newly independent countries of Latin

America.

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e l a w

Formerly self-su~cient natives of these lands conve-

niently served as a cheap or coerced labor force to exploit

the resources (land, minerals). The colonial powers received

the raw materials and agricultural products that allowed

them to industrialize; the colonies were left with depleted

lands and political structures that were geared toward tyr-

anny and exploitation. If the dispossessed masses rebelled,

colonial armies were quickly mobilized to repress them.

Consider the example of the Dominican Republic. It was

colonized first by Spain, then by the United States. (The U.S.

invaded and occupied the Dominican Republic from 1916 to

1924 and again in 1965.) The first U.S. occupation brought

about massive dispossession and transfer of Dominican

land into the hands of U.S.-owned sugar plantations; the

second brought about the modern version of colonialism

(sometimes called “neocolonialism”), in which the govern-

ments of poor countries are forced to create low-wage, low-

tax, low-regulation environments for the benefit of U.S.

corporations. (The proliferation of these export-processing

zones there explains why so many of our clothes bear tags

saying “Made in the Dominican Republic.”)

The United States has the highest standard of living in

the world, and it maintains it by using its laws, and its mili-

tary, to enforce the extraction of resources and labor from its

modern version of colonies, with little compensation for the

populations. It is no wonder that people from these coun-

tries want to follow their resources to the place where they

are being enjoyed.

Most of today’s immigrants come from countries where

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

the United States has been deeply involved in the past

hundred years: in addition to the Dominican Republic, they

come from such countries as Mexico, the Philippines, El

Salvador, Guatemala, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Given the

numerical quotas and the preference system that privileges

family members of those already in the United States, for

most would-be immigrants from the Third World (i.e., peo-

ple from former colonies—i.e., people of color) there is lit-

erally no way at all to receive permission to come here. Even

immediate family members, who are granted priority, have

to wait up to twenty years to get permission. For those with-

out family members who are citizens or permanent resi-

dents, the current law is little diƒerent from the one passed

in 1924: it permanently excludes them.

The law, then, is inherently discriminatory. It primarily

benefits close relatives of U.S. citizens and of permanent

residents. For most people who want to come to the United

States, the law simply forbids it.

W hen the law prevented blacks from sitting at a lunch

counter reserved for whites, black people protested the

law by breaking it—sitting down where they were told they

weren’t allowed. On many occasions in the past, people have

struggled for equality before the law by committing civil dis-

obedience and entering an institution, a neighborhood, a

city, a state, or a country that forbids their presence. Today,

we think of many of those who broke the law in the past in the

interest of equal rights as heroes.

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e l a w

m y t h 8

T H E C O U N T R Y I S B E I N G O V E R R U N B Y I L L E G A L I M M I G R A N T S

According to the United Nations High Commission on Hu-

man Rights, “the expression ‘illegal migrant’ should not be

used. It contradicts the spirit and violates directly the words

of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which clearly

states in Article 6 that ‘Everyone has the right to recognition

every where as a person before the law.’ The preferred term

is ‘undocumented migrant.’ ”1 Some immigration scholars

prefer “unauthorized migrant,” since many of the people

who fall into this category do in fact have documents, but not

valid documents—they may be false, or expired, or other- wise fail to authorize their presence.2

The diƒerence between “legal” and unauthorized, un-

documented, or “illegal” immigrants is nowhere near as

clear-cut as most people imagine. Some people who enter

the country legally will become illegal if they overstay their

visa; some people who enter illegally or become illegal are

actually in the process of legalizing their status, especially if

they have a close relative who can sponsor them.

Many families and households include people of dif-

fering immigration status: citizens by birth, naturalized

citizens, legal permanent residents, people on immigrant

visas, and undocumented immigrants.

A 2004 study by the Pew Hispanic Center, based on

the 2000 census and the 2004 Current Population Survey,

found 35.7 million foreign-born residents in the United

States; in 2005 this was up to 37 million. Of these, 11.3 mil-

lion (11.5 million in 2005) were naturalized citizens; 10.4

million (10.5 million in 2005) were legal permanent resi-

dents; 10.3 million (11.1 million in 2005) were unauthorized

migrants; 2.5 million (2.6 million in 2005) were refugees;

and 1.2 million (1.3 million in 2005) were temporary legal

residents (holding a nonimmigrant visa like a tourist or a

student visa).3 As of early 2006, estimates had risen to be-

tween 11 and 12 million unauthorized migrants.4

Of the unauthorized migrants, over half—5.9 million

(6.2 million in 2005)—were from Mexico, and another 2.5

million from elsewhere in Latin America. The rest came

from Asia (1 million in 2004; 1.5 million in 2005), Europe

and Canada (600,000 in both 2004 and 2005), and Africa

(400,000 in both years).5

Hard information on these unauthorized migrants is

hard to come by. But the Pew report argues that most of those

who came from Mexico entered “without inspection”—that

is, they crossed the border without valid entry documents—

while most of those from outside the Americas entered with

valid visas but overstayed them. For the rest of Latin Amer-

ica, migrants are assumed to be divided between the two cat-

egories—some crossing the border without documents, and

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e l a w

some overstaying valid visas.6 The California Rural Legal

Assistance Foundation estimates that half of all unautho-

rized migrants are EWIs—people who “entered without

inspection,” that is, crossed the border without passing

through a border control post. The other half are visa over-

stayers—people who entered with a valid visa but did not de-

part when the visa expired.7

In addition, something like 1 to 1.5 million of the un-

authorized migrants have “quasi-legal” status in the United

States. They may have requested asylum, or begun the pro-

cess of acquiring legal permanent resident status, or be-

come eligible for a new category of authorized presence, like

the temporary protected status oƒered to Salvadorans and

Nicaraguans.8

The stereotype most Americans hold of the “illegal im-

migrant” is a single, adult male, here to work temporarily.

Indeed some of the unauthorized migrant population falls

into this category. Of the approximately 11.1 million unau-

thorized migrants in the country as of March 2005, only

about 25 percent (2.4 million) were single men, fewer than

10 percent (730,000) were single women, and 16 percent

(1.8 million) of unauthorized migrants were children under

eighteen. The remaining 3.9 million women and 5.4 million

men lived in families, whose members varied in terms of

immigration status. In particular, they included three mil-

lion children who were U.S. citizens.9

Overall, unauthorized migrants tend to have lower levels

of education and work at lower-paying jobs than do autho-

rized migrants or citizens. They are especially overrepre-

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

sented in agriculture and construction work—some of the

most unregulated sectors of the labor market.10 Only 4.3

percent of all workers in the United States are unauthorized

migrants, but they constitute 19 percent of workers in agri-

culture, 17 percent in cleaning and building maintenance,

12 percent in construction, 11 percent in food preparation,

and 8 percent in production.11

In industrial work, unauthorized workers are particu-

larly present in food manufacturing and in textiles and

apparel manufacturing. These two industries oƒer good ex-

amples of how global economic restructuring has aƒected

the U.S. labor market.

Textiles and garments were two of the first industries

to experiment with the mobility of capital. The U.S. textile

industry began in New England in the mid-nineteenth

century. Before the century ended, textile magnates were

looking to invest in places where they could produce more

cheaply. South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and other places

in the U.S. south oƒered low taxes, cheap labor, o~cial re-

pression of unions, and subsidies to entice capital.

Factory owners in the north played a double game dur-

ing the early to mid-twentieth century. They invested in the

south, taking advantage of the incentives southern commu-

nities oƒered. Then they told their northern workers that

they were being undercut by southern competition and

would have to lower wages and speed up the work pace in

order to remain competitive. Often they ran their northern

factories into the ground before closing them permanently.

In the second half of the century, the game turned global.

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e l a w

Manufacturers opened plants in Puerto Rico, in Mexico,

and elsewhere in Latin America and in Asia. They imposed

cost-cutting measures in their U.S. plants, claiming “for-

eign” competition. W hen they had reduced conditions in

their U.S. factories to make them competitive with the

Third World, they began to import Latin American workers

—claiming that no U.S. workers wanted the jobs. New En-

gland’s oldest textile towns, like Lowell, Massachusetts, and

Central Falls, Rhode Island, turned into new immigrant

centers in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, as textile employers re-

cruited workers in Puerto Rico and Colombia.12

Meatpacking followed a somewhat diƒerent trajectory.

W hile the textile industry was able to use the threat of plant

relocation to successfully undermine union organizing at-

tempts or to keep unions weak, the meatpacking industry

became one of the bastions of industrial union organizing in

the 1930s, which succeeded in significantly improving the

conditions of workers. “From the 1930s to the 1970s,” ex-

plains Lance Compa, “meatpacking workers’ pay and con-

ditions improved. Master contracts covering the industry

raised wages and safety standards. In the 1960s and 1970s,

meatpacking workers’ pay and conditions approximated

those of auto, steel, and other industrial laborers who

worked hard in their plants and through their unions to at-

tain steady jobs with good wages and benefits. Meatpackers’

wages remained substantially higher than the average man-

ufacturing sector wage.”13

In the 1980s, meatpackers began an assault on the con-

ditions of their unionized workers. Management’s response

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

to the 1985 strike at a Hormel meatpacking plant in Aus-

tin, Minnesota, epitomized the industry’s commitment to

breaking and eliminating unions in their plants. The strike

lasted for over a year and a half, and garnered national at-

tention from labor activists and others who hoped to stem

the tide of concessionary bargaining. The cautious national

union (UFCW ) opposed the militant local, and the strike

was crushed. It was the beginning of the dismantling of the

unionized meatpacking sector.

Because it is perishable, meat is harder to transport than

many of the items whose production was moved abroad in

the 1980s. Rather, the meat industry replicated what the

agricultural industry had been doing since the nineteenth

century: it began to “bring in the Third World.” As Compa

explains it, “Instead of exporting production to developing

countries for low labor costs, lax health, safety and environ-

mental enforcement, and vulnerable, exploited workers,

U.S. meat and poultry companies essentially are reproduc-

ing developing country employment conditions here.”14

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e l a w

m y t h 9

T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S H A S A G E N E R O U S R E F U G E E P O L I C Y

Since World War II, U.S. law has provided for certain

would-be immigrants to be granted special rights as ref-

ugees. Despite the folklore (repeated in the citizenship

exam) that “the Pilgrims came to America to gain religious

freedom”1 and the Statue of Liberty inscription welcoming

“your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to

breathe free,” prior to World War II the country in fact had

no immigration provisions at all for refugees. Although the

admission of refugees since then is often thought of as a hu-

manitarian policy, its character has been much more politi-

cal than humanitarian. The vast majority of the three million

refugees admitted to the country since 1945 have been from

just three countries: Cuba, Vietnam, and the former So-

viet Union.2 For the United States, “refugee” has generally

meant “refugee from Communism.” From 1965 until 1980,

this definition was actually written into the law.

During the 1930s, President Roosevelt clung resolutely

to the established quota system as a reason for not opening

the doors of the United States to those trying to flee Hitler’s

Germany.3 At the end of the war, the Allies struggled to figure

out what to do with some one million displaced persons in

the zones they occupied. The United States finally enacted

the Displaced Persons Act (DPA), which allowed 205,000

refugees to be admitted between 1948 and 1950. The refu-

gees would be charged against future years’ quotas, instead

of having to wait until quota spaces became available.

Provisions of the 1948 DPA also limited the ability of

Jewish refugees to take advantage of it, although the 1950 re-

newal, which allowed another 200,000 displaced persons to

enter, this time above the existing quota system, did enable

some 80,000 Jewish refugees into the country. “Refugee”

status was also granted to at least several thousand Nazi col-

laborators under the acts.4 “Only a minority of those ad-

mitted . . . were Hitler’s victims,” concludes one analysis. “A

larger number were members of groups that had supported

the Third Reich or benefited from it . . . [In addition,] more

than 70 percent . . . were refugees from the USSR and East-

ern Europe.”5

After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the attorney general’s

o~ce invoked its ability to “parole” thousands of Cubans

who left the island. The 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act created

a special legal situation just for Cubans: any Cuban who had

been present for a year could be automatically granted legal

permanent residence. Not only that, but a gamut of federal

assistance programs facilitated Cubans’ settlement in the

United States.

For refugees from the neighboring island of Haiti, the

U.S. extended a very diƒerent kind of welcome. Over the

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e l a w

course of the 1970s thousands of Haitians fled the growing

repression of the Duvalier dictatorship there and sought

asylum in the United States. Many came on small rafts and

homemade boats. By mid-1978 some six thousand to seven

thousand cases had piled up before the INS (Immigration

and Naturalization Service) o~ce in Miami, as the o~ce

hesitated to act on them. After all, Duvalier was a U.S. ally—

wouldn’t it be contradictory to admit that his government

was creating political refugees?

In July of that year, the INS intelligence division oƒered

a blanket opinion that Haitians should be considered “eco-

nomic,” not political, refugees. To deter future migration,

the INS enforcement o~ce advised that Haitians be de-

tained upon arrival, denied work permits, and be processed

and expelled as quickly as possible. Under the new Haiti

Program untrained o~cers began carrying out forty rapid-

fire asylum interviews in a day. Over four thousand applica-

tions were processed under the program, and every one was

denied.6

It was not until the Refugee Act of 1980 that the United

States finally created a refugee policy that conformed to

United Nations standards of treating equally all people fac-

ing political persecution. Even though the United States had

signed the 1951 UN Convention and the 1967 Protocol de-

fining refugees, its own policy remained a Cold War policy

that applied only to refugees from Communist countries.

It didn’t take long for the new Refugee Act to be tested.

The stream of Haitian refugees continued, and only weeks

after President Carter signed the law, thousands of Cuban

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

refugees began arriving on the shores of South Florida.

After a large group of Cubans occupied the Peruvian em-

bassy in Havana demanding the right to emigrate to the

United States, Fidel Castro reversed a long-standing policy

of restricting emigration by sea and announced that those

who wanted to leave were welcome to do so. Between April

and September of 1980, some 125,000 Cubans departed, in

what became known as the Mariel Boatlift, after the town

from which many set sail.

Cuban immigrants arriving through the Mariel Boat-

lift were universally accepted as “political” refugees, while

Haitians fleeing the violence of the Duvalier dictatorship

at the same moment were denied refugee status, under the

argument that they were leaving because of the economic

devastation of the country. “Photographs of shirtless black

refugees huddled aboard barely seaworthy craft evoked im-

ages buried deep in the American collective mind. Like the

slave ships of yore, these boats also brought a cargo of black

laborers, except that this time, they came on their own ini-

tiative, and this time, nobody wanted them. Still more pa-

thetic were those black bodies washing ashore Florida’s

pristine beaches when their craft did not make it.”7

In September 1981, President Reagan announced that

Haitian immigrants posed a “serious national problem

detrimental to the interests of the United States.” He nego-

tiated an agreement with the Duvalier dictatorship that al-

lowed the Coast Guard to block immigration by patrolling

Haitian waters and return all ships before they could reach

U.S. territory.8 No agreement like this existed any where else

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e l a w

in the world.9 By the end of 1990, 23,000 Haitians had been

stopped at sea under the new policy, and only 8 of these were

granted asylum.10

In one particularly glaring case, in July 1991 a large

Haitian boat filled with refugees stopped to rescue some

Cubans whose boat had wrecked at sea. W hen the Coast

Guard intercepted them, the Haitian ship was returned with

its passengers to Haiti—except for the Cubans, who were

brought to Florida.11

At the heart of the policy divide between the warm wel-

come for Cubans and the cold one for Haitians was a logical

leap that was rarely articulated. U.S. policy was based on the

premise that in Communist countries, economic di~culties

were the result of government policies, and were therefore

political. Thus the Cubans who left in the early 1960s when

faced with the threat of losing their property or their life-

style, or those who left in the 1980s out of exhaustion from

economic hardship, were political refugees: they were flee-

ing the policies of Cuba’s Communist government.

In a capitalist country like Haiti, however, U.S. policy was

based on the idea that poverty was merely an economic, not

a political problem. Even Haitians who clearly faced direct

political persecution—like Solivece Romet, who described

his torture at the hands of the government-sponsored

Tontons Macoutes and showed INS agents his scars—were

classed as economic, rather than political refugees.12 Those

who made the mistake of telling INS agents that they in-

tended to work if admitted to the United States were likewise

doomed to the “economic” category and denied entry.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

These events were eerily recapitulated in the summer of

1994, when a growing economic crisis in Cuba, including

massive power outages, provoked another exodus from the

island, coinciding with increasing desperation and repres-

sion by the military government that had overthrown Pres-

ident Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti. The September 1991

coup in Haiti had provoked another huge wave of refugees

in the last months of the year. Hundreds were dying in un-

seaworthy vessels. In November, amidst growing protests by

Congress and human rights groups, a federal judge ordered

the Bush administration to stop its long-standing policy of

repatriating fleeing Haitians.13

Bush refused, however, to allow the refugees into the

United States. Instead, ships intercepted at sea were taken

to the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. “Stories in

the mainstream U.S. media continued to portray Guan-

tánamo as a haven for refugees. Haitians, including the

Haitian print and radio media, tended to refer to the base

as a ‘concentration camp,’ a ‘prison,’ or, at best, ‘a detention

facility.’ ”14

The rationale for detaining and then repatriating the

Haitians on Guantánamo rather than giving them the right

to seek asylum in the United States was a curious one, but

one that would become familiar later on. “W hile conceding

that the Haitians are treated diƒerently from other national

groups who seek asylum in the United States, the Govern-

ment claimed that the U.S. Constitution and other sources

of U.S. and international law do not apply on Guantánamo.”15

The U.S. Refugee Act of 1980, and international law, were

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e l a w

thus conveniently dispensed with, to the outrage of the UN

High Commissioner for Refugees.16

In May 1992, with the camp overflowing, Bush reverted

to the old Haiti Program: Haitians picked up at sea would

once again be returned to Haiti. In the words of medical

anthropologist, physician, and Partners in Health founder

Paul Farmer, “Haiti resembled more and more a burning

building with no exits.”17

W hen President Bill Clinton took o~ce in January 1993,

he reversed Bush’s policy of returning Haitians and re-

opened the Guantánamo camp. W hat he did not expect was

a flood of Cuban rafters in the summer of 1994.

On August 18, 1994, with 21,000 Haitians in the make-

shift camp, President Clinton did the unprecedented: he

announced that Cubans picked up at sea, instead of being

admitted to the United States, would join the Haitians at

Guantánamo. “In a stroke, Clinton turned Cubans into the

legal equivalent of Haitians,” the Washington Post noted in wonderment.18 By the end of 1994 some 50,000 refugees

were housed there, at a cost of $500,000 to $1 million a day.19

Although the treatment was ostensibly equal, in fact it

was not. In September 1994, U.S. troops occupied Haiti, and

in November the massive repatriation of Haitians began,

over the vociferous objections of immigrant and human

rights organizations. Meanwhile in October, humanitarian

evacuations began bringing Cubans from the camp into

the United States. By the end of 1994, three-fourths of the

Haitians had been “voluntarily” returned to Haiti, and in

January 1995, those who refused were forcibly repatriated.20

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

In May 1995, the Clinton administration opened the way

to admission for the 20,000 Cubans remaining in the camp.

Only a few hundred Haitians were still in Guantánamo: most

were unaccompanied children who had relatives or spon-

sors in the United States, pleading for them to be allowed in.

Right as the doors were opened for Guantánamo’s Cuban

detainees, the repatriation of the Haitian children began.

“Many of the children sent back to Haiti have been left to

fend for themselves in squalid and dangerous conditions.

Some are destitute and living in the street.”21

The 1995 agreements that allowed the Cubans in did lead

to the first small retreat from the welcome provided by the

1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. Clinton agreed to work with

Castro to stem the tide. The new “wet foot, dry foot” policy

announced in May 1995 allowed any Cuban who reached

U.S. shores to continue to receive the preferential treatment

of the 1966 act. Those picked up at sea, however, would be

returned to Cuba. The United States also agreed to imple-

ment an orderly distribution of immigrant visas through its

U.S. Interests Section in Havana (which is part of the Swiss

embassy), to discourage people from seeking the dangerous

sea route to immigration.

The case of refugees from Central America in the 1980s

was similarly politicized.22 After the 1979 Sandinista victory

in Nicaragua, the right-wing governments of El Salvador

and Guatemala stepped up their campaigns against leftist

guerrillas and their supposed civilian supporters. In El Sal-

vador, the FMLN rebels succeeded in gaining control of

significant portions of the country’s territory. Military raids

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e l a w

against civilians in rebel-held territories, in addition to

military and right-wing death squad repression against un-

armed religious, social justice, and human rights activists,

led to a mass exodus from the country.

In Guatemala, the smaller guerrilla groups operated

mainly in isolated areas of the country, but the government

and right-wing armed reaction was, if anything, more vi-

cious. Hundreds of indigenous villages were destroyed in a

scorched-earth policy that has been described as a geno-

cide. Millions were internally displaced, and another mil-

lion fled the country. Over the course of the 1980s, up to a

million Salvadorans and Guatemalans sought refuge in the

United States.

Because the United States opposed the revolutionary

government in Nicaragua, and supported the right-wing

governments in El Salvador and Guatemala, its response to

refugees from the three countries could not have been more

diƒerent. Between 1984 and 1990, 45,000 Salvadorans,

48,000 Nicaraguans, and 9,500 Guatemalans requested

asylum; 26 percent of the Nicaraguan applications were

approved, while only 2.6 percent of those submitted by Sal-

vadorans and 1.8 percent of those submitted by Guatema-

lans were granted.23 (Meanwhile, applicants from countries

that the U.S. government considered enemies were ap-

proved at far higher rates: for Syrians, it was 73 percent; for

people from the People’s Republic of China, 52 percent.24)

Thousands of refugees were arrested at the border and re-

turned to Mexico without having the chance to even apply

for asylum.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

The Central American situation spawned a significant

solidarity movement in the United States. Activists sought

to end U.S. military support for the Contras in Nicaragua

and for the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala. They

worked with religious, human rights, and social justice or-

ganizations in Central America. Thousands of Americans

traveled to Central America to learn firsthand about the sit-

uation, and to support the movements for social change

there. They also created the Sanctuary Movement inside the

United States, to provide refuge and aid for the thousands

who came fleeing the violence there.

In 1985, a group of over eighty religious and refugee or-

ganizations brought suit against the federal government for

unfairly applying its own laws regarding refugees in denying

asylum applications by Guatemalan and Salvadoran ref-

ugees. Because of the leading role of the American Baptist

Church, it became known as the ABC lawsuit. The decision

in favor of the refugees, in December 1990, halted all de-

portations and granted Salvadorans and Guatemalans tem-

porary legal status while they were allowed to resubmit their

applications.25

Despite the ABC decision against the INS, and another

1990 ruling against the INS for “engag[ing] in a pattern and

practice of pressuring or intimidating Salvadorans” to dis-

courage them from applying for asylum, the 1996 immigra-

tion reforms imposed new obstacles for asylum applicants.

For people already in the United States, a time limit was

imposed: if they remained in the country for a year without

filing an application, they lost their chance altogether. For

i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e l a w

those who arrived at the border and requested asylum, under

the new rules they would either be denied summarily by

whatever immigration agent they happened to encounter at

the border, or they would be placed in detention while their

case was investigated.26

Except Cubans. Even with the 1995 modifications, the

Cuban Adjustment Act remained in place. To this day,

Cubans are not detained, and they don’t have to prove a well-

founded fear of persecution. Like most pre-1924 immi-

grants, they just have to arrive here and say they want to

come in.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

PA R T T H R E E

I M M I G R AT I O N A N D R A C E

Most people in the United States are unaware of the

degree to which racial distinctions and exclusions have

been embedded in U.S. history. Although the territory

that is now the United States has been racially diverse ever

since the first Europeans arrived, the political entity of

the country was restricted to people from Europe. Even today, sources from textbooks to popular culture promote

the idea that the real essence of the country is white.

The oft-repeated phrase “this is a country of immigrants”

rea~rms that notion. The “immigrants” it refers to are

European immigrants. Only by a large stretch of the imagi-

nation could Native Americans, or enslaved Africans, be

included in the category “immigrants.” U.S. immigration

and naturalization policy was one piece of a national politi-

cal structure and identity aimed deliberately at creating,

and preserving, a white country. The legacies of this

history are very much with us still today.

m y t h 1 0

T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S I S A M E LT I N G P O T T H AT H A S A LWAY S W E L C O M E D I M M I G R A N T S F R O M A L L O V E R T H E W O R L D

In most of the world, the concepts of race and nation are very

closely connected. In the nineteenth century, when the first

nation-states of Europe were coming into existence, the two

terms were often used interchangeably: “the French race” or

“the German race.” Borders, and governments, were sup-

posed to reflect “nations” that were unified by historical,

linguistic, and cultural ties that were often thought of in

terms of bloodlines.

Even in Europe, these ideas were very problematic.

Since Europe was populated by waves of migration and con-

quest from the Mediterranean and from Central Asia over

the course of many centuries, nowhere did a really homoge-

nous population exist. Spain emerged as an apparently co-

herent entity in the 1400s only by driving out Muslims and

Jews, and by declaring one of the many dialects of the penin-

sula to be the o~cial language. Ethnic nationalist move-

ments even today, like those in the Basque Country and

Catalonia in Spain’s northwest and northeast, respectively,

still challenge the hegemony of Spanish language and gov-

ernment. Most European conflicts of the twentieth century

were the result of groups trying to enforce some kind of

racial, ethnic, or cultural purity, or to define exactly where

the borders of one nation end and those of another begin.

Most histories of the United States portray its national

identity very diƒerently, as a melting pot made up of ethni-

cally diverse immigrants. The citizenship test reveals what

most people believe to be the basis of U.S. nationality. To be-

come a citizen, you have to demonstrate knowledge of En-

glish and knowledge of certain aspects of U.S. history and

institutions. There are no racial or ethnic requirements.

But in fact U.S. nationality has historically been based

very much on race. Congress first enacted a naturalization

law—determining who could become a citizen of the United

States—in 1790, fourteen years after the country was estab-

lished. The law restricted naturalization to “free white per-

sons.” “W hite” was not defined—its meaning was thought

to be obvious. Neither, for that matter, was “persons”—but it

went without saying that “persons” meant “male persons.”

With the growth of racial pseudoscience in the nineteenth

century, Congress and the courts were increasingly drawn

into trying to define who was and was not racially “white”

and therefore eligible for citizenship.

There were many people, though, who were definitively

not white, yet were present in the newly established country.

Native Americans, even if physically present in the new

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

country, were considered permanent foreigners belonging

to diƒerent nations. The United States was established as

a country based on slavery, and in order to justify slavery,

those enslaved had to be denied the rights of citizenship.

But slavery and race were also intertwined. If slaves had

no legal rights, what about blacks who were not legally en-

slaved? Some states abolished slavery shortly after inde-

pendence, and some granted citizenship to free blacks, but

that did not make them citizens of the United States. People

of African origin, whether slave or free, were nonpersons as

far as the federal government was concerned. The relation-

ship of nationality and race was very firmly established. The

“nation” remained clearly defined as an entity composed of

white people.

Events in the 1800s entrenched the restriction of rights

to white people. The Fugitive Slave Act, state immigration

laws, and the Dred Scott decision raise interesting parallels

to today’s debate on immigration. The Fugitive Slave Act,

passed by Congress in 1850, required residents of non-slave

states to enforce the institution by assisting in the arrest and

return of former slaves who sought freedom in states where

slavery was illegal. The federal government thus prohibited

equal rights, and equal treatment, in all states. Even if a state

wanted to grant equal rights, it could not. The law essentially

criminalized those who treated blacks as human beings

rather than as property—just as some immigration propos-

als today propose to criminalize those who treat immigrants

as human beings.1

Although some of the older non-slave states argued for

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

the rights of all persons, the laws of many non-slave states

actually prohibited African Americans from moving there

at all, though these laws were not always enforced. Illinois,

Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, California, and Oregon all passed

legislation as they became states that banned African Amer-

ican immigration. The Illinois state constitution passed in

1848 required the legislature to “prohibit free persons of

color from immigrating to and settling in this state.”2 Indi-

ana voters—and only whites could vote, of course—approved

a law written during the state’s Constitutional Convention in

1850–51 that prohibited African Americans from entering

the state. And Article 13 of the state’s constitution made it il-

legal for employers to hire African Americans.3

As early as the 1790s, when there were only about sixty

thousand free blacks in U.S. territory, state and federal

governments had begun looking for ways to eliminate this

unwanted population. In 1819 the federal government

amended the law prohibiting the slave trade to ensure that

captured enslaved Africans would not be admitted to the

United States. Colonization schemes at the state and na-

tional levels attempting to deport free blacks littered the

nineteenth century. Luminaries from Francis Scott Key to

Daniel Webster to Andrew Jackson sponsored the American

Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color in the United

States (ACS), and southern states pursued the project of de-

porting manumitted (freed) slaves, as did Abraham Lin-

coln. Over its fifty years of existence, the ACS “resettled over

1,000 captives from slave ships and sponsored the trans-

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

portation of 12,000 Negroes, most of them recently manu-

mitted from the large estates in the Deep South, under con-

ditions close to deportation.”4

In 1857, the Supreme Court ruled that a person de-

scended from Africans could not be a citizen of the United

States, and thus could not have rights under U.S. laws. Dred

Scott was born a slave in Virginia, but lived as a free man

when he moved with his master to Illinois and the Wiscon-

sin territories, where slavery was prohibited. W hen the

master’s family tried to reenslave him in Missouri, he sued

for his freedom. The court decision was very clear: even after

being emancipated, the descendants of Africans could not

be citizens.

In the court’s opinion, Justice Taney wrote that the fram-

ers of the Constitution clearly intended to refer to white people when they guaranteed rights and privileges to all cit-

izens. Blacks, Taney explained,

had for more than a century before been regarded as

beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to

associate with the white race either in social or political

relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights

which the white man was bound to respect . . . This

opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civi-

lized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an

axiom in morals as well as in politics which no one

thought of disputing or supposed to be open to dispute,

and men in every grade and position in society daily

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as

well as in matters of public concern, without doubting

for a moment the correctness of this opinion.5

Thus spoke the judge. The job of the Court was to uphold

the intent of the Constitution—which was to deny rights and

citizenship to people of African descent. As for the Decla-

ration of Independence, the justice further explained, “it is

too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not

intended to be included, and formed no part of the people

who framed and adopted this declaration.”6

W hites were part of the community of “men” by virtue

of being here. Blacks were excluded from the community of

“men” by virtue of having been enslaved by white people.

Arguments about the rights of citizens and “aliens” today

reflect many of the same ideas. Immigrants may be physi-

cally present—as African Americans were—but they are ex-

cluded from the community that is accorded rights. Rights

are reserved for the portion of the population defined as

“citizens.”

Post–Civil War legislation took a first step away from

white exclusivity by implementing the notion of citizenship

by virtue of birth in the United States, and by nominally ex-

tending naturalization privileges to people of African ori-

gin. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 redefined citizenship by

stating that “All persons born . . . in the United States and

not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not

taxed, are declared to be citizens of the United States.” The

Fourteenth Amendment further clarified this in 1868, stat-

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

ing that “All persons born or naturalized in the US, and sub-

ject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the US and

of the state wherein they reside.” The exclusion of Native

Americans reiterated by the “and subject to the jurisdiction

thereof” clause was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1884. It

was not until 1940 that the last restrictions on Native Amer-

ican citizenship and naturalization were removed.7

Except in the case of Native Americans, these acts

seemed to privilege the place of birth of the individual,

rather than “race” or the place of birth of parents or ances-

tors, as the key to citizenship. (Children of U.S. citizens,

however, were automatically granted citizenship even if

born outside of the country.) But they still made it clear that

rights apply only to some people, not to all people.

Racial/national exclusion still applied to naturalization:

only some people were eligible to be naturalized. U.S. law restricted naturalization to people who were “white” until

1870, when it added the category of people of “African nativ-

ity or African descent.” Because there was virtually no im-

migration from Africa until much later in the twentieth

century, this addition was essentially meaningless—in prac-

tice, naturalization was still limited to white Europeans.

The framers of the Constitution may have had English-

men in mind when they wrote “all men.” The authors of the

Fourteenth Amendment clearly had two categories in mind

when they wrote “all persons”: whites, and the descendants

of African slaves. But they wrote the Amendment just as a

new wave of immigrants was about to enter the country. How

would U.S. law and society respond to newcomers who ar-

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

rived from Canada, from Europe, but also from Asia and

from Latin America (primarily Mexico) after 1868? If peo-

ple who were not white were not allowed to become citizens,

were they still allowed to come to the United States?

In 1882, Congress answered with a resounding “no” by

passing the Chinese Exclusion Act. As “aliens ineligible to

citizenship,” the Chinese, and other groups that followed,

such as Japanese people and other Asians, were stripped

of other rights as well. The Fourteenth Amendment prohib-

ited discrimination based on race, but it did not prohibit

discrimination based on citizenship status—and access to

citizenship was still very clearly based on race. The Chinese-

origin population fell from a high of 118,746 in 1900 to

85,202 in 1930. Political scientist Aristide Zolberg de-

scribed this “willful reduction of a national group” as “the

only successful instance of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the history

of American immigration.”8

California and ten other states banned Japanese resi-

dents from owning land through a prohibition on land own-

ership by “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” Arkansas was

even more specific, declaring that “no Japanese or a descen-

dant of a Japanese shall ever purchase or hold title to any

lands in the State of Arkansas.” A 1907 federal law stipu-

lated that a female citizen who married an alien would be

stripped of her own status as a citizen, and a 1922 revision

that allowed such women to retain their citizenship still re-

moved it from women who married aliens who were racially

ineligible for citizenship. (Not until 1940 was a woman’s

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

citizenship status made completely independent of her

husband’s.)9

In 1923, the Supreme Court ruled that Asian Indians

were not eligible for citizenship. The federal government

immediately “began a campaign to strip naturalized Asian

Indians of their citizenship.” California expanded its ban on

land ownership to Asian Indians. Suddenly, a group of peo-

ple with rights became a group of people without rights—

because the court had ruled that they were not white.10

The immigration restriction laws of 1917, 1921, and 1924

codified these racial/national exclusions. Most accounts de-

scribe these laws as aimed against southern and eastern Eu-

ropeans, who made up the majority of people migrating to

the country at the time. W hat is less remembered in the his-

tory books is how these laws treated non-Europeans. The

1917 Immigration Act, most commonly known because it in-

stated a literacy requirement, also created a “barred Asiatic

zone” that covered most of the world’s territory, from Af-

ghanistan to the Pacific. Chinese and Japanese immigrants

had already been completely excluded and declared ineli-

gible for citizenship; now all people defined as Asian were

excluded.

The 1921 and 1924 acts created numerical limits based

on “national origins”—but only of white people. The 1924

act looked at the “national origins” of the population of the

country as revealing the correct balance between north-

western and southeastern Europeans. Allowing for a total of

155,000 immigrants a year, it divided them proportionally

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

by country—16 percent to come from southern and eastern

Europe, and 84 percent from northern and western Eu-

rope.11

In designing these acts, Congress made it clear that, de-

spite the Fourteenth Amendment and the extension of citi-

zenship and even naturalization to people of African origin,

this was essentially a white country. The presence of people

who were not white was incidental, not central, to its com-

position. So when the population was examined in order to

determine its “national origins,” it was only the white pop-

ulation that was counted. People who were “the descendants

of slave immigrants,” and “aliens ineligible for citizenship

or their descendants” (i.e., people from the “barred Asiatic

zone”) were simply not counted—and they got no quotas.12

(Something similar happens today in the U.S. census.

W hen it counts people of Hispanic origin in the United

States, it excludes Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico.

They’re citizens—but somehow they’re diƒerent from other

citizens, and thus not counted.13)

The quotas did limit the immigration of southeastern

Europeans and privilege those from northern Europe. But

it’s a sign of just how much our history books accept the idea

that the United States is a white country that the law’s prohi-

bitions against people who were not white is usually not even

mentioned. The quota system established by the 1924 law

remained in eƒect until 1965.

The law listed sixty-four countries of the world outside

of the Western Hemisphere, with their corresponding quo-

tas. The minimum quota was 100, and thirty-nine countries

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

—primarily those in Asia and Africa—received the mini-

mum. Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and Germany,

topped the list with 65,721 and 25,957, respectively, followed

by the Irish Free State with 17,853. The other countries of

Europe received between 1,000 and 6,500 slots.14

( Just to add to the confusion, Asian countries like China

and India got the minimum hundred-person quota—but

Chinese and Indians were still prohibited from immigrat-

ing. So the quota was more symbolic than real.)

It was not until the 1940s that people other than whites

and those of African descent were, gradually, aƒorded the

right to naturalize (though not necessarily to immigrate):

first Native Americans (in 1940), then Chinese (1943), then

Filipinos and Indians (1946). Finally, in 1952, all racial/

national restrictions to citizenship were lifted. Part of the

probable impetus for expanding the categories of those eli-

gible for citizenship was embarrassment at being the only

country in the world besides Hitler’s Germany to uphold

such a racially exclusive definition of citizenship.15

W hat, then, was the status of those in the United States

who did not belong to one of the two categories—whites and

people of African descent—allowed to be citizens between

1870 and 1940? It’s worth noting that the two categories

themselves are somewhat unwieldy. One refers to a race—

without specifying how that race is defined—and the other

refers to a birthplace.

In the wake of the post–Civil War upsurge in immigra-

tion, it fell to U.S. courts to decide who, in fact, belonged to

the “white race.” Would it be decided by skin tone? National

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

origin? A combination of the two? In either case, exactly

where and how would the lines be drawn? Was the Japanese

man who showed the court the “pinkish” hue to his skin

white? W hat about the Syrian, who complained that since he

hailed from the land of Jesus Christ, denying his whiteness

would be like denying that Jesus was white? Or Armenians,

whom the law classed as nonwhite until 1909, and white

subsequently? Between 1878 and 1952—when the racial re-

quirement for citizenship was overturned—dozens of indi-

viduals sought to establish their race, and the courts became

more and more involved in making decisions in individual

cases that then became the basis for policy.

The immigration and naturalization restrictions consti-

tuted a neat circumvention of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The amendment guaranteed equal rights to all citizens—but

it did not specify that all people should have equal access

to citizenship. In the Dred Scott decision, the court ruled

that it was obvious that “all men” did not include blacks.

Now, states could not “make or enforce any law which shall

abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the

United States.” But if only whites and people of African an-

cestry could be citizens, the amendment still allowed groups

of people to be excluded from rights based on race.

Mae Ngai argues that “unlike Euro-Americans, whose

ethnic and racial identities became uncoupled during the

1920s, Asians’ and Mexicans’ ethnic and racial identities

remained conjoined. The legal racialization of these ethnic

groups’ national origin cast them as permanently foreign

and unassimilable to the nation . . . These racial formations

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

produced ‘alien citizens’—Asian Americans and Mexican

Americans born in the United States with formal U.S. citi-

zenship but who remained alien in the eyes of the nation.”16

The experience of African Americans further illustrates

this notion of “alien citizens.” Legally granted the rights of

citizenship during Reconstruction, they were also subject

to a new wave of exclusionism during the period between

1890 to the 1930s, which historians refer to as the “nadir

of race relations” in the postemancipation period.17 The

wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe and

U.S. expansion, which incorporated new nonwhite peoples

under U.S. rule, contributed to a hardening of the racial

boundaries of citizenship. W hites, who were voluntary

immigrants, were people inherently eligible for citizen-

ship. Nonwhites, who were to be conquered and exploited,

were not.

Civil rights legislation passed in the 1950s and 1960s

furthered the job begun in the 1860s of creating a legal basis

for racial equality. The immigration reforms of the 1960s

(discussed in Part One) ostensibly created racial equality in

immigration policy as well, by granting equal quotas to all

countries.

Nevertheless, the historical structures that privileged

white people continued to shape social realities and even

immigration policy. Congress enshrined its continuing be-

lief that the country needed more white people in the new

“diversity visa” program established in 1992, in the context

of the large Asian and Latin American immigration since

1965. The program set aside fifty-five thousand visas to be

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

granted to citizens of countries that were underrepresented

in the number of immigrants they sent.

In arguing for the legislation, Senator Alfonse D’Amato

pointed to the “painful, and even tragic problems for Irish,

Germans, Italians, Poles, and others without immediate

family members in the United States.” During the first two

years of the program, 40 percent of the visas were reserved

for Irish immigrants.18 In 1995 the program was expanded to

include all “underrepresented” countries—or rather, to ex-

clude “overrepresented” countries. Countries that had sent

over 50,000 immigrants to the United States in the previous

five years were specifically excluded. As of 2006, those

countries excluded were Canada, mainland China, Colom-

bia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Ja-

maica, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, Poland, Russia,

South Korea, the United Kingdom and its dependent terri-

tories except Northern Ireland, and Vietnam.19

W hile the diversity program is a small piece of U.S. im-

migration policy, it nevertheless responds to a deep and

long-standing assumption in U.S. history: that whites are

the true citizens here. If non-Europeans have not assimi-

lated in the same way that Europeans have, it’s because

everything from the Constitution to immigration and natu-

ralization law, to the political, social, and economic factors

discussed in the next two chapters has been founded on and

perpetrated the notion that the United States is, and should

be, a white country.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

m y t h 1 1

S I N C E W E A R E A L L T H E D E S C E N D A N T S O F I M M I G R A N T S H E R E , W E A L L S TA R T O N E Q U A L F O O T I N G

The United States has incorporated populations through

voluntary immigration, involuntary immigration, and con-

quest. Saying it is a nation of immigrants obscures the latter

two types of population incorporation. Even voluntary im-

migration includes some people who lack rights: contract

workers, indentured servants, braceros. W hen people com-

pare today’s immigrants to previous generations, they are

generally using the model of white European voluntary im-

migrants as the comparison. The law privileged white Euro-

pean immigrants from the beginning.

Immigrants of color share many characteristics with

those forcibly incorporated into the country, including Na-

tive Americans, African Americans, Mexicans, and Puerto

Ricans. Scholars of ethnic studies have used the terms “in-

ternal colonialism” or “colonized minorities” to explain the

way people of color have been incorporated into the United

States. Latin American and Asian immigrants are entering a

society that has historically defined itself against their an-

cestors, and through the conquest of their ancestors. Cus-

toms, beliefs, and laws that constructed people of color as

subject peoples rather than potential citizens, to be admit-

ted or excluded according to the needs of U.S. employers,

have extended into the twenty-first century.

The United States came into existence through a process

of English conquest of lands inhabited by Native Americans.

From the first English settlement until 1898, the ideolog y

of conquest, and of the fitness of English and English-

descended people to rule over others, was virtually unques-

tioned among the country’s leaders. Commentators in the

1890s spoke unashamedly of the unique capacity of the

“Anglo-Saxon race” for self-government, and its need for

expansion. “The Anglo-Saxon race,” a columnist for the At- lantic Monthly wrote in 1898, “now holds the foremost place in the world . . . It stands for the best yet reached in ideas and

institutions, the highest type of civilization . . . Our own best

interests imperatively demand that we should maintain the

Anglo-Saxon race in the occupation of every foot of land

which it now justly holds any where on the globe, and that

wherever we can do so righteously, we should endeavor to in-

crease its influence and its possessions.”1

Historian and philosopher John Fiske spoke for many

when he emphasized the English nature of the United States.

“The indomitable spirit of English liberty is alike indom-

itable in every land where men of English race have set

their feet as masters,” he wrote. “The conquest of the North

American continent by men of English race was unques-

tionably the most prodigious event in the political annals of

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

man kind.” The American Revolution “was not a struggle

by two diƒerent peoples,” rather “it was sustained by a part

of the English people in behalf of principles that time has

shown to be equally dear to all.” The American Revolution,

in fact, “made it apparent to an astonished world that in-

stead of one there were now two Englands, alike prepared to work with might and main toward the political regeneration

of mankind [emphasis in original].”2

Furthermore, the Anglo-Saxon race was destined to mi-

grate—in fact, because it was the superior race, its migration

would be the salvation of every part of the world it moved

to. It was not migrating to assimilate, it was migrating to

dominate. In the words of Josiah Strong, secretary of the

Congregational Home Missionary Society, in his influential

1885 book Our Country, the Anglo-Saxon had “an instinct or genius for colonizing. His unequaled energ y, his indom-

itable perseverance, and his personal independence, made

him a pioneer. He excels all others in pushing his way into

new countries.” As “the highest civilization—having devel-

oped peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its

institutions upon mankind,” the Anglo-Saxon race “will

spread itself over the earth.

“This powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down

upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the

sea, over upon Africa and beyond. And can any one doubt

that the results of this competition of races will be the ‘sur-

vival of the fittest?’ ”3 Anglo-Saxons, then, were supposed

to migrate, and to conquer everyone in their path. Non-

Anglo-Saxons were supposed to stay put and be conquered—

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

unless Anglo-Saxons decided to move them around to serve

as a labor force.

Anglo-Saxonism justified U.S. imperial expansion; it

also nurtured racism against the southern and eastern Eu-

ropean immigrants who were entering the United States at

the same time. These racisms were intertwined, though not

identical. European immigrants were “in-between,” iden-

tified in “semi-racial” ways. Italians were called “guineas”—

in a derogatory reference to their supposed closeness to

Africa; “Huns” and Slavic peoples were suspiciously Asiatic.

Between the 1910s and the 1930s, however, all of these peo-

ple “became white”—as part of the same process that reiter-

ated the exclusion of those who could never be white.4

W hen the national origins quotas for immigration were

implemented in the 1920s, the Western Hemisphere was

conspicuously left out of the calculations. Not because Mex-

icans were considered potential members of U.S. society

—quite the contrary. Mexicans were omitted from the exclu-

sionary legislation because industry and agriculture in the

Southwest depended on their labor, just as it depended on

their less-than-full-citizen status.

Mexican Americans were first incorporated into the

country with the annexation of Texas in 1845, and then

under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the

Mexican-American War in 1848 and granted the United

States 55 percent of Mexico’s territory. Prior to the reforms

of the 1860s, citizenship was still reserved for whites. Yet

Guadalupe Hidalgo oƒered citizenship to Mexicans living in

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

the newly acquired territories. W hat was the logic for grant-

ing citizenship to these newly conquered peoples?

For one thing, annexation carefully encompassed the

least populated areas of Mexico and stopped where the pop-

ulation started to increase.5 There were some 80,000 to

100,000 Mexican nationals in the territory taken in 1848,

in addition to uncounted numbers of Native Americans.6 In

the racial worldview of the Anglo-Saxon conquerors, Mexi-

cans were an anomaly: not white, not black, not Indian, not

Asian. By being granted citizenship, Mexicans were tacitly

accepted as white, even though they had just been conquered

under the rationale of Anglo-Saxon expansion and Mani-

fest Destiny. “The whole race of Mexicans here is becoming

a useless commodity,” wrote the Galveston Weekly News in 1855. Lynchings, vigilante justice, and land dispossession

confirmed the racialized way in which Anglos viewed Mex-

icans.7

O~cial confusion about Mexicans’ racial character was

compounded in the 1920s, when people of Mexican descent

who came to the United States as immigrants were even al-

lowed to naturalize (unlike Asians). In 1929 the secretary

of labor explained, “The Mexican people are of such a mixed

stock and individuals have such a limited knowledge of their

racial composition that it would be impossible for the most

learned and experienced ethnologist or anthropologist to

classify or determine their racial origin. Thus, making an

eƒort to exclude them from admission or citizenship be-

cause of their racial status is practically impossible.”8

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

Mexican Americans learned, as African Americans did

several decades later, that even citizenship was no guarantee

of equal rights. Socially and legally, these new citizens who

were not Anglo-American occupied a distinctly second-

class status. Like African Americans, Mexican Americans

were barred from jobs, from schools, from public facilities,

from land ownership, from residential areas. As David

Gutiérrez writes, “within two decades of the American

conquest it had become clear that, with few exceptions,

Mexican Americans had been relegated to a stigmatized,

subordinate position in the social and economic hierar-

chies.”9

Strange as it seems, prior to the 1920s the new border be-

tween Mexico and the United States was open and unmoni-

tored. “Immigration” and the laws governing immigration

referred to those who arrived by sea in New York or Cali-

fornia. W hite U.S. citizens had been migrating—undocu-

mented—to Texas and other parts of Mexico since the early

1800s. In fact it was Anglo immigrants in Texas who rebelled

against the Mexican government to declare the independent

Texas Republic, and U.S. citizens who crossed into Mexico

without permission who fought the Mexican-American war.

The Anglo-Americans who immigrated to Mexico clearly

saw themselves as colonizers, and their goal as conquering,

not assimilating into, their new homeland. “Texas should be

eƒectually and fully Americanized,” wrote Stephen Austin

in 1835, “in language, political principles, common origin,

sympathy, and even interest.”10

The development of mining, agriculture, and railroads

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

in the Mexican north and the U.S. west was a linked venture:

U.S. capital operated on both sides of the border, and Mex-

icans moved back and forth rather fluidly. A transborder

railroad completed in 1890 further facilitated movement.11

“Immigration inspectors ignored Mexicans coming into the

southwestern United States during the 1900s and 1910s”

because the U.S. government “did not seriously consider

Mexican immigration within its purview.” Only beginning

in 1919 did Mexicans have to formally pass through an im-

migration station and request permission to enter.12

Labor recruitment in Mexico was not inhibited by the

1885 Contract Labor Law prohibiting foreign recruitment,

which, like other restrictive measures, was aimed primarily

at Europe and China. In fact, the Chinese Exclusion Act and

the prohibition on contract labor led employers to actively

recruit Mexican workers deep in the interior of Mexico for

the first time. Now Mexican workers in the United States did

not come just from the already fluid, integrated border re-

gion. A true migrant stream from the interior of Mexico into

the interior of the United States, including areas of the Mid-

west like Kansas and Chicago, was established.13

The 1917 Immigration Act, which imposed a literacy re-

quirement and a head tax on immigrants, also created ex-

plicit provisions for Mexicans to be exempted from these

so that southwestern agricultural interests could continue

to import them as temporary workers. It was the first “guest

worker” program, and it illustrates the tangled network

of immigration legality. It remained in place until 1922.14

Puerto Rican labor migration was also strengthened in 1917,

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

with the unilateral granting of U.S. citizenship to inhabi-

tants of the island.

Although the 1924 national quota law did not place a

numerical restriction on Mexican immigration, it made a

fundamental change in the way immigration was to be dealt

with. Instead of a basically open border and welcoming at-

titude toward immigrants—including Mexicans, who were

considered nominally “white” and therefore eligible for cit-

izenship—the 1924 law closed the border and demanded that

every potential immigrant be scrutinized. It created two new

things that now seem to be a natural part of our immigration

policy: the Border Patrol and deportation. In the process, it

also created the category of the “illegal immigrant.”

Prior to 1924, immigrants could be deported for com-

mitting certain crimes, but with an open border there was

no such thing as illegal entry or an “illegal” immigrant. The

1924 law made “unlawful entry” a crime and created a new

police force, the Border Patrol, to prevent and punish it.

Suddenly, there was a new legal category of people in the

country: not citizens, not immigrants. They were people

entirely without rights. And almost all of them were Mexi-

can—those people without a race who couldn’t be denied cit-

izenship or excluded on a racial basis. Now there was a new

rationale for excluding them.

Racial exclusions from citizenship were removed in

1952, and Congress revised the national origins quotas in

1965. Legalized segregation and second-class citizenship

based on race were also dismantled at the federal level in the

1950s and ’60s. But the Border Patrol, the policy of depor-

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

tation, and the concept of the “illegal immigrant” were here

to stay.

Mexicans became the ultimate subject labor force, espe-

cially for seasonal agricultural work. Employers, and the

government, could perfectly control the labor supply, first

opening the gates and then closing them, deporting workers

when the season ended or when the depression began. Over

400,000 people of Mexican origin were deported during the

early 1930s, some 60 percent of them U.S. citizens.15

The 1942 bracero program rea~rmed the role of Mexi-

cans as workers to be imported and exported according to

the needs of U.S. agribusiness rather than as humans with

rights. A similar program, the British West Indian Program,

brought temporary workers from the Caribbean to work

in agriculture on the East Coast from 1943 to 1952. The

1952 immigration overhaul created yet another method for

bringing in temporary workers: the H-2 program, which al-

lowed for the contracting of temporary agricultural workers.

The H-2 program was later divided into H-2A for agri-

cultural workers and H-2B for other temporary, seasonal

workers and continues in existence to this day. Because West

Coast growers already had other systems in place, the H-2

program was used primarily by East Coast agriculture. In

1999, almost half of the nearly 30,000 H-2B visa entries

worked in the Southeast, mostly in tobacco. The top states

using the program were North Carolina (by far the largest,

with over 10,000 H-2 workers), Georgia, and Virginia.16

Initially, the H-2 program brought workers primarily

from the Caribbean. Interestingly, it was implemented just

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

as British West Indians were excluded from actually immi-

grating under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.

The INA specifically stipulated that residents of Britain’s

colonies would not be considered eligible as immigrants

under the quota assigned to Great Britain—even though they

were British. It was an eerie recapitulation of the rationale

of slavery: we want black people to come here to work, but we

won’t consider them potential citizens.

“Operation Wetback” in 1954, in which over a million

Mexicans were deported, provides another example of the

dueling logic of U.S. attitudes toward Mexicans. It occurred

in the midst of the bracero program, which was bringing

about 200,000 Mexicans a year into the country as guest

workers. The deportations meant that there were fewer

workers available for agriculture, and that more were re-

cruited as braceros—about 300,000 in 1954, and 400,000

to 450,000 a year in subsequent years.17 Deportations and

recruitment served the same purpose: they provided work-

ers, but ensured that the workers remained “aliens” without

rights. And they reinforced the notion that citizens and peo-

ple with rights were white people.

Operation Wetback occurred in the same year that Brown v. Board of Education marked the resurgence of a movement for rights for black people—a concept that had been experi-

mented with during Reconstruction and then submerged

for several generations. As in the past, the tentative expan-

sion of rights for some was accompanied by simultaneous

repression, making it clear that the concept of rights was still

an exclusionary one.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

100

W hen the bracero program (which served mostly the

Southwest) was ended in 1964, the demand for cheap, ex-

ploitable, temporary workers didn’t evaporate—in fact it was

increasing, due to the structural changes in the economy de-

scribed earlier. Over its twenty-two-year life, the program

had brought some five million Mexican workers into the

country.18 So a new category for filling that demand emerged:

workers who were deemed “illegal.”

They may have been crossing the border legally to do

agricultural work for decades. Their employers were still

recruiting them, and they still needed the work. But with

the stroke of a pen, they lost even the meager rights oƒered

under the bracero program. Suddenly, they were “illegal.” It

seemed the United States couldn’t live with imported Mex-

ican workers, and couldn’t live without them.

The civil rights impulse that was restoring or extending

some rights to black citizens, and creating national unease

with the guest-worker program, ended at the bounds of “le-

gality.” Agribusiness could live with civil rights, as long as

it could also be assured of a workforce without rights. The

AFL-CIO and even, for a time, the United Farm Workers

union, went along with the notion. As long as popular opin-

ion accepted the division between “legal” and “illegal,” the

social structures of inequality—and the profits they facili-

tated—could continue.

Starting in the 1990s, the numbers of workers brought in

on the H-2 program rose sharply, and recruitment shifted

from the Caribbean to Mexico. By 1999, 96 percent of H-2

workers came from Mexico.19 In the well-established pat-

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

101

tern, recruitment programs set oƒ a stream of migrants:

precisely those states that were bringing in large numbers of

temporary workers from Mexico in the 1990s began to see

increases in permanent migration in the 2000s. By 2004

these three recent destinations for immigrants were each

estimated to have from 200,000 to 300,000 undocumented

immigrants.20 Between 1980 and 1990, the foreign-born

population rose from 1.3 percent to 1.7 percent in North

Carolina, 1.7 percent to 2.7 percent in Georgia, and 3.3 per-

cent to 5 percent in Virginia.21 By 2003, the foreign born had

reached 6.2 percent in North Carolina, 7.9 percent in Geor-

gia, and 9.2 percent in Virginia.22 By 2005, the proportions

were 7.0 percent in North Carolina, 8.8 percent in Georgia,

and 9.7 percent in Virginia—and they ranked fourteenth,

ninth, and eleventh, respectively, in numbers of immigrants

by state.23

Today’s immigrants, then, are heirs to a long history of

immigration and expansion that has incorporated people

into the country’s population in a distinctly unequal man-

ner. Today’s immigrants are still immigrants, like the Euro-

peans of a century ago. But they are also Asians and Latinos,

whose history in the United States has been one of exclusion

and conquest. Both of these intertwined histories structure

the ways in which today’s immigrants come to, and are re-

ceived by, U.S. society today.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

102

m y t h 1 2

T O D AY ’ S I M M I G R A N T S T H R E AT E N T H E N AT I O N A L C U LT U R E B E C A U S E T H E Y A R E N O T A S S I M I L AT I N G

In 1993, Toni Morrison wrote, in a special issue of Time mag- azine on immigration, that the “most enduring and e~cient

rite of passage into American culture” for immigrants was

“negative appraisals of the native-born black population.

Only when the lesson of racial estrangement is learned is

assimilation complete.” Blacks, she said, were permanent

noncitizens. “The move into mainstream America always

means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real

aliens.”1

Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants may not have

identified with, or been accepted into, white society when

they first arrived in the United States. But they, or more often

their children, assimilated by becoming “white” and expe-

rienced upward mobility as they melded into the white ma-

jority. And part of the assimilation into whiteness meant the

adoption of white racial attitudes.

Black Puerto Rican author Piri Thomas described the

generational gap among Italians in his Bronx neighborhood

103

in the 1940s: the mothers and grandmothers accepted him

as one of their own while the new generation attacked him as

a “spic.” One of the Italian boys speculated that if Piri had a

sister, they could “cover the bitch’s face with the flag an’ fuck

’er for old glory,” in a graphic rendering of Toni Morrison’s

point.2

James Loewen points out that just as European immi-

grants moved out of their inner-city enclaves and merged

into white America, African Americans were being residen-

tially segregated as the phenomenon of “sundown towns,”

which explicitly prohibited blacks from remaining in them

after the sun set, spread across the country.3 Assimilation for

people of European origin was accompanied by ongoing ex-

clusion of people of color already in the United States.

For immigrants of color, assimilation means something

very diƒerent than it historically has for European immi-

grants. For Latin American immigrants, assimilation more

often means shedding their American dream and joining

the lowest rungs in a caste-like society where Native Amer-

icans and African Americans, the most “assimilated” peo-

ple of color, have been consistently kept at the bottom.

W hen Haitian immigrants assimilate, explains one study,

“they become not generic, mainstream Americans but spe-

cifically African Americans and primarily the poor African

Americans most vulnerable to American racism.”4

As Toni Morrison suggested, racial inequality is so

deeply embedded in the national culture and social fabric

of the United States that assimilation has historically meant

finding, learning, and accepting one’s place in the racial

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

104

order. If new immigrants could succeed in challenging

and transforming the racial order of the United States, that

would be a good thing. But the signs do not point in that di-

rection. The current anti-immigrant sentiment reinforces

racial inequality.

The United States, as we have seen, defined itself from

the first as a white, Anglo-Saxon country. Africans and Na-

tive Americans may have lived in the territories claimed by

the United States, but they were not citizens. The Mexicans—

primarily people of Spanish and Native American origin

—who were added to the U.S. population with the 1848

conquest were granted citizenship, of a sort—but without

shaking the firmly held idea that the United States was an

Anglo-Saxon country.

The new, non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants, starting with

the Irish in the 1850s and growing with the southern and

eastern Europeans from the 1870s on, were neither Anglo-

Saxons nor people of color. Many of these new European

immigrants came from nations that Anglo-Saxons consid-

ered inferior, and many of them came from peoples without

states. They were oppressed minorities in the countries or

empires they came from. Many came from the Ottoman

Empire or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many were Irish,

from a land controlled by England, or they were Jews from

Eastern Europe. Some were southern Italians, in a country

only just unified, where the South was economically depen-

dent on the North.

W hen European immigrants assimilated, they joined

white society in social and cultural terms. Obviously, the

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

105

color of their skin did not change—but the category of

“white” expanded from its former association with Anglo-

Saxons to include these newcomers. Anglo-Saxonism was

fundamentally based on the domination of Africans, Native

Americans, and Asians, and the institutions and ideolo-

gies of the United States reflected this reality. Southern and

eastern Europeans were not originally part of this racial

dynamic. Assimilating into it meant accepting it and iden-

tifying with the racial inequality it entailed—insisting, suc-

cessfully, on their place among whites.

W hen Asian and Latino immigrants assimilate, they also

assimilate to the United States racial hierarchy, but in a

diƒerent way. Very few of them can cross the line into white-

ness. Instead, they assimilate by becoming people of color

in a racially divided society. Assimilation, instead of bring-

ing upward mobility, brings downward mobility. Of course

there are exceptions, but overwhelmingly, the social and

economic statistics have told the same dreary story for many

generations: blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are

at the bottom of the social hierarchy, even—perhaps espe-

cially—those whose ancestors have the longest presence in

the country. It’s not lack of assimilation that keeps them

marginalized—it’s assimilation itself.

The relationship between assimilation and downward

mobility has been especially noted in studies of school-

children. Education professor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco con-

ducted two major studies of Latino adolescents in which he

found that the most recent immigrants tended to be the stu-

dents with the highest aspirations and the strongest belief

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

106

in the American dream. This was because, as immigrants,

they were not yet educated into the U.S. racial order. Teach-

ers consistently reported on new immigrants’ commitment

to education, their work ethic, and their respect for their

teachers. As they became more Americanized, they entered

an oppositional inner-city teenage culture that valued

money, drugs, and reckless behaviors defined as cool—the

opposite of the hopeful and hard-working recent arrivals.

Over time new immigrants lost their optimism. They be-

came acculturated by becoming aware of the long-standing

historical place of Latinos in U.S. society. They realized that

education was not the solution they had originally believed

it was. In fact, studies have shown that the higher the educa-

tional level, the greater the income disparity between whites

and nonwhites in U.S. society. Rather than leveling the play-

ing field, educational achievement maintains or even exac-

erbates inequalities.5

Although students of color may not be aware of the statis-

tics, their decisions seem to reflect a larger awareness that

education is not an automatic ticket to the American dream.

A 2000 study found graduation rates to be 76 percent for

white students, 57 percent for Native Americans, 55 percent

for African Americans, and 53 percent for Hispanics.6 The

newest immigrants look a lot like the oldest “foreigners” in

the United States in terms of social status. Unlike whole

generations of European immigrants, no amount of assim-

ilation will ever make them white.

Like earlier generations of immigrants, those arriving

today still see learning English as crucial to survival and suc-

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

107

cess. But new immigrants also become aware that learning

to speak English will not resolve the problems of race. Na-

tive Americans and African Americans are native speakers

of English—but this has not helped them to assimilate into

a U.S. society that still in many ways defines itself as white.

Of all Latino groups in the United States, it’s Puerto Ri-

cans who are the most assimilated. All Puerto Ricans have

been citizens since 1917. Puerto Ricans tend to know En-

glish, and to speak English as their primary language, at

much higher rates than other Latinos.7 Puerto Ricans also

have a huge advantage over other immigrants because their

citizenship status makes them eligible for public social ser-

vices and gives them the automatic right to work, rights that

many immigrants from other parts of Latin America lack.

Although Mexican nationals are not automatically citi-

zens the way Puerto Ricans are, Mexicans have the longest

history in the United States of any Latino group. Mexicans

residing in the territories taken by the United States in 1848

were granted citizenship, and Mexicans have been migrat-

ing into the United States for a longer time than any other

group.

Yet Mexicans and Puerto Ricans have the highest poverty rates of any group of Latinos in the United States. Cubans,

the vast majority of whom came to the United States after

1959, Dominicans, who started coming in large numbers in

the 1970s, and Central Americans, whose massive migration

dates to the 1980s, all have much lower poverty rates: 24.1

percent of Mexicans and 23.7 percent of Puerto Ricans in the

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

108

United States lived below the poverty line in 2003, while

only 14.4 percent of Cubans did.8

In an interesting study of black West Indian immigrants,

Mary Waters found that “immigrants and their children do

better economically by maintaining a strong ethnic iden-

tity and culture and by resisting American cultural and

identity influences . . . those who resist becoming American

do well and those who lose their immigrant ethnic distinc-

tiveness become downwardly mobile . . . W hen West Indi-

ans lose their distinctiveness as immigrants or ethnics they

become not just Americans, but black Americans.”9

The picture is clear. Immigrants of color do assimilate

into U.S. society, but, in contrast to white immigrants, for

people of color assimilation means downward mobility. As-

similation means learning the racial order of the United

States, and for people of color it means joining the lower

ranks of that racial order. The association often made be-

tween assimilation and upward mobility is based on the ex-

perience of white immigrants. For immigrants of color, the

trajectory of assimilation is a very diƒerent one.

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

109

m y t h 1 3

T O D AY ’ S I M M I G R A N T S A R E N O T L E A R N I N G E N G L I S H , A N D B I L I N G U A L E D U C AT I O N J U S T A D D S T O T H E P R O B L E M

The long waiting lists for available ESL (English as a Second

Language) classes and the overwhelming trend for English

to predominate among the second and third generations of

immigrants from Latin America belie the common belief

that new immigrants are reluctant to learn English. In many

ways, the language patterns of today’s immigrants are simi-

lar to those of earlier generations: older immigrants find

learning the new language extremely di~cult, and some-

times unnecessary, while the younger generation quickly

realizes that English is essential and becomes fluent rapidly.

By the third generation, the language of the immigrant’s

homeland tends to be lost.1 Often third or fourth genera-

tions will study their grandparents’ native language in

school to try to reconnect with their heritage.

In some ways, though, today’s situation is diƒerent, and

some of these diƒerences have led to misconceptions about

what today’s immigrants are really doing, especially with re-

spect to learning English.

110

Many of those who came to the United States from Eu-

rope a hundred years ago planned to work hard for a few

years and then return to their homelands. Those who car-

ried out this plan rarely learned much English. But for those

who ended up staying longer and establishing families

here, English came to predominate within a generation or at

most two.

This pattern, which prevailed from the 1870s through

the early twentieth century, shifted in the decade between

1914 and 1924. The migrant stream was interrupted, in both

directions. The First World War and the increasingly re-

strictive U.S. immigration laws led to a significant reduction

in transatlantic travel. This meant that immigrant popula-

tions and their cultures ceased to be nourished by a con-

tinuing influx, and that immigrants who were here had to

give up their hopes of returning home. At the same time,

anti-foreign (and especially anti-German) propaganda and

Americanization campaigns created further pressures for

immigrants to abandon their native languages. Multilin-

gualism came to be replaced by English monolingualism.

Both the past and the present of Latin American immi-

grants are somewhat diƒerent. First, the history of Latin

Americans in the United States is one of forcible incorpora-

tion as well as immigration. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans

were conquered by the United States. Conquered peoples

have historically been more marginalized, and more reluc-

tant to give up their cultural heritage, than voluntary immi-

grants. Many Native American populations, for example,

have maintained their languages for hundreds of years after

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

111

conquest. Likewise, Puerto Ricans resisted the intensive

Anglicization campaign that sought to replace Spanish with

English on the island in the first half of the twentieth cen-

tury.

Although the history of conquest and forced incor-

poration of Spanish-speaking peoples into the United

States in some ways structures the experiences of contem-

porary Latin American immigrants, it’s not the only factor

that makes their experience diƒerent from that of earlier

European immigrants. The other major diƒerence is that

geography, technolog y, and immigration patterns keep

cross-border ties much more alive for today’s Latino immi-

grants. Their homelands are closer, they can go back and

forth more easily and cheaply, they can stay in touch through

various electronic media, and immigration is ongoing. So

even if second- and third-generation Latinos are speaking

English, new first generations are continually rejuvenating

the Spanish-speaking population.

From the outside, it may look like Latinos are not learn-

ing English. But what’s really happening is that as one gen-

eration learns English, new Spanish speakers are arriving.

At the same time, more Latinos are speaking both languages

than has historically been the case for European immi-

grants. They learn English without giving up Spanish.

In 1980, 11 percent of the U.S. population, or 23.1 mil-

lion people, spoke a language other than English at home. In

1990, it was 14 percent, or 31.8 million people, and in 2000,

it was 18 percent or 47 million people. Over half of these—

28.1 million in 2000—were Spanish speakers. (It’s worth

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

112

noting, though, that over half of those who spoke Spanish or

another non-English language at home were also proficient

in English.)2 But the pattern of adoption of English has re-

mained consistent: “The longer the length of stay, the more

extensive the adoption of the English language.”3 The main

variable aƒecting adoption of English has been age upon ar-

rival: the older the immigrant, the less likely he or she is to

become fluent in English.

W hile it’s clear that today’s Spanish-speaking immi-

grants are learning English just as quickly as earlier gener-

ations of European immigrants did, they also seem to be

retaining their native language at higher levels than did the

Europeans. This is probably due to the factors mentioned

above: the history of colonization, the geographic proxim-

ity, the continuing immigration, and improved communi-

cations technolog y. W hile over half of third-generation

Latino immigrants are monolingual in English, significant

numbers are fluent in both English and Spanish.4

One way to measure the desire of Latin American immi-

grants to learn English is through their enrollment in ESL

classes. In a recent study, almost 60 percent of ESL pro-

viders in the United States reported significant waiting lists

—some up to three years. Many of those that reported no

waiting list explained that they did not keep a list because

there were so many people trying to sign up for their classes,

they simply filled the classes then turned people away. In

New York City, there were only forty thousand slots for over

a million hopeful students.5

A study by the Pew Hispanic Foundation asked Latinos

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

113

directly how important they believed learning English was.

“Hispanics by a large margin believe that immigrants have

to speak English to be a part of American society and even

more so that English should be taught to the children of

immigrants,” the authors of the survey concluded. Accord-

ing to the study, 92 percent of Hispanics believed that it was

“very important” that the children of immigrants be taught

English, compared to 87 percent of non-Hispanic whites

and 83 percent of non-Hispanic blacks.6 Clearly, there is no

reluctance to learn English among the Hispanic population.

W hy, then, have politicians and activists felt the need

to promote “English only” laws and initiatives throughout

the United States? By late 2006 twenty-eight states had,

through legislation or through the initiative process, de-

clared English as their o~cial language. The organization

U.S. English, Inc., founded by former senator S. I. Haya-

kawa, has been working since 1983 to promote such legisla-

tion at the state and national levels. Its goal, the organization

announces, is “preserving the unifying role of the English

language in the United States.”7 The organization English for

the Children has focused its energies on dismantling bilin-

gual education programs, arguing that children should be

taught only in English. Led by California businessman Ron

Unz, this organization has also succeeded in passing anti-

bilingual-education initiatives in California, Arizona, and

Massachusetts.8

Most supporters of these initiatives argue passionately

for the importance of English. But since there is no orga-

nized movement in the political or educational spheres, nor

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

114

any discernable public opinion, that challenges the impor-

tance of learning English, the campaign had to find a dif-

ferent target. Instead of targeting immigrants, it targeted

the bilingual education programs established in the 1960s

to help immigrant children learn English. Ignoring two

generations of research on the successes of these programs,

Unz and his followers built a campaign on the entirely un-

substantiated notion that bilingual education actually pre- vented children from learning English.

Research on the topic has been fairly unanimous in its

conclusions that bilingualism, or multilingualism, oƒers

both cognitive and professional advantages over monolin-

gualism. It also shows that while children can gain conver-

sational knowledge of a new language rather quickly, it takes

three to four years for them to develop the academic fluency

that allows them to engage in in-depth study in the second

language.9

Thus children who receive instruction in their native

language in subject areas like math, science, and reading

while they are learning English consistently show better

short-term and long-term results—not only in these subject

areas, but also in knowledge of English.10 These outcomes

are unsurprising to cognitive scientists, who have long ar-

gued for the benefits of bilingualism.11

But the proponents of “English only” ask voters to en-

dorse the proposal that non-English-speaking children’s

needs will be better met with no instruction in their native

language. Rather, they propose a limited period in an ESL

classroom, followed by a move into subject areas taught only

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

115

in English. English-only proponents also raise the specter—

also entirely unsupported by any evidence—that bilingual-

ism threatens English.

James Crawford, former president of the National

Association of Bilingual Educators, argues that by combin-

ing xenophobia with misinformation, the anti-bilingual-

education movement has brought both conservatives and

liberals into its English-only fold. Some of the leaders of the

anti-bilingual movement may be motivated by xenophobia,

but most of the voters who have supported the initiatives

do so because they have come to believe—contrary to all ev-

idence—that bilingual education disadvantages immigrant

children. As Crawford explains, many people vote against

bilingual education “in the erroneous belief that it segre-

gates immigrant children, fails to teach them English, and

limits their opportunities.”12

A high-profile—and well-funded—campaign has cre-

ated this widespread impression that bilingual education

impedes children’s ability to learn English. According to

this theory, learning English and learning other kinds of

subject matter are mutually exclusive: either children are

taught English, with academic subjects put on hold, or they

are isolated in “bilingual” classrooms where they learn their

academic subjects in their native language, but no English.

Reagan administration o~cial Linda Chávez “told the

stories of children allegedly victimized by a ‘multibillion-

dollar bureaucracy’—misassigned to bilingual classrooms,

held there against their parents’ will, and prevented from

learning English.”13 Conservative analysts call bilingual ed-

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

116

ucation “modern-day segregation . . . cordoning children

into separate classrooms and depriving them of English

language skills.”14

This description fundamentally misconstrues the na-

ture and the goals of bilingual education. Bilingual educa-

tion is based on the premise that “there is no need to hold

children back in English while they learn school subjects in

their native language, or to hold them back academically

while they acquire English. Quite the contrary. A generation

of research and practice has shown that developing aca-

demic skills and knowledge in students’ vernacular sup-

ports their acquisition of English.”15 Most voters, though,

don’t have the time or the resources to explore the research

on language acquisition, and they don’t know much about

how bilingual programs work.

Furthermore, as Crawford explains, “because bilingual

education is controversial, it is reported less as a pedagogi-

cal field than a political issue, with opposing ‘sides’ given

equal time.”16 Rather like the issue of evolution, or global

warming: there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on

the basic issues, but because they are politically controver- sial, they are often presented in the media as if there were

equal scientific validity to the opposing political views.

In some ways, the debate about bilingual education mir-

rors other debates about social policy. Conservatives argue

that social spending on programs like welfare, a~rmative

action, or others designed to address social, racial, and eco-

nomic inequalities actually harms those whom it is designed

to help.

i m m i g r a t i o n a n d r a c e

117

Education should not be understood as a zero-sum issue.

Just as children should be taught math and reading—and ed- ucators understand that literacy enhances math skills, and

vice versa—children who are fluent in a language other than

English have an academic skill that should be nurtured.

Politicians and others who are concerned with immigrants

learning English should push for more adult ESL pro-

grams, and better funding for bilingual education, rather

than punitive measures like English-only ballots and ban-

ning the educational programs designed to eƒectively teach

children.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

118

PA R T F O U R

H O W H AV E U . S . P O L I C I E S C R E AT E D I M M I G R AT I O N ?

Discussions of immigration in the news media, in the

halls of Congress, or in the streets tend to see immigration

as an individual, rather than a structural and historical,

issue. They start from the assumption that people in other

countries come here to take advantage of the wealth and

opportunity that abound in this country. Since waves of

immigration are composed of many individual decisions,

the argument goes, we need to take steps to stop those

individuals once they’ve made their decisions, otherwise

they’ll use up all of the wealth and opportunity that by

rights should belong first to citizens.

If we look at numbers and trends, however, we can see

that migrant flows are in fact highly structured. They’re

structured by colonial relationships. In fact the current

migration streams around the world are one contemporary

expression of long-standing, and continuing, social and

economic relationships created by colonialism.

There are really two parts of the issue that we need to

understand. First, we need to understand why the United

States and other immigrant-receiving countries, like the

European countries, are so wealthy. It is not just chance:

it has much to do with the colonial world system that

emerged after 1492, which drained resources out of

Africa, Latin America, and Asia and into the United States

and Europe. Given this background, it is little wonder

that inhabitants of these former regions want some of

the wealth that was created out of their resources and

their labor—but that they’re denied access to in their

homelands.

Second, we need to look at the continuing relationships

and ties that make immigration a possibility and a reality.

Disparities in resources don’t, on their own, lead to immi-

gration. It’s the economic ties created by colonial and neo-

colonial economies, economic demand in the receiving

country, and even, in many cases, direct recruitment that

set the stage for immigration.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

120

m y t h 1 4

I M M I G R A N T S O N LY C O M E H E R E B E C A U S E T H E Y WA N T T O E N J O Y O U R H I G H E R S TA N D A R D O F L I V I N G

Immigrants do come to the United States because the stan-

dard of living is so much higher here than in their own coun-

tries. But that’s not the whole story. The main countries from

which people migrate to the United States are not the poor-

est countries of the world, and the people who migrate are

not the poorest people. In fact the poorest countries—most

of which are in Africa—send only tiny numbers of migrants

to the United States. Puerto Rico, by far the wealthiest area

in Latin America, has sent almost half of its population to

the United States, while Bolivia, one of the poorest coun-

tries, has sent hardly any migrants. The largest number of

migrants comes from Mexico—which is one of the wealthier

countries of Latin America.1

Every immigrant comes for individual reasons. But pat-

terns of immigration have structural and historical causes.

There is not one single cause that explains all immigration.

There are, though, several major interrelated factors that

121

have structured immigration in the past and that continue to

structure it today.

Immigrants usually explain their decision to leave their

home country for another in terms of push–pull factors.

Poverty, lack of opportunity, and danger “push” people to

leave; opportunity, availability of jobs, education, and safety

“pull” people elsewhere. Still, these well-known explana-

tions don’t really explain very much. They fail to explain just

why some places seem to be characterized by poverty, lack

of opportunity, and danger while others oƒer opportu-

nity, jobs, education, and safety. They also don’t explain why

long-standing inequalities among regions or countries lead

only sometimes to flows of migration.

The more sophisticated explanations look at patterns.

A closer look at some specific cases, with particular atten-

tion to Puerto Rico and the Philippines, reveals some of the

factors that structured twentieth-century migrations. Of

course Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917, so

when we talk about Puerto Rico we are not talking about in-

ternational migration. But the patterns of Puerto Rican mi-

gration to the continental United States shed light on what is

going on elsewhere too.

Puerto Ricans are not the largest group of Latin Amer-

icans in the continental United States numerically, but

Puerto Rico has sent a greater proportion of its population

to the U.S. than any other country. Some 40 percent of

Puerto Ricans have left the island for the continent. So it’s

an excellent place to begin investigating the question of why

people migrate.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

122

As is the case for most migrant flows, the sending and

the receiving countries—in this case the United States and

Puerto Rico—have a long-standing relationship. The United

States took Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898 as part of the

spoils of the Spanish-American War and ruled it as a colony

until 1952. Globally, this kind of long-standing relationship

is an important one to look at in understanding migration.

People from India and Pakistan go to England; people from

Senegal and Algeria go to France; people from Morocco go

to Spain; people from Mexico and Puerto Rico come to the

United States. Colonization sets the stage for later migration. This is why Juan González called his book on Latinos in the

United States The Harvest of Empire—because empire spawns migration.

Colonization creates cultural ties. It brings people from

the metropolis (the colonizing power) to the colony and

places them in positions of power while destroying local

institutions. (Puerto Rico oƒers something of a variation

on the general pattern here, since it was already a colony

when the United States took over, rather than being self-

governing.) Colonization almost always brings in structures

of cultural and racial inequality, imbuing the institutions of

the colony with the idea of the “white man’s burden”—the

idea that white Europeans are culturally superior. In this re-

spect, Puerto Rico’s experience is typical.

U.S. cultural imperialism in Puerto Rico took the form

of an Anglicization campaign. The name of the island was

o~cially changed to “Porto Rico.” The U.S. commissioner of

education explained in 1903 that “their language is a patois

h o w h a v e u . s . p o l i c i e s c r e a t e d i m m i g r a t i o n ?

123

almost unintelligible to the natives of Barcelona or Madrid.

It possesses no literature and has little value as an intellec-

tual medium. There is a bare possibility that it will be nearly

as easy to educate this people out of their patois into English

as it will be to educate them into the elegant tongue of Cas-

tile.”2 English, then, was introduced as the language of the

educational system.

Magali García Ramis’s novel Happy Days, Uncle Sergio gives some poignant examples of how cultural imperialism

works. She describes growing up in a middle-class family on

the island in the 1950s with Puerto Rican culture and iden-

tity being systematically erased and denied.

“There are no famous Puerto Rican artists because

Puerto Rico doesn’t have much culture and this island is too

small,” the narrator Lidia’s brother explains to her. “Only

now as part of the U.S., as a Commonwealth, has Puerto Rico

begun to progress.”3 Americans, the children are constantly

told, “had to be admired and loved more than any other peo-

ple, because they were good. They had saved the world from

the Nazis, and now they were protecting it from the Com-

munists. Also they were geniuses when it came to technol-

og y and progress. The dam we had just visited had been

studied in the United States.”4

As a teenager, Lidia despairs.

W hy don’t we have anything of value, Uncle? W hy don’t

we have a single worldwide famous artist, a poet, a

painter? . . . In the series Exemplary Lives they’ve pre-

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

124

sented dozens of famous people from all over the world,

from India, Argentina, the United States, Sweden,

France, and never one from Puerto Rico. On dictionary

flaps they put the flags of all the countries, even one

of the International Red Cross, those of the British

Colonies, and the Virgin Islands, but ours is never

there, because we aren’t anything, not a country or a

colony or a commonwealth like the British islands.

We’re nothing. We don’t exist. We are shit, I thought,

and I don’t want to belong to this country!5

A Filipina nurse, one of thousands who came to work in

U.S. hospitals, expressed a similar sentiment. “The thing I

love about American hospitals is that we have enough sup-

plies and equipment. You have catheters . . . In the Philip-

pines we boiled our own rectal tubes. You use the catheters

over and over . . . Here you just use it once and dump it out.

Supplies and equipment, paper, everything. It was no com-

parison. [In the Philippines], it was so limited all the time.”6

New York City hospitals trying to recruit Filipina nurses

projected a similarly glorified image. “We will help you cross

the BRIDGE from where you are to where you want to be . . .

NEW YORK CITY! No matter where you are—your nursing

diploma can bring you to New York City . . . Imagine! Living

and working in America’s most exciting city . . . where the

whole world looks for the finest medical care!”7

Lidia’s lament, like that of the Filipina nurse, reveals

what some have termed a “colonized mentality.” The colo-

nial power projects an image of omnipotence and superior-

h o w h a v e u . s . p o l i c i e s c r e a t e d i m m i g r a t i o n ?

125

ity and reiterates the inferiority of those it has colonized. Is

it any surprise that colonial subjects dream of leaving home

for the metropolis?

It’s not only in Puerto Rico that the United States has suc-

cessfully projected its image of wealth and omnipotence.

Many Latin Americans refer to the current relationship of

their countries to the United States as a neocolonial rela- tionship. Although the United States does not directly

govern their countries, it exerts economic, political, and

military control through indirect means.

U.S. military bases and troops span the globe. Since

the 1950s, some 500,000 U.S. troops have been deployed

around the world, many without permission and without

visas from the countries that they go to, making them, es-

sentially, illegal immigrants.8 In Honduras in the 1980s,

some o~cials coined the nickname “USS Honduras,” re-

ferring to the overwhelming U.S. military presence there.9

According to Chalmers Johnson, this “vast network of

American bases on every continent except Antarctica ac-

tually constitutes a new form of empire”—an “empire of

bases.”10

The lure of the United States as the source of superabun-

dance and wealth is also projected worldwide through film,

radio, and television. The film El Norte depicts how images of the United States permeate a remote village in Guate-

mala’s indigenous highlands, through copies of Good House- keeping that a woman there received from a friend who was a maid in the house of an American in the capital. “Everybody

there has a flush toilet!” she proclaims.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

126

Immigrants to the United States perpetuate the image,

sometimes deliberately, sometimes in spite of themselves.

W hen friends and relatives sacrifice to send someone to

the United States, the immigrant bears a heav y obligation

to repay the debt. Anthropologist Sarah Mahler describes

how Salvadorans on Long Island respond to the guilt and ob-

ligation they feel by sending home exaggerated accounts of

their success. Another anthropologist, Roger Lancaster, de-

scribes the importance of dollars to poor Nicaraguans.11

U.S. tourists, sometimes in spite of themselves, also

contribute. After a ten-day study-travel stay in Cuba, one of

my U.S. students wrote, “I often found myself . . . attempt-

ing to convince them of the existence of a large, economi-

cally marginalized portion of the United States. Yet no

matter what I told them the fact was that I stood before them

as someone who had traveled outside of her own country,

with my fancy camera, new sneakers, having never expe-

rienced a blackout, or a shortage of water, let alone being

hungry. In this respect, I was just more proof of the U.S.’s

opulence.”12

With 4 percent of the world’s population, the United

States consumes 22 percent of its electricity, 25 percent of its

oil, and 23 percent of its natural gas.13 It’s not surprising that

people in other countries are taken aback at our level of

consumption—especially if they’re the ones producing what

we’re consuming.

Colonization also brought about economic transforma-

tions in the colonies that contribute to migration and, in

particular, migration to the metropolis. In the industrial era

h o w h a v e u . s . p o l i c i e s c r e a t e d i m m i g r a t i o n ?

127

(starting in the middle of the nineteenth century), the colo-

nial powers used their colonies as a source of raw materials,

and as a market for their manufactured goods. Colonies pro-

vided agricultural products like sugar, coƒee, tea, bananas,

and tobacco, all of which made it cheap to feed the industrial

working class at home, and they provided raw materials for

industry, like tin and copper.

To produce these raw materials, companies and govern-

ments had to find a way to entice or force colonized peoples

away from subsistence farms and villages to work in plan-

tations and mines. Labor recruiters used varying levels of

coercion to obtain workers. Sometimes they lent money, or

made false promises. Sometimes, villages were destroyed

when plantations or mines took over or contaminated the

land. (See the epilogue for a description of a contemporary

example of this process.)

W hether forced or voluntary, the move from subsis-

tence production to wage labor brought about fundamental

changes in social organization. People who had formerly

produced most of what they consumed now produced for

others and used their wages to consume goods imported

from the metropolis. Often, people left their villages to mi-

grate to plantations or urban centers for work. Once tradi-

tional village life and ties are unraveled, migration out of the

country becomes a real possibility.

Foreign-owned corporations, like armies, tourists, and

military bases, tend to bring a small part of the First World

into the midst of the Third. Consider the contrast between

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

128

the Tintaya copper mine and the rest of the country of Peru,

in which it operates, as described by Dan Baum in The New Yorker:

Peru’s per-capita gross domestic product is less than

that of Namibia or the Dominican Republic, but the

Anglo-Australian Tintaya copper mine is a decidedly

First World operation. The man-made canyon of the

open pit is bordered by a spotless miniature city—neat

workers’ houses with flowers out front, garden apart-

ments, a chapel, a hotel, a hospital, a health club, and

o~ce buildings. The rules of conduct are enforced

with the rigor of a military academy: no walking in the

street, no crossing outside the zebra stripes, no smok-

ing, and orange vests and hard hats required every-

where. The mine’s obsessive rectitude, amid the nearly

uninhabited high grassy plains and snow-capped

mountains of southeastern Peru, is as anomalous as a

moon colony in a science-fiction story. Engineers at

Tintaya work in cubicles, each with a late-model I.B.M.

ThinkPad attached to a nineteen-inch L.C.D. monitor,

their whiteboards covered with dizzying graphs,

parabolas, and complicated equations.

It’s not surprising that Peruvians employed by the mine

start to think about emigration. The New Yorker profile of one immigrant explained, “Though happy in his job, Raúl

yearned for a life as orderly as the mine, for a country that

h o w h a v e u . s . p o l i c i e s c r e a t e d i m m i g r a t i o n ?

129

funded education and parks, regulated air pollution and

noise, and policed its own lawmakers.”14

From the mid-nineteenth century on, Puerto Ricans

produced sugar and coƒee for U.S. markets and imported

U.S manufactured goods. Many migrated from rural to ur-

ban areas. As early as the 1920s, U.S. manufacturers began

to experiment with shipping parts of their production to

Puerto Rico. Puerto Rican women, in factories and in their

homes, sewed and embroidered handkerchiefs and clothing

that went back to U.S. markets.

The colonial relationship invariably drains resources

from the colony to the metropolis. Colonial subjects see

their homeland deteriorate and the colonial power expand

its wealth and power. The lure is inescapable.

But Puerto Rico was a U.S. colony, and it was poor and

lacking in opportunity (like most other colonies), for a long

time before the large flow of Puerto Ricans into the conti-

nental United States started. Two interrelated things hap-

pened in the 1940s that turned the long-standing unequal

relationship into a cause for mass migration.

One side of the coin was Operation Bootstrap (which

I discuss in more depth in Part One). U.S. investment had

been streaming into Puerto Rico for decades, but Operation

Bootstrap was something new. Up until now colonial pow-

ers had used their colonies to support industrialization at

home. Now a colonial power began to take advantage of colo-

nial labor to deindustrialize at home. The other side was recruitment. Puerto Ricans were re-

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

130

cruited to fill wartime shortages of agricultural workers in

the U.S. northeast. Increasingly, though, they were also re-

cruited by low-wage industries on the continent that were

trying to compete with those that were beginning to move

abroad—especially New York’s garment industries. As the

global economy created greater opportunities for profit,

businesses took them, any way they could.

The migration of Puerto Ricans to the mainland, then,

was a result not just of the fact that the United States was

wealthier and oƒered higher wages than Puerto Rico. It

was the dynamic relationship between the two that put into

progress the process of migration. Until Puerto Ricans were

fully removed from a subsistence economy, higher wages

were not an important draw. Until recruiters came to the is-

land, and until people began working for U.S.-owned facto-

ries on the island, the possibility of moving to the mainland

to work in a U.S. factory didn’t become a reality.

Again, García Ramis captures in her novel the cultural

and economic threads that Operation Bootstrap wove, lead-

ing to migration. “It was a time of hope that still smelled

like new. It was a time of razing red clay mountains to

build houses in suburbs, of dissecting every green mountain

with asphalt roads, of blossoming cement and hotels, of

inaugurating dams and electric power stations, and of wait-

ing in the new airport, that one day would be international,

for the arrival of Americans dressed in iridescent gray

suits.”15

As Douglas Massey explains in the case of Mexico,

h o w h a v e u . s . p o l i c i e s c r e a t e d i m m i g r a t i o n ?

131

That Mexico is by far the largest source of U.S. immi-

grants is hardly surprising. In addition to sharing a

land border with the United States, it was twice invaded

by U.S. troops in the 20th century (in 1914 and 1917),

it has been the target of two U.S.-sponsored labor

recruitment eƒorts (during 1917–18 and 1942–64),

and since 1986, at U.S. insistence, it has undertaken

a radical transformation of its political economy and

entered the global market. Moreover, since 1994 it

has been linked to the United States by NAFTA, a com-

prehensive economic treaty that presently generates

$250 billion per year in binational trade. Under these

circumstances, immigration between the two countries

is inevitable, even though Mexico is wealthy by Third

World standards.16

W hen people raise the question of “why do people mi-

grate?” it’s often because they consider migration to be a

negative thing, and they want to know how to stop it. The ex-

planation proposed here doesn’t mean to imply a judgment

about migration. W hat it tries to do is to place migration

in a historical context, and see it as part of a larger global

system. Citizen workers who have lost their jobs to global re-

structuring and migrants who have come to the United

States to fill the new secondary labor market are part of

a system that is much larger than themselves. Migration is

a result, not a cause, of these global economic changes.

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132

c a s e s t u d y

T H E P H I L I P P I N E S

Puerto Rico and the Philippines are two of the areas that

have sent the greatest proportion of their populations to the

United States. The parallels in their histories can help to ex-

plain why.

Puerto Rico, with almost 3 million migrants, and the

Philippines, with almost 1.5 million migrants, represent,

after Mexico and China (both much larger countries), the

largest migrant groups in the United States. (Mexico had

over 9 million, according to the 2000 census, and China 1.5

million.) The 2000 census surveys recorded a total popula-

tion of 76 million in the Philippines and 3.8 million in

Puerto Rico.

Like Puerto Rico, the Philippines was a Spanish colony

coveted by the United States until 1898. “Cuba has a re-

markable counterpart in the Far East,” explained the U.S.

minister to Siam in 1897. The natives are “gentle, polite, and

hospitable,” yet not at all “ambitious”: “thirty-five dollars

will provide a man with abundant food and clothing for a

year.” Furthermore, “although inclined to be lazy, as are all

tropical people, they are exceedingly fond of amusements.”17

The people may have been poor, but the land was rich. “In

133

material wealth the Philippines are lavishly blessed. Hemp,

sugar, and tobacco are three products that bring enormous

profits, and coƒee bids fair to soon rival them.” Foreign

trade was valued at $35 million the previous year.18 “The

prodigality of nature impresses the traveler wherever he

journeys.”19

Almost everybody in the United States has heard of the

“Spanish-American War.” This war was fought, of course, in

Cuba, and Cubans tend to see it as just one more example

of imperial arrogance that their role in the war is ignored in

the United States. Actually, the Cubans had been fighting

for several decades for independence from Spain before the

United States intervened in 1898.

The Treaty of Paris that ended the war ceded not only

Cuba but also other formerly Spanish island territories

to the United States: Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philip-

pines. The first three acquiesced relatively peacefully to

the transfer of power from Spain to the United States, but

the Philippine independence movement rose up in arms.

The U.S.–Philippine war hasn’t entered the history books

—it doesn’t even have an o~cial name. But it was the first

guerrilla war, and the first Asian war, that the United

States fought. More people died in that conflict than in the

Spanish-American War, and it lasted much longer.

In the context of the U.S. war against the Philippines,

Rudyard Kipling published his well-known poem “The

W hite Man’s Burden,” defending the colonial enterprise, in

McClure’s Magazine in February 1899. The “burden” was the racial obligation to conquer—for the benefit of the Filipinos,

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

134

of course: “Send forth the best ye breed,” Kipling wrote,

“Go bind your sons to exile, / To serve your captives’ need.”

Those conquered were notoriously ungrateful for the sac-

rifice the whites made on their behalf: the “new-caught,

sullen peoples, / Half-devil and half-child” usually gave the

white man only his “old reward”: “the blame of those ye bet-

ter, / The hate of those ye guard.” Still, his inherent superi-

ority gave the white man the duty to govern others, even

against their will.20

One outspoken southern challenger of the U.S. racial

order at the time, Reverend Quincy Ewing of Mississippi,

noted the connection between domestic racism and foreign

expansion inherent in the poem:

Northern applause of the policy of shooting down

weaker brown men in distant islands to civilize them,

or even to “save their souls”—must inevitably plant

seeds of bitter fruit for black men in the southern

states of this country, and perhaps, nay, very probably,

in all the others. I cannot believe I am mistaken in

supposing that the lynching spirit has shown itself

conspicuously bold and self-congratulatory in the

northern and western as well as in the southern states

of the union, since it became possible for the hoarse

and brutal muse of Rudyard Kipling to sing the nation’s

policy and purpose. If millions of brown men across

the thousands of miles of sea are the white nation’s

burden—to be dealt with as a burden—why may not

the white men of the southern states look upon the

h o w h a v e u . s . p o l i c i e s c r e a t e d i m m i g r a t i o n ?

135

black man, separated from them by no sea at all, as

their burden, to be dealt with as a burden rather than

as men?21

Political cartoons consistently used racist images based

on blacks in the U.S. south to depict the inhabitants of Cuba,

Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. American soldiers “com-

monly referred to Filipinos as ‘niggers.’ ”22

As Senator Alfred Beveridge proclaimed in 1898, “W hy

is it more di~cult to administer Hawaii than New Mexico or

California? Both had a savage and an alien population: both

were more remote from the seat of government when they

came under our dominion than the Philippines are today.”

Colonial subjects were to be ruled. To opponents who ques-

tioned the legitimacy of Anglo-Saxon rule over others, he

replied, “We govern the Indians without their consent, we

govern our territories without their consent.”23

Others used the association of old and new colonial sub-

jects to argue against annexation. Southern segregationists

like Benjamin Tillman could also be anti-imperialists. Till-

man referred to Kipling’s poem when he explained to the

U.S. Senate in 1899 why southern Democrats had voted

overwhelmingly against the treaty:

It was not because we are Democrats, but because we

understand and realize what it is to have two races side

by side that can not mix or mingle without deteriora-

tion and injury to both and the ultimate destruction

of the civilization of the higher. We of the South have

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

136

borne this white man’s burden of a colored race in our

midst since their emancipation and before.

It was a burden upon our manhood and our ideas

of liberty before they were emancipated. It is still a

burden, although they have been granted the fran-

chise . . . We are not responsible, because we inherited

it, and your fathers as well as ours are responsible for

the presence amongst us of that people. W hy do we as

a people want to incorporate into our citizenship ten

millions more of diƒerent or of diƒering races, three

or four of them?24

Still, as journalist and diplomat John Barrett pointed out

in the North American Review, the Philippines were “one of the greatest undeveloped opportunities in all the world—

a group of islands with numberless riches and resources

awaiting exploitation, and capable of providing a market for

a large quantity of our manufactured products.”25

Until 1898, all of the territories that the United States in-

corporated fell under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787—

they were incorporated with the understanding that they

would ultimately be admitted into statehood. The size of the

nonwhite populations of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philip-

pines worried even the most ardent imperialists. In 1901,

the Supreme Court resolved the issue by creating the cate-

gory of “unincorporated territory” that allowed the United

States to own and control the territories without having

to extend the Constitution to them. “W hilst in an interna-

tional sense Porto Rico was not a foreign country, since it

h o w h a v e u . s . p o l i c i e s c r e a t e d i m m i g r a t i o n ?

137

was subject to the sovereignty of and was owned by the

United States, it was foreign to the United States in a do-

mestic sense,” explained the court.26

“We come not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends,”

President McKinley explained in announcing U.S. sov-

ereignty in the Philippines. He declared that all who co-

operated “will receive the reward of [U.S.] support and

protection. All others will be brought within the lawful rule

we have assumed, with firmness if need be.”27

Likewise in a proclamation to the people of Puerto Rico

upon occupying their country in July 1898, U.S. general Nel-

son Miles insisted upon the benevolence of his enterprise:

In the cause of liberty, justice, and humanity, [U.S.]

military forces have come to occupy the island of

Puerto Rico. They come bearing the banner of freedom,

inspired by a noble purpose to seek the enemies of our

country and yours, and to destroy or capture all who are

in armed resistance . . . The chief object of the Ameri-

can military forces will be to overthrow the armed

authority of Spain, and to give the people of your beau-

tiful island the largest measure of liberty consistent

with this occupation . . . It is not our purpose to inter-

fere with any existing laws and customs . . . so long as

they conform to the rules of military administration of

order and justice. This is not a war of devastation, but

one to give all within the control of [U.S.] military and

naval forces the advantages and blessings of enlight-

ened civilization.28

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

138

For the people of these territories, too, a new category

had to be invented: the “U.S. national,” neither citizen nor

alien. They had no political rights, but they did have the right

to travel to the mainland.29 Some protested that Filipinos,

because they were racially ineligible for citizenship, should

be excluded under the same laws that prohibited other

Asians from entering the United States. Congress, however,

insisted that the United States could not prohibit entry as

long as it held the Philippines as a territory.

Sugar plantations in Hawaii recruited and imported both

Puerto Rican and Filipino workers, taking advantage of their

status as “nationals.” U.S. sugar planters in Hawaii had im-

ported over 200,000 workers from Japan, China, Portugal,

and Puerto Rico in the late nineteenth century, before the

islands were subject to U.S. immigration laws. W hen Hawaii

was annexed in 1898, however, planters turned to the Phil-

ippines. From 1909 to 1929, some 120,000 Filipinos were

brought to Hawaii to work on the plantations.30 Many of

those followed labor recruiters on to the mainland, to the

fields of California. The 1930 census found 45,000 Filipinos

on the mainland and 63,000 in Hawaii.31

Law yer Madison Grant, one of the founders of the U.S.

eugenicist and “scientific” racist movement in the early

twentieth century (and cited as an inspiration for Nazi eu-

genics policy), wrote, “The swarming of the Filipinos into

the Pacific states brings with it a repetition of the Chinese

problem of sixty years ago. California is determined that

the white man there shall not be replaced by the Chinese, the

Japanese, the Mexican, or the Filipino.”32 In the view of the

h o w h a v e u . s . p o l i c i e s c r e a t e d i m m i g r a t i o n ?

139

scientific racists, the white man’s destiny was to “replace”

people of color, but never to be “replaced” by them. Perhaps

at the heart of these manifestations of racial exclusionism in

the United States is the original sin—the fact that the coun-

try was founded, and expanded, by replacing its original in-

habitants. In order to justify this original replacement, the

right of whites to expand, and the fate of people of color to

disappear, had to be constantly reiterated and reenacted.

In 1934 the Philippines Independence Act turned the

country into a commonwealth—another invented status—

and putting it on a ten-year path to independence.33 Echo-

ing Samuel Gompers’s argument against annexation of the

Philippines three decades earlier, Madison Grant wrote that

“as a safeguard to our own racial welfare, it might become

necessary to give the Filipino his independence.”34

With the stroke of a pen, Filipinos became “aliens” and

lost their right to enter the United States. U.S. citizens re-

tained their right to enter the Philippines and be treated as full citizens there.35 The 60,000 Filipinos who had settled

in the United States, mostly as agricultural workers in Cali-

fornia, were oƒered various incentives for repatriation. Few

were interested in the oƒer, especially since it meant giving

up their right to return to the United States.

California’s nineteenth-century anti-miscegenation

laws prohibited marriages between whites and “negroes,

mulattoes, and Mongolians.”36 Such legislation was upheld

by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883, and by the 1920s thirty-

eight states had anti-miscegenation laws on the books. Six-

teen states still prohibited interracial marriage when the

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

140

court overturned that ruling in 1967. (Alabama did not re-

voke its statute until 2000, and even then, 40 percent of the

voters wanted to keep it.)37

The courts could not agree, however, on whether Fil-

ipinos were “Mongolians” or “Malays,” and in 1933 the Los

Angeles Superior Court allowed a Filipino man to marry a

white woman—at the same time urging the state legislature

to amend the law so that Filipinos would be included. The

legislature did so later that year, including “members of the

Malay race” among those prohibited from marrying Cau-

casians.38

“The dominant race of the country has a perfect right to

exclude all other races from equal rights with its own peo-

ple,” explained the presiding judge in one case in the late

1920s that ruled against the right of a Filipino to marry a

Caucasian.39 “I am quite satisfied in my own mind,” wrote

another judge in another 1930s California case, “that the

Filipino is a Malay and that a Malay is a Mongolian, just

as much as the white American is of the Teutonic race, the

Teutonic family, or of the Nordic family, carrying it back to

the Aryan family. Hence, it is my view that under the Code of

California as it now exists, intermarriage between a Filipino

and a Caucasian would be void.”40

Even as the doors of exclusion were closing on Filipinos,

the seeds for a later migration were being sown through the

U.S. colonial system in the Philippines. Establishing a pub-

lic health and sanitation infrastructure was a component of

U.S. imperial policy in both the Caribbean and the Pacific.

It supported the ideolog y of Anglo-Saxon uplift of back-

h o w h a v e u . s . p o l i c i e s c r e a t e d i m m i g r a t i o n ?

141

ward peoples and conveniently made the tropics safe for

white settlers at the same time.41 During the 1920s the U.S.

government and the Rockefeller Foundation International

Health Board created a nursing education program in the

Philippines based on the U.S. model. The language of in-

struction was English.

W hen Filipino independence was finally completed in

1946 (delayed by the Second World War), it was qualified by

the Bell Act, which stipulated an unequal “free trade”—U.S.

goods could enter the Philippines in unlimited quantities,

duty free, while Filipino goods were subject to quotas. U.S.

citizens and corporations were also granted investment

privileges in the country. Finally, the U.S. controlled the

exchange rate. In addition, the U.S. maintained full sover-

eignty over its twenty-three military installations in the

Philippines.42

Filipinos had, of course, been working for U.S. employ-

ers for years: on sugar plantations, as soldiers in the U.S.

army, and on U.S. bases in the Philippines, which directly

employed almost 70,000 Filipinos in the 1980s.43 Indepen-

dence only reinforced the unequal economic and cultural

relationships that contributed to migration.

A generation of Filipina nurses was poised to take ad-

vantage of the opportunity created in 1948 when the U.S.

began an exchange visitor program to bring Filipina nurses

to the U.S. for postgraduate study in U.S. hospitals.44 Air-

lines and travel agencies enthusiastically promoted the pro-

gram in the Philippines.45

The ostensible idea of the program was that the nurses

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

142

would return home to bring their education back to their

people. But in the United States, a nursing shortage ap-

proaching crisis proportions led hospitals to recruit the stu-

dents and provide them with green cards to stay and work

here. Between 1948 and 1973, 12,000 Filipina nurses came

to the States to study, and many of them stayed and became

citizens.46 The 1965 Immigration Act added incentives by

making nurses a category of workers eligible for preferen-

tial visas, and U.S. hospitals and Filipino travel agencies

stepped up their recruitment eƒorts.47 (Another 17,000 Fil-

ipinos were brought to the U.S. for military training between

1950 and the early 1980s.48 By 1970, 14,000 Filipinos were

serving in the U.S. nav y, more than the total number serv-

ing in the Philippines’ own nav y.49) By 1989, 73 percent of

foreign nurses in the United States were from the Philip-

pines. They worked primarily in large public hospitals in

major U.S. cities. In New York City, 18 percent of RNs were

Filipino.50

By 2005, U.S. hospitals were reporting an ever-growing

nursing deficit that had reached 118,000.51 The “nursing

shortage” in the United States was rooted in two interrelated

phenomena. First, low wages and poor working conditions

are characteristic of nursing jobs, as they are of agricultural

and domestic work. Not surprisingly, people with other op-

tions tend to avoid the most onerous ones. Employers then

find that they can’t fill their positions, and the government

helps them to import workers who have fewer options.

Second, the health-care sector underwent its own re-

structuring in the post-1965 period. U.S. workers began to

h o w h a v e u . s . p o l i c i e s c r e a t e d i m m i g r a t i o n ?

143

obtain health plans through their employers even prior to

1965. Government programs like Medicare and Medicaid

increased access to health care in the 1960s. The shift from

private doctors to HMOs and hospitals in the 1980s and ’90s

further increased the demand for nurses. Government cut-

backs and employer pressure, meanwhile, forced health-

care providers to continually cut costs. So the demand for

nurses rose, but working conditions in the sector stayed

poor.52

As with agriculture, the U.S. government has greatly fa-

cilitated a continuing influx of foreign nurses. Some qualify

for immigrant visas because the Department of Labor has

kept nurses listed as a profession in need of immigrant

workers; others come on temporary work visas. Repeated

revisions of the law have allowed more nurses to come, and

made it easier for them to stay.53 The American Hospital As-

sociation began recruiting heavily abroad, especially in the

Philippines, but also in China and India. In 2005, Congress

authorized an additional 50,000 visas for nurses because

the 12,000 to 14,000 already authorized were nowhere near

enough to fill the demand.54

Even with the poor conditions in the nursing field, as the

labor market in the U.S. got worse overall, more citizens

began to turn to nursing as a potential career. Nursing school

applications skyrocketed. By 2005, U.S. nursing schools

were rejecting 150,000 qualified applicants a year because

they didn’t have enough spaces. And they couldn’t expand,

because teaching nursing paid even less than being a nurse. With the shortages, schools couldn’t attract teachers.55

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

144

The United States wasn’t the only wealthy country fac-

ing the “care deficit” described by Arlie Hochschild and

Barbara Ehrenreich (see Myth 2, on immigrants and low-

paying jobs). The preparation of nurses for service abroad

became a major industry in the Philippines. By 2000, over

150,000 Filipina nurses were employed in the United King-

dom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Middle East.56

As the U.S. Congress debated new immigration legisla-

tion in 2006, the American Hospital Association lobbied

hard for unlimited entry of foreign nurses. The Senate bill

included this provision, though the House bill did not.57

For the Philippines and other poor countries, the hem-

orrhage of nurses to the wealthy world had contradictory

eƒects. Starting salary for a nurse in the Philippines is

about $2,000 a year, while in the United States it’s around

$36,000.58 Filipinos working abroad sent back $10.7 billion

in remittances in 2005, 13.5 percent of the country’s GDP.59

On the other hand, as the New York Times explained, “Health care has deteriorated there in recent years as tens

of thousands of nurses have moved abroad. Thousands of

ill-paid doctors have even abandoned their profession to

become migrant-ready nurses themselves, Filipino re-

searchers say. ‘The Filipino people will suƒer because the

U.S. will get all our trained nurses,’ said George Cordero,

president of the Philippine Nurse Association. ‘But what can

we do?’ ” A former director of the Philippine National Insti-

tutes of Health estimated that 80 percent of the country’s

doctors had moved, or were in the process of moving, into

nursing. “I plead for justice,” he told the Times. “There has

h o w h a v e u . s . p o l i c i e s c r e a t e d i m m i g r a t i o n ?

145

to be give and take, not just take, take, take by the United

States.”60

The specific events described here help to explain why

the Philippines, like Puerto Rico, sends such an extraor-

dinarily high proportion of its population to the United

States. They also reveal a larger pattern. Colonialism sets up

a system in which colonized peoples work for those who col-

onized them. This system is not erased after direct colonial-

ism ends. Rather, it evolves and develops. The colonizer

continues to use former colonial subjects as cheap workers,

and the unequal economic relationship is also reinforced in

this way. Immigration is just one piece of this larger puzzle,

interlocking with all of the other pieces.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

146

PA R T F I V E

T H E D E B AT E AT T H E T U R N O F T H E M I L L E N N I U M

The immigration debate has become increasingly acrimo-

nious in the first years of the new millennium. Pundits and

politicians demand a solution to the immigration “crisis.”

The more they talk about the crisis, the more worried peo-

ple seem to become about it. With so many well-placed

voices talking about a crisis, people begin to feel there

really is one.

We need to pause, though, and think about what exactly

is so dangerous about immigration—what makes it a crisis.

For many Americans, there is indeed a crisis. It’s a cri-

sis of worsening jobs and working conditions, of deterio-

ration of public services, of lack of health insurance. It’s an

economic crisis. It’s also a crisis that benefits one sector of

society: the very rich. And it’s a crisis that has very little to

do with immigration.

There’s also another crisis facing many Americans, and

that’s the crisis of national security. Americans are being

sent to fight in far-oƒ wars, and like Rudyard Kipling’s

“new-caught, sullen peoples,” people in Iraq and Afghan-

istan don’t seem properly grateful for American troops’

sacrifices. Instead, the people we’ve invaded seem intent

on driving out or killing their presumed saviors. Mean-

while, anger at the United States and its policies, and

threats of attack against this country, are increasing.

Then there’s the crisis of global warming, and scien-

tists’ predictions that if we keep up our current rate of con-

sumption, our common homeland, the earth, will become

uninhabitable in the foreseeable future.

With so many real crises facing us, why has so much

national attention been focused instead on the issue of

immigration? Perhaps the pundits and politicians who

are spending so much energ y whipping up this immigra-

tion scare are trying to distract us from some other, more

pressing, national—and global—issues.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

148

m y t h 1 5

T H E A M E R I C A N P U B L I C O P P O S E S I M M I G R AT I O N , A N D T H E D E B AT E I N C O N G R E S S R E F L E C T S T H AT

First, we should remember that Democrats and Republicans

within the U.S. mainstream share a broad set of values and

beliefs. In the global spectrum, they fall pretty close to-

gether. Both Democrats and Republicans have supported

and helped to orchestrate the global and domestic economic

order that has emerged since the 1970s. In broad terms, this

has meant privatizations, a shift away from government reg-

ulation of industry, cutbacks in government services, and

a free trade agenda that has pushed other governments—

especially Third World governments—to follow these same

policies in more extreme ways.

Domestically, this process has been described as a re-

treat from the mid-century redistributive government role

embodied in the New Deal and the War on Poverty. Although

those programs are associated (rightly) with the Democratic

Party, the Democrats of the late twentieth and early twenty-

first centuries have retreated from the social welfare orien-

tation of their predecessors, at least at the national level.

149

Internationally, the new consensus is sometimes (not

very accurately) called globalization. The philosophy behind

it can be seen in the Chicago School of Economics–inspired

program implemented in Chile in the 1970s, in the Struc-

tural Adjustment Programs (or SAPs) mandated by the

World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for the

Third World in the 1980s, and in the so-called Washington

Consensus prescribed for Latin American and other Third

World economies in the 1990s.

Though they have diƒerent names, these policy ap-

proaches all encompass similar basic principles, sometimes

also called “neoliberal” because they draw on some aspects

of nineteenth-century liberal economic thought (which is

very diƒerent from what Americans generally think of as

“liberal” in the twentieth century). They call for cutting back

government spending on social welfare (including health

and education), encouraging the export economy by devalu-

ing currency and ending currency controls and tariƒs, elim-

inating government subsidies for programs for the poor,

abolishing price controls, privatizing state-owned enter-

prises, creating incentives for foreign investors, deregulat-

ing industries, and protecting property rights.

In other words, the role of governments in the Third

World should be to create optimum conditions for foreign

investors, in hopes that investment will bring economic

development that will eventually benefit the poor. In the

United States these kinds of policies are often called “Rea-

ganomics,” after Ronald Reagan, or “trickle-down econom-

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

150

ics”: by oƒering the rich greater ability to increase their

wealth, benefits will eventually trickle down to the poor.

Prior to the 1970s, most Latin American countries had

followed a very diƒerent economic path, one that looked a

bit more like the New Deal. The mid-century policies were

diƒerent from the New Deal because Latin American coun-

tries in general had a low level of industrialization, and a lot

of emphasis was placed on state-sponsored industrializa-

tion. But they were similar to the New Deal in their use of

government spending to provide services and employment

for the working classes, and implementation of fiscal poli-

cies aimed at supporting local development rather than for-

eign investment.

The most recent embodiments of the neoliberal model

have been the free trade agreements that the United States

signed with Mexico and Canada in 1994 and those that

are currently in progress (agreed upon and approved by

the United States, but awaiting final approval by some of

the participants) with the Dominican Republic and Central

America: NAFTA and CAFTA. The United States has also

been pushing for the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which

would spread this agenda through the entire continent.

Since 2000, though, the election of leftist governments in

Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia has derailed

the push for the FTA A.

Neoliberal policies have had profound eƒects on the

populations and social structures of Latin American coun-

tries. Living conditions for the poor, who relied on subsi-

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

151

dized services and basic goods and on price controls, plum-

meted as the safety net was dismantled. Free trade was also

disastrous for many peasant farmers, who could not com-

pete with the highly mechanized and heavily subsidized U.S.

agricultural sector whose products then flooded their coun-

try’s markets. W hile U.S. economic advisers and lenders

insisted that Latin American countries end their subsidies

to the agricultural sector, U.S. agribusiness continued to

receive huge subsidies and benefits from the U.S. govern-

ment.

Peasants who fled to the already overcrowded cities

found the social services and benefits there vanishing. The

new maquiladora industries employed some people, but far

fewer than had been expected, and often they did not pay a

living wage. In addition, popular protest often met with in-

creasing repression. Free-market policies may be associ-

ated with democracy in the United States and elsewhere in

the industrialized world, but in the Third World, they more

commonly come with the disappearance of democratic

rights, as in Pinochet’s Chile.

This is the complex of factors—pressed for by both

Democratic and Republican administrations—that led to

increased out-migration from Latin America at the end of

the twentieth century. At the same time, though, both Dem-

ocratic and Republic administrations were implementing a

U.S. version of neoliberalism at home. Welfare reform, pri-

vatizations, cutbacks in social services like health and edu-

cation, attacks on labor unions, deregulation—all of these

things were happening in the United States as well, and con-

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

152

tributing to the growing gaps in income and wealth in this

country.

Despite these broad areas of agreement, policymakers,

commentators, and the public at large can often be found

hotly debating the issue of immigration. Within the main-

stream, the current debate on immigration can be framed

by the recent Senate and House bills that propose solutions

to the supposed problem of immigration. There are some

significant diƒerences between the bills, but there are

also some important commonalities. The 2006 Senate bill,

known as the Kennedy-McCain proposal, has been called a

“comprehensive” proposal because it provides a path for

the 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the

country to obtain legal status. In addition, it provides for

increased border control and a guest-worker program to

regulate future immigration. The House bill is an “enforce-

ment-only” approach that puts much more emphasis on

border control: it proposes building a new seven-hundred-

mile wall along the southern border, hiring ten thousand

new Border Patrol agents, building new detention facilities,

and further criminalizing undocumented immigrants and

those who employ or aid them.

The Senate bill is the more liberal of the two and enjoys

support from a number of liberal advocacy groups—but also

from President Bush. Most of its backers are Democrats,

though significant numbers of Republicans also support

it. The House bill is a Republican-sponsored bill that only

small numbers of Democrats have come out in favor of.

Most immigrants’ rights groups argue strongly for the

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

153

need for a comprehensive reform. Some have come out in

support of the Senate bill, believing that it is the best that can

be hoped for in the current political climate.1 Others object

to the punitive requirements for legalization, and to the no-

tion of a new guest-worker program.2 Unions are similarly

divided. The AFL-CIO opposes the Senate plan, arguing

that guest-worker programs by their very nature create a

group of people who are not full citizens, and who are easily

exploited and abused. “It creates a permanent underclass of

workers who are unable to fully participate in democracy,”

said AFL-CIO president John Sweeney. “The plan deepens

the potential for abuse and exploitation of these workers,

while undermining wages and labor protections for all

workers.”3

In contrast, Eliseo Medina, president of the SEIU (Ser-

vice Employees International Union), whose father came to

the United States under the bracero program, argues that

this guest worker proposal avoids the problematic aspects of

earlier programs. He declared the SEIU’s support for the

Senate bill. The Change to Win Coalition, which split from

the AFL-CIO in 2005 and to which the SEIU now belongs,

has not taken an o~cial position on the matter. But some

SEIU members disagreed so strongly with their union’s

position that they formed a new organization called “No

Worker Is Illegal” to press the SEIU to revise its stance.

“Guest-worker programs, further militarization of the bor-

der, and employer sanctions hurt all workers,” they explain.4

Others point out that a temporary guest-worker program

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

154

is at odds with the jobs that migrant workers are filling. Only

one in ten Mexican workers in the United States holds a

temporary or seasonal job. “Rotating temporary workers

through permanent jobs is simply not sound policy, and in-

vites non-compliance with the terms of the programme by

both migrants and employers,” notes immigration special-

ist Wayne Cornelius.5

Meanwhile, states and local communities around the

United States are discussing or implementing anti-immi-

grant regulations. Fifty-seven state-level bills were enacted

in the first half of 2006. A few of these actually extended

some rights to noncitizens, but the majority sought to fur-

ther marginalize and exclude them. Especially popular were

those restricting public benefits and those punishing unau-

thorized employment.6

Hazelton, Pennsylvania, Vista, California, and Milford,

Massachusetts, are only three of dozens of cities that have

passed local ordinances aimed against immigrants. The

southern California town of Vista (population 72,000) now

requires those who hire day laborers to “register with the

city, display a certificate in their car windows and present

written terms of employment to workers.” Milford revised

zoning laws to prevent unrelated adults from sharing hous-

ing. Hazelton’s mayor signed the “Illegal Immigration Relief

Act” to punish those who do business with, employ, or

provide housing for undocumented immigrants.7 In New

Hampshire, local police in Hudson and New Ipswich have

arrested undocumented immigrants for trespassing. (The

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

155

courts struck down the charges.) The Arizona legislature

passed a similar bill in April, 2006, though it was vetoed by

the governor.8

W hile right-wing talk-show hosts have become notori-

ous for their rather virulent anti-immigrant stances, polls

show that in fact significant majorities of the population

support the “comprehensive” approach that provides a

route to legalization for undocumented immigrants cur-

rently in the country as well as increased border control.

A Manhattan Institute survey of likely Republican voters

found that 72 percent supported a plan along the lines of the

Senate proposal.9

Much, however, depends on how the question is framed.

A CNN poll commissioned by anti-immigrant commentator

Lou Dobbs asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of the U.S.

government deporting immigrants to the country they came

from?” Sixty-seven percent answered, “approve.” W hen

asked whether they wanted to see the number of illegal im-

migrants increased, decreased, or stay the same, 67 percent

said “decreased”—but only 34 percent followed up that they

wanted to see all illegal immigrants deported.

Interestingly, the CNN/Dobbs poll found the most dra-

matic results when it asked, “W hen someone is arrested,

do you think the police should be required to determine

whether that person is a U.S. citizen?” and “W hen someone

applies to a social service agency for assistance such as wel-

fare or food stamps, do you think that agency should or

should not be required to check whether that person is a

citizen and record their citizenship status?” Eighty-three

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

156

percent answered “yes” to the first, and 91 percent to the

second.10

The AFL-CIO enthusiastically promotes Dobbs’s Export- ing America: W hy Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas on its “Union Shop” website.11 Dobbs made com- mon cause with the AFL-CIO on issues of outsourcing and

free trade, making union representatives frequent guests

on his show. He was lauded by AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer

Richard Trumka, who called his show a “nightly crusade,”

and the New York Teacher, which called him “the working chump’s champion.”12

Dobbs parted with the unions, though, when the AFL-

CIO began to move away from its anti-immigrant stance.

Dobbs takes a populist line against immigration, arguing

that “big business and labor groups are the beneficiaries of

illegal immigration, the true costs are borne by taxpayers

and working Americans.”13 “American working men and

women are under the most vicious assault from so-called

free trade, job outsourcing to cheap foreign labor markets,

rising healthcare costs, a failing educational system, mas-

sive illegal immigration, and stagnant wages,” Dobbs writes,

taking unions to task for failing to protect their members’—

and other working people’s—interests.14

Still, despite the popularity of Dobbs and other viru-

lently anti-immigrant media figures, public opinion over-

all seems to be decidedly less hysterical on the issue than are

the voices that make it into the media. The Pew Hispanic

Foundation found that 52 percent agreed that immigrants

“are a burden because they take jobs, housing, and health-

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

157

care,” while 41 percent felt that immigrants “strengthen

our country with their hard work and talents.” These num-

bers varied fairly significantly by age, educational level, and

economic level, with older people, people with only a high

school education or less, and people who reported their per-

sonal finances as “only fair/poor” being more likely to feel

immigrants were a burden. Interestingly, there was no sig-

nificant diƒerence between blacks and whites, although

Hispanics were much more likely to see immigrants in pos-

itive terms.15

The Pew research brought out two additional, illuminat-

ing results. First, people who lived in areas with very few im-

migrants were much more likely to have negative views of

immigrants than people who lived in areas with high con-

centrations of immigrants. In areas with low concentrations

of immigrants, a full 67 percent felt that immigrants were

a burden and only 27 percent felt that they strengthened

the country, whereas in areas with many immigrants, 47

percent felt they were a burden and 48 percent felt they

were a benefit.16 This suggests that for many people, anti-

immigrant sentiments come less from personal experience

than from outside sources.

Second, the poll showed that despite the virulence of

anti-immigrant rhetoric on talk shows and elsewhere, very

few people, even those who said they were worried about

immigrants taking jobs, housing, and health care, really

considered the issue to be of major importance. Sixty-two

percent said that the presence of immigrants in their com-

munities had not significantly aƒected public services, and

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

158

only 27 percent said that immigrants had negatively aƒected

services.17 W hen asked what the most important problem

facing their local community was, 14 percent answered

crime and violence, 14 percent said unemployment, and

12 percent said education. Between 5 and 10 percent each

chose one of the following: crowding/tra~c, roads, infra-

structure, and government/politics. Only 4 percent saw im-

migration as the most important problem.18

W here, then, does the virulence of the debate come

from? W hy do politicians and commentators seem to think

that immigration is such a divisive and hot-button issue, if

the American public seems more concerned about tra~c

and road conditions, to say nothing of crime, unemploy-

ment, and education?

I’ll suggest two possible explanations. One is that

while large numbers of Americans don’t share in the anti-

immigrant fears and sentiments, those who do so feel very

strongly and are very vocal. Their voices thus make a large

and noisy impact in the public sphere.

The second is that elected o~cials, and commentators

and talk-show hosts, are very much aware of the many

Americans who are deeply disturbed by the growing eco-

nomic inequalities, loss of quality of life, and deterioration

of public services that have resulted from economic re-

structuring in the United States over the past thirty years.

An ever-growing segment of the U.S. middle class lives

“only a job loss, a medical problem, or an out-of-control

credit card away from financial catastrophe.”19

Not only do Americans feel that they are in an economi-

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

159

cally precarious situation, they also have little faith in their

leaders to resolve the issues facing our society. One recent

poll asked Americans to rate the level of trust they feel in the

country’s institutions. The levels of trust were appallingly

low: only 3 percent trusted Congress, 7 percent trusted

corporate leaders, 11 percent trusted the media, 24 percent

trusted the president, and 29 percent trusted the courts.20

Meanwhile, voter turnout rates in the United States hover

between 50 percent and 60 percent—among the lowest in

the industrialized world.21

Under such circumstances, it’s not surprising that some

members of Congress and the media resort to fearmonger-

ing and scapegoating as a way of trying to attract public

attention and support. Immigrants present a convenient

target. The level of noise, however, seems to be greater than

anti-immigrant demagogues’ actual ability to influence

public opinion. Between 2000 and 2006, the numbers of

Americans who believed that immigrants are a burden on

the country did increase, from 38 percent to 52 percent,

while those who believed they strengthened the country de-

creased from 50 percent to 41 percent. Still, between 1997

and 2006 the proportion believing that Latinos work very

hard increased from 63 to 80 percent, the proportion be-

lieving that they often go on welfare decreased from 55 to 37

percent, and the proportion believing that they significantly

increased crime rates decreased from 43 to 33 percent.22

Furthermore, the numbers who believe that immigrants

take jobs from Americans has been on a fairly steady decline

since 1983, when over 40 percent believed it. Today it’s just

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

160

24 percent.23 So it seems that the upsurge in anti-immigrant

rhetoric and politicking may have inflamed small numbers

of people, but that most people in the country, especially

those who live in high-immigration areas, hold more mea-

sured views.

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

161

m y t h 1 6

T H E O V E R W H E L M I N G V I C T O R Y O F P R O P O S I T I O N 1 8 7 I N C A L I F O R N I A S H O W S T H AT T H E P U B L I C O P P O S E S I M M I G R AT I O N

W hen immigration-related issues have come up for a vote,

as they did in 1994 with California’s Proposition 187, the

voting results don’t always look like the poll results reported

above. “Prop 187,” billed as the “illegal alien initiative,”

passed with 59 percent of the vote—a significant majority.1

The initiative would have prohibited undocumented immi-

grants from receiving public health and education services

in the state, had not most of its provisions been quickly

struck down by the courts as unconstitutional.

There are two reasons why the vote on Prop 187 does not

seem to correspond to the more positive attitude about im-

migrants that the polls tend to show. One is that the cam-

paign itself mobilized virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric

—and fallacious arguments—that may have influenced pub-

lic opinion. In addition, while polls use scientific methods

to come up with a representative cross-section of the popu-

162

lation, electoral voting merely records the opinions of those

who choose to vote. In California’s 1994 election, only 8.9

million people voted—fewer than half of those eligible.

“The demographic profile of voters in the 1994 election

contrasts sharply with the state’s larger adult population and

its citizen adults who are eligible to vote,” one analysis of

the results concluded. “As a group, voters in 1994 are older,

include more white non-Hispanics, are more conservative,

have higher levels of income, are better educated, include

fewer residents of Los Angeles County, and are more apt to

be a~liated with Protestant religions.”2 By age, race, polit-

ical a~liation, and religion, this election mobilized pre-

cisely those who were more likely to hold anti-immigrant

views.

A couple of other facts stand out about the results. First,

the poorest Californians—those earning under twenty thou-

sand dollars a year—were more opposed to Prop 187 than any

other income group. Not surprisingly, Latinos voted over-

whelmingly against the initiative, and political liberals and

Democrats also tended to oppose it. Interestingly, men sup-

ported Prop 187 much more than women did. Only 52 per-

cent of blacks and Asians supported it, while 64 percent of

whites did—and 69 percent of white men.3

Another study of the campaign tactics of the two sides

notes that even the “No on 187” campaign failed to challenge

the anti-immigrant message. Jan Adams, a leader of the

anti-187 movement in northern California, explained that

the professional political consultants who ran the campaign

“concluded it was necessary to concede the problematic na-

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

163

ture of immigration, but find something even more unpop-

ular than ‘illegal’ immigrants to blame, preferably the Fed-

eral government for failing to police the border adequately.

A second set of messages played on voters’ fears: rampaging

gangs of (brown) children pushed out of the schools; the

spread of tuberculosis by untreated ‘illegals’; and, the staple

of anti-initiative campaigns, it would all lead to bureaucracy

and cost too much.”4

By failing to oƒer a counter to the anti-immigrant mes-

sage promoted by the pro-187 campaign, the “no” campaign

may have actually strengthened anti-immigrant sentiment

and encouraged some people to vote “yes.”

Although Prop 187 was struck down by the courts, many

of its provisions were in fact implemented in 1996 through

the Welfare Reform Act. The act carefully avoided the bla-

tantly unconstitutional elements of Prop 187, like denying

public education to undocumented immigrant children. But

it eƒectively excluded immigrants, documented and undoc-

umented, from almost all other public benefits.

Prop 187 also played an important role in President Clin-

ton’s decision to unleash an enormous new border control

initiative. Anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States,

according to Wayne Cornelius, is “broad but not very deep”—

except when mobilized through campaigns like the 187 cam-

paign. With the 1996 elections approaching and California a

key to a Clinton victory, the president decided to capitalize

on—and thus further fan the flames of—the anti-immigrant

upsurge there. One former Clinton o~cial recalled a delib-

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

164

erate decision to “put as much money into the INS as it could

plausibly absorb.”5

The approval of Prop 187 does not necessarily show the

strength of anti-immigrant attitudes in the United States. It

did, though, provide a lesson to politicians on the potential

for inflaming, and benefiting from, these attitudes.

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

165

m y t h 1 7

I M M I G R AT I O N I S A P R O B L E M

Immigration is indeed a problem, but not in the way it’s

generally defined. Immigration is a humanitarian problem.

People leave their homelands, their families, and their live-

lihoods and risk their lives. W hat is needed is a humanitar-

ian solution: the creation of a new model of global economic

integration—one that redistributes the planet’s resources

more equitably among its inhabitants, and one that respects

and nourishes traditional peasant lifestyles.

Instead, U.S. policies have turned a humanitarian

problem into a humanitarian disaster. U.S. foreign policies

foster more, rather than less, global inequality. Domestic

policies keep domestic inequality, and the demand for

secondary-sector workers, high. And border enforcement

policies have created a humanitarian crisis. The $20 billion

that the United States has spent on militarizing the border

in the past decade has had no appreciable eƒect on immi-

gration levels, but it has caused thousands of deaths and un-

told human suƒering.

One of the places where the problems created by U.S. im-

migration policies play out most dramatically is on the U.S.–

Mexico border. Since 1994, the United States has poured

166

money and resources into trying to close various stretches

of the border. Rather than slowing unauthorized border

crossings, the campaign has turned the border into a death

zone. Between 1985 and mid-1992, some 175 immigrants

were killed as they tried to navigate their way across the

freeways in San Diego, the most common border crossing

area. Between 1995, when “Operation Gatekeeper” went

into eƒect, and the end of 2004, some three thousand died

crossing the border, most in the deserts of Arizona, as

the crossing points have been pushed farther and farther

east.1 Close to another 500 died in 2005.2 And that’s only

documented deaths: the bones of others who were aban-

doned in the desert, dead or dying, remain to be found.

W hile the human cost of “Operation Gatekeeper” has

been significant, it has had “no statistically significant ef-

fect” on the number of unauthorized crossings. Wayne Cor-

nelius found that the only substantive change it has brought,

as far as overall immigration trends are concerned, is that

unauthorized migrants are likely to stay longer in the United

States and to bring their families, because going home to

visit has become so much more dangerous.3

Between 1993, when the new border enforcement pro-

gram began, and 2000, the average length of an undocu-

mented Mexican immigrant’s stay rose from forty weeks to

fifty weeks, then to seventy weeks by 2002. The composition

of the Mexican undocumented population also shifted, away

from the predominantly single male migrants of the past

to approximately 50 percent women and children. Some

48,000 children cross the border each year, many of them

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

167

coming to try to find a parent—especially a mother—who is

already in the United States. One study of domestic workers

in Los Angeles found that 82 percent of live-in nannies and

24 percent of housecleaners were women who had left chil-

dren behind in their homelands.4

The greatest beneficiaries of the change were the smug-

glers. The cost of crossing illegally rose—from around $500

in 1993 to $2,500 in 2004.5 Border smuggling grew from

a small-scale, individual operation to encompass sophisti-

cated rings with links to organized crime and drug tra~ck-

ing.6 A Mexican study found over one hundred large-scale

smuggling rings operating in 2004.7

The real victims are people like María Eugenia Martínez,

a thirty-nine-year-old mother of eight from the indigenous

region of Huehuetenango, Guatemala. Huehuetenango was

one of the regions hardest hit by the counterinsurgency of

the 1980s in Guatemala. W hile genocide against the coun-

try’s indigenous population has five-hundred-year-old

roots, the war of the 1980s was also a manifestation of U.S.

post–World War II policies. In 1954 the United States or-

chestrated the overthrow of Guatemala’s elected govern-

ment, deeming it too soft on Communism. It put into place

a series of ferociously right-wing military regimes, which

ruled by terror until the mid-1990s.

Martínez’s hometown of El Terrero was one of the areas

the army considered to be a guerrilla stronghold, which

meant that the entire population was treated as the enemy.

Eighty percent of Huehuetenango province’s inhabitants,

primarily indigenous Mam, Chuj, and Kanjobal Maya peo-

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

168

ple, fled their homes under army attack between 1980 and

1981. Some ended up in refugee camps just across the bor-

der in Chiapas, Mexico.8 Others made it to the United States,

especially Los Angeles. By 1990, Los Angeles had 159,000

Guatemalans recorded in the census—as usual, the actual

population was probably much higher. Many of them were

women domestic workers.9

Martínez, however, came in 2003, well after the signing

of the peace accords in 1996. During the first years after the

accords thousands of refugees returned from Mexico. But

the economic devastation of the war had led to a continued

high level of out-migration, overwhelmingly to the United

States and often following links that had already been estab-

lished.

Martínez had a half-brother and cousins in a Central

American neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles. The

situation in her hometown was becoming intolerable: her

husband was abusive, and the money that she earned selling

homemade sausages in a market stall wasn’t enough to send

her younger children to high school. So she did what so

many others were doing: she crossed the border illegally,

and joined her relatives in Los Angeles. She was working at

a garment factory there when she was picked up and de-

ported a little over a year later, in June 2004.10

About a million Guatemalans were living in the United

States in 2005. Ten percent of them came from Huehuete-

nango, and over 35 percent lived in Los Angeles.11 Martí-

nez’s experience was part of a much larger story.12

Her job in Los Angeles allowed her to send home money

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

169

for her children’s education and for her older son’s wedding.

Again, she was not alone: over one-third of Guatemala’s

population received some of the $3 billion in remittances

that migrants to the United States sent home in 2005.13 De-

ported across the border and deposited in Tijuana, Martínez

wanted to get back to Los Angeles, to her job, as quickly as

possible.

Crossing the border in Tijuana was extremely di~cult,

so Martínez and several others traveled 150 miles east to-

ward Mexicali. It’s easier to cross the unguarded border in

the desert between Tijuana and Mexicali, but it means an

eight- to ten-hour hike through remote trails in punishing

heat.

Martínez’s group succeeded in getting across the border.

But after four hours of hiking in hundred-degree heat with

little water, she began to suƒer from heat exhaustion and

finally collapsed at the side of the trail. Part of the group

continued, but when their water ran out they panicked and

turned back to Mexico along a diƒerent trail. Martínez’s

sun-blackened, decomposing body was discovered by a

Border Patrol helicopter days later.14 Her story reveals the

real “problem” of immigration—a problem that few U.S. cit-

izens ever see.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

170

m y t h 1 8

C O U N T R I E S N E E D T O C O N T R O L W H O G O E S I N A N D O U T

Governments have often tried to control the size and

makeup of their populations by how they establish their bor-

ders, by expelling or exterminating groups of people within

their national borders, by controlling movement and settle-

ment, and by controlling reproduction inside their fron-

tiers. Generally, when we study how governments have done

this in the past, we are horrified.

There’s a parallel between racial thinking and economic

thinking here. One pattern is that colonizers fear losing

their racial control over those they colonize. There is talk of

race suicide, and worries that people of color are reproduc-

ing far too quickly and will overwhelm the white population.

Population control becomes a method for preserving white

dominance.

The economic pattern is that in societies divided be-

tween haves and have-nots, the haves often see eliminating

the have-nots as the best solution to inequality, rather than

redistributing the resources. As a solution to poverty, the

171

haves propose methods to make poor people stop repro-

ducing.

Because the division of the world, and of individual so-

cieties, into haves and have-nots has been so structured by

conquest and ideas of racial superiority, the racial and the

economic arguments are often two sides of the same coin.

And the solution too is the same: find ways to eradicate, and

justify the eradication of, poor people of color.

Let’s look at some examples. In the United States, Native

Americans were the original aliens who had to be expelled

from the land in order to create a white, English society here.

English migrants had no intention of assimilating into the

land they migrated to: they wanted to replace the societies

that existed there. “The tribes which occupied the countries

now constituting the Eastern States were annihilated or have

melted away to make room for the whites,” President An-

drew Jackson explained in an address to Congress in 1830.

This history justified his own Indian removal program, “the

benevolent policy of the Government, steadily pursued for

nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians

beyond the white settlements,” which he announced was

“approaching to a happy consummation.”1

African Americans constituted a diƒerent kind of alien

in white America’s midst: not potential citizens, yet nec-

essary as a labor force. So they were forced to be physically

present, while legally, they were nonpersons. Until the

1870s, that is. After the brief experiment with Reconstruc-

tion, white society embarked on a century of African Amer-

ican expulsion. Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and regulations

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

172

drove African Americans out of institutions, towns, coun-

ties, and even states.

Like African Americans, the Chinese were used for la-

bor, denied citizenship, then excluded. For Mexicans, tem-

porary worker programs and periodic waves of deportation

followed the same pattern. The incarceration of Japanese,

and people of Japanese descent, during World War II reiter-

ated the message: this is a white country, and you are not

wanted among us.

Advances in technolog y, combined with the develop-

ment of the pseudoscience of eugenics, provided another

means of population control. W hen they weren’t physically

driven out or slaughtered, people of color were the subject of

eugenics campaigns to try to curtail their reproduction. The

same “eugenical thinking” that was behind immigration re-

strictions was also behind anti-miscegenation laws aimed

at keeping the races separate, and anti-reproduction strate-

gies aimed at preventing population growth among those

considered racially inferior.

Part of the rationale for eugenics policies was that med-

ical and social advances had interfered with the process of

natural selection, which would have naturally eliminated

the inferior races in the absence of human intervention.

As geographer James A. Tyner explains, “especially pro-

nounced was a popular belief that welfare and charity

programs were counteracting the ‘bloody hand’ of evolu-

tion. Rather than succumbing to nature’s law of ‘survival of

the fittest,’ misguided philanthropy—including minimum

wages, set working hours, free public education, public

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

173

health reforms—was enabling inferior peoples to live longer

and to reproduce.”2

Madison Grant, the U.S. scientific racist thinker, wrote

in 1918 that “the most practical and hopeful method of race

improvement is through the elimination of the least desir-

able elements of the nation by depriving them of the power

to contribute to future generations.”3 His ideas were be-

hind the 1920s immigration restrictions and also provided

scholarly justification for sterilization campaigns directed

against citizens who were considered undesirable. From

Vermont to California to the Deep South to Puerto Rico,

nonwhite women were sterilized in disproportionate num-

bers by zealous doctors intent on improving the race.4

California, consistently the state with the highest rates

of involuntary sterilization, kept its law on the books from

1909 to 1979. By 1942, over 15,000 people had been steril-

ized. Mexican Americans were sterilized at a rate double

their proportion of the population, and African Americans

at four times their proportion.5

Shortly after taking Puerto Rico in 1898, U.S. o~cials

started to worry about “overpopulation” on the island. “It

was first used in policy debates to explain oƒ-island labor

contracts, where agents from U.S. business or agriculture

would oƒer transportation to places like Hawaii, Arizona, or

Georgia, in exchange for work contracts . . . By the 1930s,

however, the term ‘overpopulation’ had acquired another

meaning, one that blamed excessive sexuality and fertility

for the poverty of the island as a whole.”6

Women’s studies professor Laura Briggs explains that

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

174

“by 1932, responding to the problem of ‘overpopulation’

had become the cornerstone of federal policy in Puerto

Rico.”7 Promoters of birth control policies in Puerto Rico

believed that “it was better to prevent poor or dark-skinned

people from being born.”8 In the 1940s and ’50s, U.S. phar-

maceutical companies used the island as a giant laboratory

for contraceptive research, including early trials of the birth

control pill.9

High rates of sterilization of blacks and Native Ameri-

cans also continued into the second half of the century. In

the 1950s, sterilization, “preponderantly aimed at African

American and poor women, began to be wielded by state

courts and legislatures as a punishment for bearing illegit-

imate children or as extortion to ensure ongoing receipt of

family assistance.”10 Sterilization rates rose again, especially

after the War on Poverty in the 1960s introduced federally

funded sterilizations through Medicaid and the O~ce of

Economic Opportunity, leading to what one analyst called

“widespread sterilization abuse” during the 1960s and ’70s.

Between 1960 and 1974 over 100,000 sterilizations were

carried out annually.11

The Indian Health Service began providing family plan-

ning services in 1965. Protests and federal investigations

revealed that regulations requiring consent were routinely

violated. In an article in American Indian Quarterly, Ph.D. student Jane Lawrence cited a study by the Health Research

Group in Washington, D.C., that found that “the majority of

physicians were white, Euro-American males who believed

that they were helping society by limiting the number of

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

175

births in low-income, minority families. They assumed that

they were enabling the government to cut funding for Med-

icaid and welfare programs while lessening their own per-

sonal tax burden to support the programs.”12 Between 25

percent and 50 percent of Native American women were

sterilized in the 1970s. A study by a Native American physi-

cian concluded that Indian women often agreed to steriliza-

tion because they were told that otherwise they would lose

their children or their welfare benefits.13

In spite of a national outcry when Dr. Helen Rodríguez-

Trías discovered rates of sterilization approaching 40 per-

cent in Puerto Rico in 1965—prompting federal legislation

to restrict involuntary or coerced sterilizations—federally

funded sterilization programs continued to target women of

color. Over 40 percent of Puerto Rican women were still get-

ting sterilized in the 1980s.14 Studies in the 1970s and 1990s

showed that black women had double the sterilization rate

of white women.15 Former Reagan administration o~cial

William J. Bennett revealed that “eugenical thinking” has

not completely disappeared from our culture with his noto-

rious comment that “you could abort every black baby in this

country, and your crime rate would go down.”16

Of course the United States is not the only country to

have used exclusionary citizenship, expulsions, racial pu-

rification campaigns, sterilizations, and eugenics to try to

create an ethnically homogenous nation. Jews, the quintes-

sential “others” in the European nation-states in which they

lived, were subject to periodic expulsions and extermina-

tions there. They then reversed the balance in Palestine,

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

176

where they drove out Palestinian inhabitants and created

laws allowing Jews who had never set foot there to “return,”

while Palestinians became aliens forbidden to return to

their homes in 1948 and again in 1967.

Immigration restrictions against people of color in the

United States have historically responded to the same logic

as other forms of population control. Today’s immigration

restrictions do not explicitly mention race, but they still

apply, overwhelmingly, to people of color. And they still re-

spond to the idea that governments should mandate the

composition of the populations within their territories, and

ensure that socially dominant groups remain numerically

dominant.

An interesting twist on this logic in the United States

has been the move to take children away from sectors of the

population being eliminated and have them raised by the

dominant sectors. The Native American boarding school

program starting in the late 1800s was one early example of

a dominant society trying to culturally and racially remake

the population by removing children from their families.

Governments ranging from Franco’s Spain in the 1940s

to the dictatorships of Argentina in the 1970s and El Sal-

vador in the 1980s engaged in programs of abducting chil-

dren of supposed leftists and placing them for adoption.17 In

the words of women’s studies professor Laura Briggs,

Raising the “orphans” of colonized people is a very

familiar practice. From the nineteenth century French

orphanages in Indochina to U.S. children’s homes in

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

177

Puerto Rico in the early years of the twentieth, manag-

ing children and raising youth to belong to a diƒerent

culture from that of their ancestors has a history.

Indeed the white settler colonies of the British

empire—the United States, Canada, Australia—made

acculturating native children in boarding schools as

indispensable a part of their policies toward indige-

nous people as war and reservations.18

The American Association of Indian Aƒairs (A AIA)

noted in the 1960s that an astonishing one in four Na-

tive American children in some states had been removed

from parental care into adoptive, foster, or institutional

homes. In the ’60s and ’70s, Native American and Afri-

can American groups including the A AIA and the National

Association of Black Social Workers protested the ongoing

state-mandated removal of children from these communi-

ties and their placement with white families.19

The current growth in international adoptions illumi-

nates the continuing ironies in U.S. immigration policies.

Most international adoptions are carried out by white,

middle-class families from countries whose inhabitants

face severe restrictions in trying to come to the United

States. For the children entering white families, however,

law and practice smooth the way. In the summer of 2006,

as Israeli bombs systematically flattened the country of

Lebanon, Lebanese desperate to escape to safety found the

doors of the so-called liberal democracies slammed in their

faces. Calling to mind what Paul Farmer had said about Haiti

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

178

in the early 1990s, the country was coming to resemble a

burning building with no exits. In the midst of it all, the

Boston Globe reported cheerily that “Logan Edward Maroon Gabriel is home, finally.” A Salem, New Hampshire, woman

was waiting in Beirut to complete the adoption of the baby

when the invasion unfolded. In contrast to the hundreds of

thousands of Lebanese who had no way out, this baby’s pa-

pers were quickly put in order, and the beaming family pic-

tured prominently in the newspaper as they were welcomed

by “100 cheering relatives and friends.”20

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

179

m y t h 1 9

W E N E E D T O P R O T E C T O U R B O R D E R S T O P R E V E N T C R I M I N A L S A N D T E R R O R I S T S F R O M E N T E R I N G T H E C O U N T R Y

The potential that a citizen will commit a crime or even a ter-

rorist act is just as real as the potential that an immigrant

will. No country has a monopoly on violent lawbreakers, and

in no country are they nonexistent. The rule of law, and the

lawful prosecution of those who commit crimes, makes a lot

more sense than closing borders as a way to reduce crimi-

nality.

Terrorist acts in the United States have been committed

by citizens and by immigrants, and for causes related to do-

mestic as well as international issues. In 2000, the FBI re-

ported no incidents of international terrorism carried out

inside the United States and eight incidents of domestic ter-

rorism, all carried out by U.S. citizens belonging to animal

rights groups or environmental groups. In 2001, there were

twelve incidents of domestic terrorism, one (the September

11 attacks) of international terrorism, and one (the anthrax-

laced-letter incidents) of unknown origins. Environmental

and animal rights groups (in this case the Earth Liberation

180

Front and the Animal Liberation Front) were again the ap-

parent perpetrators of several of the twelve domestic inci-

dents, joined in 2001 by two carried out by anti-abortion

activists.1

Those involved in the 9/11 attacks, which in scale

dwarfed the other attacks taking place in the United States,

were not citizens. However, all but four were legally in the

country at the time of the attacks, having entered on tourist

or student visas. A study of forty-eight “militant Islamic

terrorists” who committed crimes in the United States,

by the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies,

found that thirty-six of them were in the country legally at

the time they committed crimes, and seventeen were either

permanent residents or naturalized citizens. Those who

were not permanent residents had received visas—mostly

tourist visas—to come to the country, and most of them had

not violated the terms of their visas.2 Not even the highest

fence or the most militarized border in the world would have

kept them out. Their crimes were crimes of violence, not

crimes of immigration.

It’s true that there have been in the past, and may be in

the future, individuals working with international terrorist

organizations who want to enter the United States. However,

these are actually among the least likely people to risk arrest and death trying to cross the border illegally. It’s much more

likely that members of an international organization like

Al-Qaeda will, like the September 11 perpetrators, use per-

fectly legal channels to get into the United States.

Does this mean that we need to do better, or diƒerent,

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

181

screening of those who want to enter the United States by

legal means? Possibly. But the idea that screening people

who cross borders is an eƒective way to deter terrorist at-

tacks is also a kind of a mirage. Just as U.S. planes cross in-

ternational borders to drop bombs, usually without going

through any kind of immigration control process, so could

the United States become the victim of international attack,

regardless of its border control policies. The planes that flew

into the twin towers on September 11 happened to take oƒ

in Boston . . . But they could just as well have taken oƒ from

some other country. Hijackers, like invaders, have proven

quite able to cross borders and kill people without permis-

sion. And criminals can be born any where, including inside

the United States. There is just no logical relationship be-

tween border security and the prevention of terrorism.

Is there, then, nothing that can be done to prevent future

terrorist attacks? First, those of us who live in the United

States should remember that the number of civilians killed

by U.S. military attacks on other countries has far, far ex-

ceeded the number of U.S. civilians killed by attacks on the

United States, or against U.S. citizens elsewhere. So curbing

U.S. military aggression would probably be the most eƒec-

tive way to achieve a global reduction in attacks on unarmed

civilians.

As far as preventing future attacks against U.S. targets, a

combination of two approaches seems most likely to achieve

that result. On one hand, seeking to reduce global tensions,

and in particular U.S. unilateralism and aggression, could

substantially reduce anti-Americanism in other countries.

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

182

Second, eƒective police and investigative work—abiding by

international law, international agreements, and the Ge-

neva Conventions—at least oƒers the possibility of working

toward a world ruled by law, in which criminals are prose-

cuted under the rule of law for the crimes they commit, and

those not accused of any crime are spared the fate of becom-

ing collateral damage.

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

183

m y t h 2 0

I F P E O P L E B R E A K O U R L AW S B Y I M M I G R AT I N G I L L E G A L LY, T H E Y A R E C R I M I N A L S A N D S H O U L D B E D E P O R T E D

As we’ve seen, the history of our country has included many

laws that today look unjust and discriminatory. The original

laws of this country upheld slavery and limited citizenship

to white men. Later laws justified lynching and segregation.

W hen we look back at history, we generally honor the peo-

ple who broke those laws. Rosa Parks broke the law when

she refused to move to the back of the bus. Harriet Tubman

broke the law when she fled slavery and helped to create the

Underground Railroad.

Immigration laws are very diƒerent from the laws that

we usually have in mind when we talk about people breaking

the law. “Breaking the law” conjures up images of assaults,

thefts, murders—violations of laws that were created to pro-

tect people from harm.

Like other discriminatory legislation in our country’s

history, immigration laws define and diƒerentiate legal sta-

tus on the basis of arbitrary attributes. Immigration laws cre-

ate unequal rights. People who break immigration laws don’t

184

cause harm or even potential harm (unlike, for example,

drunk driving, which creates the potential for harm even if

no accident occurs). Rather, people who break immigration

laws do things that are perfectly legal for others, but denied

to them—like cross a border or, even more commonly, sim-

ply exist.

Some undocumented immigrants crossed the border

“illegally,” but many in fact obtained legal permission to

cross the border and entered the country on visas that al-

lowed them to stay temporarily. W hen the visa expired, they

became “illegal” overnight.

Some citizens wonder why immigrants don’t simply “fol-

low the rules” and do the appropriate paperwork, or renew

their visas, or become citizens, thus becoming “legal.” The

reason they don’t is the same as the reason that Rosa Parks

didn’t sit “legally” in the front of the bus, or Harriet Tubman

didn’t “legally” emancipate herself from slavery: because

the law was designed not to allow certain groups of people to have the rights that others enjoy.

“If I had the resources and the connections to apply to

come legally,” one undocumented Mexican immigrant ex-

plained, “I wouldn’t need to leave Mexico to work in this

country.” Or, in the words of Pew Hispanic Center demogra-

pher Jeƒrey Passel, “For most Mexicans, there is no line to

get in.”1

For would-be immigrants from the Philippines, for ex-

ample, the U.S. government was, as of mid-2006, granting

visas to people who applied as long ago as 1984. The way the

preference system works, if a Filipino has no immediate

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

185

family in the United States, he or she basically can’t even get

in line to wait for a visa. For people in the “fourth prefer-

ence” category—brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens—visas

were just being made available for those who applied in

1984. If you fell into the “first preference”—unmarried chil-

dren of U.S. citizens, including minor children—Immigra-

tion Services was, in 2006, allocating visas to those who

applied in 1992.2

W hat happened to an eighty-one-year-old Haitian Bap-

tist pastor, Joseph Dantica, can help to illustrate the strange

netherworld dividing “legal” from “illegal” immigrants.

Dantica held a valid multiple-entry visa to the United States.

In October 2004, armed Haitian gangs attacked his home

and his church in a poor neighborhood of Port-au-Prince,

threatening to kill him if he did not give them money they

demanded. After going into hiding for several days, Dantica

used his visa to get on a flight to the United States, where sev-

eral of his family members lived.

W hen he went through immigration in Miami, his visa

was approved and stamped for entry. Then the immigration

o~cial asked him how long he intended to stay in the United

States. W hen he said that he was planning to ask for politi-

cal asylum, fearing that he’d be killed if he returned to Haiti,

he was arrested.

The law permitted his entrance into the United States on

a tourist visa. The law also permitted him to ask for asylum

in the United States. But the law also said that he would

be arrested for doing these things. Haitians who request

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

186

asylum from inside the United States are considered guilty

until proven innocent.

In Dantica’s case, immigration o~cials confiscated his

medications when they jailed him, and after four days he

died in the Krome Detention Center. Family members in

the United States were denied the right to see him as he lay

dying.3

Technically, the law authorized Dantica’s arrest. If he had

been Cuban, instead of Haitian, he would not have been ar-

rested. Under the 1995 “wet foot, dry foot” policy, Cubans

are automatically eligible for asylum if they set foot on U.S.

territory. That’s why author Tom Miller, commenting on

the immigrants’ rights demonstrations in 2006, suggested

that “what they really want is to be treated like Cubans . . .

[Cubans] don’t need to wade the Rio Grande or walk the

Sonoran Desert—they can simply stroll up to any port of

entry along the two-thousand-mile border and say to the

U.S. immigration inspector, ‘Soy cubana. ¿me permite en-

trar?’ I’m Cuban, mind if I come in? And the answer is al-

most always, ‘come on in!’ ”4

Dantica is only one out of tens of thousands of immi-

grants each year who commit a victimless crime that is ille-

gal because of who they are, not because of what they did.

Mexicans cross the border “illegally” because they are not

allowed to cross the border legally. The law discriminates by

making it illegal for some people to do what is perfectly legal

for others.

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

187

m y t h 2 1

T H E P R O B L E M S T H I S B O O K R A I S E S A R E S O H U G E T H AT T H E R E ’ S N O T H I N G W E C A N D O A B O U T T H E M

In this book I’ve tried to show that immigration is part of an

interconnected global system that has been shaped by his-

tory and economics. People have been moving around the

earth ever since they stood upright millions of years ago. Na-

tional borders, and attempts to govern the flows of migra-

tion from above, are only a few hundred years old.

Today’s immigration is structured by contemporary

relationships among countries and regions, and by their

history of economic inequality. Unequal economic rela-

tionships should be changed—not because they lead to mi-

gration, but because they lead to human suƒering and an

unsustainable world. High levels of migration are a symp-

tom of a global economic system that privileges the few at the

expense of the many. It could be called capitalism, it could

be called neoliberalism, it could be called globalization, it

could be called neocolonialism. As long as it keeps resources

unequally distributed in the world, you’re going to have peo-

ple escaping the regions that are deliberately kept poor and

188

violent and seeking freedom in the places where the world’s

resources have been concentrated: in the countries that

have controlled, and been the beneficiaries of, the global

economic system that took shape after 1492.

If our goal is to slow migration, then the best way to do so

is to work for a more equitable global system. But slowing

migration is an odd goal, if the real problem is global in-

equality. Fences and borders might be touted as a curb on

migration, but in fact they serve to harden global inequality.

Of course global inequality can’t be transformed over-

night. And immigration policy is only one piece of a much

larger system. It may seem overwhelming to try to imagine

how to get from our current state to a more just and egalitar-

ian world.

Still, there are certainly concrete steps that we could take

to make our immigration policy more humane. A more hu-

mane immigration policy would reduce human suƒering by

a significant, if limited, amount. It would not, in and of it-

self, make much diƒerence in the way the world is struc-

tured. If changes in immigration policy were accompanied

by similar small steps to ameliorate glaring injustices in

other areas, though, we might actually be on our way to cre-

ating a better world.

In a more equal world, border issues would cease to hold

the importance that they do. Consider the example of the

European Union. Given the relatively equal distribution of

resources, power, and opportunity among the countries of

Europe, the virtual elimination of borders among them was

not an earth-shattering event. Another example of rela-

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

189

tively open borders is that which exists among the various

states in the United States. Residents of Massachusetts can

travel freely to Connecticut, through an entirely unpoliced

border. Still, while there they must obey Connecticut’s speed

limit, tax, and seat belt laws. It’s entirely possible for open

borders to coexist with orderly administration and a state

of law.

Our current immigration policy is so overloaded with in-

human, and inhumane, provisions that improving it would

be first and foremost an exercise in eliminating its most

baleful characteristics. We could start by rolling back the

punitive and discriminatory changes that have been made in

the last several decades, especially in the 1996 Illegal Immi-

gration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.1 Revok-

ing some of the most draconian elements of that law would

be a logical first step in a process aimed at eventually guar-

anteeing full equality before the law for immigrants.

Another step forward would be to reverse the militariza-

tion of the border that began with Operation Gatekeeper in

1993. The decriminalization of border crossing would en-

courage almost all would-be immigrants to pass through es-

tablished inspection stations, just as, for example, the vast

majority of U.S. citizens do when they travel to Mexico or

Canada. Would-be immigrants would no longer have to turn

to smugglers and risky desert crossings. Those in the United

States could return home freely. Families could be reunited.

Extending full legal rights to all immigrants would go

far toward eliminating the economic exploitation of im-

migrant workers. Some immigrants—just as some citizens

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

190

do—would probably still work under the table. But employ-

ers would no longer be able to use the threat of deportation,

and workers would no longer be subject to the constant fear

of discovery. Their ability to stand up for their rights, and to

unionize, would be greatly enhanced. These first steps would

put us on the road to a humane immigration policy.

Would these steps lead to a huge influx in immigration?

It’s hard to tell, but most of the signs suggest that they would

not. The increasingly punitive, dangerous, and exploitative

policies of the past two decades have not led to any decrease

in immigration—just the opposite. Immigration has steadily

increased as anti-immigrant policies have become harsher.

As I’ve tried to show in this book, the main causes of immi-

gration are structural, economic, and historical, and they

have to do with global relationships and global inequality.

Taking steps to humanize immigration policy would not,

of course, eliminate the global and domestic economic in-

equalities that are the underlying cause of migration. But

there are also small steps we could conceive of taking toward

creating a more equal society, and a more equal world. W hile

these steps would inevitably lead to a slowing of migration,

that’s not the main reason we should follow them. We should

work for a more just world for moral, ethical, and humani-

tarian reasons. Migration would be reduced because poor

people’s lives and livelihoods would become more sustain-

able—which is a worthy end on its own.

Domestically, we could think about reweaving and

strengthening the social safety net that has been so frayed

since the 1970s. Working for national health care and uni-

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

191

versal preschool might be a place to start. Or restructuring

the tax system so that corporations and the super-rich pay

their fair share. Or enforcing corporate accountability to-

ward workers and communities. We could work toward a

thirty-hour work week and full employment.

Globally, we could forgive Third World debt and create

a system of democratic oversight for U.S. corporations

operating abroad. We could respect the sovereignty of gov-

ernments like Cuba’s, Venezuela’s, and Bolivia’s, which are

experimenting with diƒerent economic models. We could

eliminate military “aid” that is used primarily, in Latin

America, to repress domestic movements for social change.

Trying to build a new world of more just relationships is

a worthy goal in and of itself, regardless of the eƒect it might

have on migration. But a more just world will, inevitably,

also lead to a drop in migration. Some migrants leave their

homelands for fun, adventure, or curiosity. The vast major-

ity, though, leave because they have no alternative. They

leave their homes, their families, and their loved ones as a

last resort.

More of the same kinds of foreign policies that have

brought the world to its present state will not change the

structures of global inequality. More invasions, more for-

eign domination, more free trade, and more foreign invest-

ment are not the answer. A diƒerent kind of global system

would necessarily entail a more just distribution of the

world’s resources. It would mean that the industrialized

countries—led by the United States, by far the world’s largest

consumer of resources—would have to lower their levels of

“ t h e y t a k e o u r j o b s ! ”

192

consumption, so that there would be something left for the

rest of the world.

Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano wrote in 1992:

The average American consumes as much as 50

Haitians . . . W hat would happen if the fifty Haitians

consumed as many cars, as many televisions, as many

refrigerators or as many luxury goods as the one Amer-

ican? Nothing. Nothing would ever happen again.

We would have to change planets. Ours, which is

already close to catastrophe, couldn’t take it.

The precarious equilibrium of the world depends

on the perpetuation of injustice. So that some can

consume more, people must continue to consume less.

To keep people in their place, the system produces

armaments. Incapable of fighting poverty, the system

fights the poor.2

Fifteen years after Galeano wrote these words, today’s

war on immigrants continues the fight against the poor.

t h e d e b a t e a t t h e t u r n o f t h e m i l l e n n i u m

193

E P I L O G U E

As I was finishing my work on this book, I had the oppor-

tunity to travel to a remote region of Colombia and see

firsthand, from the other side, some of the global economic

changes that have contributed to the surge in immigration

in recent decades—and will continue to do so in the future.

Colombia’s Guajira peninsula is one of the poorest and

most isolated regions of the country. Except for a few tour-

ist spots along the coast, few outsiders or even Colombians

travel there. Because it borders Venezuela and abuts the

Caribbean Sea, it has maintained a small-scale local econ-

omy of trade and smuggling for centuries—everything from

precious metals to cigarettes, to illegal drugs, to gasoline.

The population in the region is made up of indigenous

Way uu people—the largest indigenous group in Colombia—

and small Afro-Colombian and mestizo communities. The

Way uu trace their presence in the peninsula to before the

Spanish conquest. The Afro-Colombian communities’ oral

histories recount that they descend from enslaved Africans

who rebelled and freed themselves on a ship bound for the

Caribbean. They took over the ship and landed on the Gua-

jira, making their way inland, and founded the original four

communities there.

194

Public services are scarce to nonexistent. In the north-

ern desert region, the mostly Way uu inhabitants are semi-

nomadic herders. Organized in matrilineal clans, they travel

with their herds to where there is water. Many of the women

are monolingual in the Way uu language, though many men

also speak Spanish. In the southern part of the peninsula,

both Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities found

fertile farmlands and depended on the Ranchería River that

runs down the peninsula as a source of water.

Economic development came crashing into the Guajira

in the early 1980s in the form of what soon became the

world’s largest open-pit coal mine. The U.S.-based Exxon

Corporation entered into a joint venture with the Colom-

bian government to explore and exploit the mine, which was

later privatized and sold to a consortium of some of the

world’s largest mining multinationals: BHP Billiton, Glen-

core, and Anglo-American.

The mine undeniably brought economic development to

the region. But it was exactly the kind of distorted develop-

ment that destroys traditional farming communities and

sets the stage for migration.

The mine gobbled up formerly productive lands and

turned them into a giant hole in the ground, thirty-five

miles long and five miles wide. It churned up a dust that

blankets and smothers the region for miles around the mine

itself. It fouled the Ranchería River, leaving the small com-

munities with no water source.

“We have no source of work to support our families,”

wrote members of the indigenous community of Tamaquito

e p i l o g u e

195

in the summer of 2006. “We don’t even have any income

with which to buy our women the materials they need for

their weavings . . . We are getting sick because of the con-

tamination of the Cerrejón mine, and we have no land left

to cultivate. We also cannot raise animals because they die.

W hen we do plant something, we cannot harvest it because

the coal dust kills it.”

After being subject to the same kinds of conditions for

years, the Afro-Colombian community of Tabaco was razed

in the summer of 2001 as the mine continued its inexor-

able expansion. “I want to say a little about how we lived in

Tabaco,” a former resident told our visiting delegation five

years later. “Life was rich, we shared, no one suƒered be-

cause we shared what we had. There was a river near the

town. We had land. We walked freely all over the territory.

The last nine years we have had no land to work, we are dis-

placed, we have no lodging. I had a farm, I had animals, but

they ran me oƒ, so I lost everything . . . I raised my twelve

children there. W hen we lost my land I wasn’t able to con-

tinue educating my children. I still own a small piece of land

but it is in the middle of the company’s land and we can’t even

get to it.”

For the past five hundred years the global trend, acceler-

ating in the past fifty years or so, has been one of rural–

urban migration. Peasant farmers have historically been

tenaciously attached to their land. The voices of the people

of Tamaquito and Tabaco echo the voices of millions of peo-

ple displaced from their small farms over the centuries.

e p i l o g u e

196

Enormous amounts of violence and coercion, and human

suƒering, were necessary to separate Africans from their

lands and bring them to the Americas as forced laborers, to

separate indigenous communities in the Americas from

their lands to make the lands available for plantations and

mines.

Once the millennial connection that ties peasants to

their lands is broken, it is almost impossible to restore.

Once their children leave the land to go to the cities, almost

nothing could convince them to return to a life of farming.

It’s a painful, heartbreaking, and almost irreversible

process. It’s already happened in much of the world: 48 per-

cent of the world’s population lived in urban areas in 2003,

and the proportion is expected to exceed 50 percent in 2007,

for the first time in human history.1

Visiting the Guajira gave me an unmatchable firsthand

view of the process, just at the moment of dispossession. The

small farming communities in the area around the mine

were barely hanging on. Their farmlands had been taken

over by the mine, their water source contaminated, the air

was thick with dust, their animals were dying and their chil-

dren were coughing constantly. But the people were ada-

mant. “I’m a farmer. That’s all I know how to do. We want

land.” This was their unending refrain.

“W hy don’t they just leave?” asked a U.S. embassy rep-

resentative when we met with him after our visit to the Gua-

jira and described the unbearable situation of the villagers

there. W hy, indeed? W here would they go? To join the two

e p i l o g u e

197

to three million other displaced people in Colombia in the

shantytowns surrounding the major urban areas? To forage

in the garbage dumps? To the United States?

W hat seemed so dramatic was catching these communi-

ties in a historical moment in which they still were utterly

committed to maintaining their communal, agricultural

lives: lives that were being undermined and destroyed by

modernization.

If one goal of a humane migration policy is to reduce

human suƒering, then the needs and desires of peasant

communities around the world that are struggling to main-

tain their traditional lifestyles and cultures should be cen-

tral. Migration may not be clearly good or bad in and of itself,

but the destruction of communities and cultures around the

world is indisputably harmful to the people who live in them.

e p i l o g u e

198

T I M E L I N E

1790 First naturalization law passed, restricting natural- ization to “free white persons.”1

1798 Alien and Sedition Acts provide for deportation of “dangerous” aliens.

1803 Louisiana Purchase doubles the size of U.S. terri- tory, incorporating new populations.

1808 Importation of slaves prohibited. 1819 First federal immigration legislation requires

reporting of all entries.

1830 Indian Removal Act leads to deportation of 100,000 Native Americans to west of the

Mississippi.

1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo expands the borders of the United States to the Pacific. Mexican resi-

dents given the option of declaring U.S. or Mexi-

can citizenship.

1855 Immigrant women granted citizenship automati- cally upon marriage to a citizen, or upon an

immigrant husband’s naturalization.

1857 Dred Scott decision mandates that African Ameri- cans cannot be citizens.

199

1864 Contract Labor Law permits recruitment of foreign workers.

1868 Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to African Americans born in the U.S.

1870 Naturalization Act allows “white persons and persons of African descent” to naturalize.

1875 Convicts and prostitutes prohibited from entering country.

1882 Chinese Exclusion Act prohibits entry of Chinese for ten years.

Head tax of fifty cents imposed on immigrants.

Long-distance and seasonal Mexican migration

grows with Chinese exclusion.

1885 Contract Labor Law prohibits entry by sea of work- ers recruited abroad (i.e., continues to allow

recruitment of Mexican contract workers).

1891 Bureau of Immigration established under the Trea- sury Department to oversee and enforce federal

immigration law.

Steamship companies required to return immi-

grants who fall into excluded categories to their

place of origin.

1892 Ellis Island opened to screen incoming immigrants arriving from Europe.

1898 United States takes Puerto Rico, Guam, Philip- pines, and Hawaii as “territories.” Residents are

not granted citizenship, but as “nationals” they

can enter the continental U.S.

1902 Chinese Exclusion Act renewed indefinitely.

t i m e l i n e

200

1903 Anarchists, epileptics, polygamists, and beggars ruled inadmissible.

Bureau of Immigration transferred to the Depart-

ment of Commerce and Labor.

1906 Knowledge of English required for naturalization. Bureau of Immigration becomes Bureau of Immi-

gration and Naturalization (the two are split in

1913 and reunited in 1933 under the Department

of Labor as the Immigration and Naturalization

Service).

First implementation of inspections at the Mexi-

can border, primarily aimed at excluding Chinese

entering through Mexico.

1907 Gentleman’s Agreement with Japan restricts Japanese immigration.

Head tax is raised.

People with physical or mental defects, tuberculo-

sis, and children unaccompanied by a parent

are excluded.

Women lose citizenship upon marrying a

noncitizen.

1917 Asiatic barred zone prohibits all immigration from Asia.

Literacy requirement established for immigrants

from Europe.

Temporary guest-worker program exempts Mexi-

cans from literacy requirement and head tax.

Puerto Ricans granted citizenship.

1918 Passport Act requires o~cial documentation for

t i m e l i n e

201

entry into the United States. Border Crossing

Cards issued for Canadians and Mexicans.

1921 Quota Act limits European immigrants to 3 percent of each European nationality present in the

U.S. in 1910. Visa issued in home country now

required for entry. Non-Europeans are not

included in the act: Asians are still barred,

immigrants from the Western Hemisphere

are allowed unlimited entry, and Africans are

ignored.

1922 Mexican guest-worker program abolished. Women’s citizenship separated from that of their

husbands (except if a woman marries an alien

who is racially ineligible for citizenship, in which

case she loses her citizenship).

1924 Quota Act revised to 2 percent of each nationality based on numbers in U.S in 1890. Still applies

only to Europeans.

Border Patrol created.

Native Americans born in the United States

granted citizenship (but still not allowed

to naturalize).

1929 1924 Quota Act made permanent. 1930 Deportation of millions of Mexicans begins. 1934 Philippine Independence Act turns the Philip-

pines into a commonwealth; Filipinos are no

longer “nationals”; Philippines granted an

immigration quota of 50.

1940 Alien Registration Act/Smith Act. Provides penal-

t i m e l i n e

202

ties, including deportation of noncitizens, for

subversive activities. Requires fingerprinting

and registration of all aliens.

“Descendants of races indigenous to the Western

Hemisphere” allowed to naturalize.

1941 Internment of “enemy aliens” (primarily Japanese) begins. 120,000 Japanese Americans

incarcerated by 1945.

1942 Bracero Program established for contracting of temporary agricultural workers from

Mexico.

1943 Chinese Exclusion Law repealed, and Chinese allowed to become naturalized citizens. China

granted a quota of 105.

British West Indies program established for

importation of temporary agricultural workers

from the BWI to eleven eastern states (especially

Florida).

1945 War Brides Act allows immigration of foreign women married to members of the U.S. armed

forces.

1946 Filipinos and (Asian) Indians allowed to naturalize (other Asians, including Koreans, Japanese, and

Southeast Asians, still ineligible for citizenship).

Philippines granted independence, and a quota of

100. India also given quota of 100.

1947 Operation Bootstrap in Puerto Rico sets the stage for the “great migration” of the 1950s.

Newly formed Pakistan granted quota of 100.

t i m e l i n e

203

1948 Displaced Persons Act permits 205,000 European war refugees to enter over two years.

Exchange Visitor Program brings Filipina nurses to

study in the United States

1949 CIA created and granted a quota of 100 to bring in aliens useful to “the national mission” without

regard to admissibility.2

1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (McCarran- Walter Act) technically eliminates race as a bar

to immigration or citizenship. Asiatic barred

zone abolished. Japan’s quota set at 185 annually.

China’s remains at 105; other Asian countries

given 100. Colonial subjects not eligible for

quotas (e.g., black West Indians cannot enter

under Britain’s quota even though they are

British citizens).

H-2 temporary visa establishes a large but gener-

ally ignored guest-worker program.

Attorney general is authorized to “parole” immi-

grants over quota for reasons of “public interest.”

This provision will be used for Hungarians

fleeing the Soviet invasion in 1956, for 15,000

Chinese fleeing China’s 1949 Communist revo-

lution, and for 145,000 Cubans fleeing the 1959

revolution there, as well as 400,000 Southeast

Asian refugees between 1975 and 1980.

Prohibition on “subversives” (and specifically

Communists, anarchists, and homosexuals)

t i m e l i n e

204

means many foreign intellectuals cannot travel

to United States.

1953 Refugee Relief Act expands Displaced Persons Act of 1948 to allow 200,000 more entrants above

quotas. “Refugee” defined as a person fleeing a

Communist country or the Middle East. Asians

allowed as refugees for the first time.

1954 “Operation Wetback” deports one million undocu- mented Mexicans.

Numbers entering under the Bracero program

increase from 200,000 a year prior to Operation

Wetback to 450,000 a year by the end of the

1950s.

1957 Refugee admissions no longer subject to quota system.

1959 Cuban Revolution; U.S. attorney general grants Cuban immigrants widespread parole to enter

the United States as refugees.

Hawaii becomes a state, significantly increasing

“Asian” population of U.S.

1962 Cuban Refugee Program provides financial assis- tance to Cuban entrants.

1964 Bracero program abolished. 1965 Hart-Celler Act establishes a uniform quota of

20,000 per country for countries outside the

Western Hemisphere and a ceiling of 120,000

for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere.

Family reunification, job skills, and refugee sta-

t i m e l i n e

205

tus are privileged. Immediate family members

exempted from quota. Provisions made for

17,400 refugees per year.

H-2 temporary worker program continued.

Voting Rights Act strengthens citizenship for

African Americans.

1966 Cuban Adjustment Act oƒers Cubans automatic refugee and legal permanent residence status,

chargeable to the Western Hemisphere quota.

1975 Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act provides resettlement assistance for refugees

from Cambodia and Vietnam (Laos added in

1976).

1976 Uniform quota of 20,000 applied to Western Hemisphere countries (Cuban refugees not

charged to quota system).

1977 Indochinese refugees granted permanent resident status.

1978 Eastern and Western Hemisphere quotas com- bined to allow 290,000 global limit.

1980 Refugee Act brings U.S. law into compliance with UN Refugee Convention (which the U.S. signed

in 1968). Allows entrance to 50,000 refugees

a year outside of the quota system. Defines

refugees as persons who have a “well-founded

fear of persecution” based on “race, religion,

nationality, membership in a particular social

group, or political opinion.” Establishes federal

t i m e l i n e

206

programs for resettlement. Lowers global (non-

refugee) quota to 270,000 a year.

Registered nurses granted special access to perma-

nent legal status.

1981 Immigrants who are not legal permanent residents denied access to most federal aid programs.

1982 Operation Jobs—INS raids workplaces, arrests 5,000.

1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) allows undocumented immigrants who can prove

continued presence in the country since 1982

and fulfill other requirements to apply for legal-

ization—1.7 million apply. SAW (Special Agricul-

tural Workers) provision allows legalization for

those engaged in temporary agricultural work

in 1985 and 1986. Nearly 1 million approved.

IRCA imposes employer sanctions requiring

employers to verify immigration status of

workers hired.

H-2 temporary worker program split between

H-2A (agricultural) and H-2B (nonagricultural)

workers.

1990 Global cap on immigration increased to 675,000 a year, including 480,000 family-sponsored,

140,000 employment-based, and 55,000 “diver-

sity immigrants” from low-sending countries,

especially Ireland.

American Baptist Church v. Thornburgh lawsuit set-

t i m e l i n e

207

tlement allows Guatemalans and Salvadorans to

remain in the country and work while asylum

cases are reevaluated.

1994 Operation Gatekeeper tries to close San Diego crossing points with fencing, stadium lights,

and greatly increased border patrol presence.

Migrant crossings start to shift eastward to the

Arizona desert.

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAF TA)

increases economic integration between United

States and Mexico.

1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act bars legal permanent resi-

dents from most federal aid programs (food

stamps, Medicaid) unless they have lived in the

U.S. for five years, and allows states to create

further restrictions.

Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant

Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) greatly increases

funding for Border Patrol and detention of

aliens; increases penalties for unlawful entry

and facilitates deportation; requires proof of

citizenship for federal public benefits; requires

educational institutions to provide INS with

information on foreign students. Cubans

exempted from many of the provisions.

1997 Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) allows Nicaraguans and

t i m e l i n e

208

Cubans easier access to legal permanent resident

status.

2001 Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and

Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act pro-

hibits entry of people associated with organiza-

tions or governments identified as supporting

terrorism.

2002 Homeland Security Act replaces the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) with the newly

created U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Ser-

vices (USCIS) under the Department of Home-

land Security.

t i m e l i n e

209

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

I’m grateful to the wonderful people who read and oƒered

comments on the manuscript for this book at various

stages of its progress: Gene Bell-Villada, David Caplan,

Diane Chomsky, Rick Dionne, Ana Echevarría-Morales,

Guillermo Fernández-Ampié, Julie Greene, Knut Lang-

setmo, Katrina Sealey, Steve Stri‰er, Amanda Warnock,

and the students in HIS 725, Latinos in the United States,

in the fall of 2006.

Many thanks to Shuya Ohno at MIRA (Massachusetts

Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition) for connecting

me to Gayatri Patnaik, who really deserves much of the credit

for this book coming into existence at all; she and her col-

leagues at Beacon Press have all been a pleasure to work

with.

210

N O T E S

i n t r o d u c t i o n

1. James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 146, 148.

2. Jeƒrey S. Passel, “The Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized

Migrant Population in the U.S.,” Pew Hispanic Center, March 7,

2006, http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/61.pdf; Steven A. Ca-

marota, “Immigrants at Mid-Decade: A Snapshot of America’s

Foreign-Born Population in 2005,” Center for Immigration Stud-

ies, December 2005, w w w.cis.org/articles/2005/ back1405.html.

3. Nolan Malone, Kaali Baluja, Joseph M. Costanzo, and Cynthia J.

Davis, “The Foreign-Born Population, 2000,” Census 2000 brief

issued December 2003, w w w.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-

34.pdf.

4. Jeƒrey S. Passel and Robert Suro, “Rise, Peak and Decline: Trends

in U.S. Immigration 1992–2004,” Pew Hispanic Center, Septem-

ber 27, 2005, http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/53.pdf.

5. Immigration slowed in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, but started to

climb again, slowly, in the 1950s and ’60s, and more rapidly in

the 1970s and ’80s. (Even though far fewer immigrants arrived

in the 1920s than in previous decades, the numbers of immigrants

arriving exceeded the numbers of foreign-born people who died,

making 1930 the peak year.) The low point, percentage-wise, in

foreign-born population was 1970, at 4.7 percent, or 9.6 million

people. Numbers and percentage of the foreign born then rose, to

6.2 percent or 14.1 million people in 1980, and to 7.9 percent or

19.8 million people in 1990. See Campbell J. Gibson and Emily

211

Lennon, “Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born

Population of the United States: 1850–1990,” Population Divi-

sion Working Paper No. 29, February 1999, w w w.census.gov/

population/w w w/documentation/twps0029/twps0029.html.

6. Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: Norton, 1998); Samuel P. Hunt- ington, W ho Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

7. Quoted in Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 117.

8. U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 Census of the Population, “Quick Facts: Race,” http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/ long_68176.htm.

9. “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” United Nations, w w w

.un.org/Overview/rights.html.

10. “Learn about the United States: Quick Civics Lesson,” United

States Citizenship and Immigration Services, w w w.uscis.gov/

graphics/citizenship/flashcards/M-638.pdf.

11. See Christian Joppke, “The Evolution of Alien Rights in the United

States, Germany, and the European Union,” in Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices, ed. T. Alexander Aleinikoƒ and Douglas Klusmeyer (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for

International Peace, 2001), 36–62, esp. 38–44.

12. Ron Hayduk, Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3–4.

13. Ron Hayduk and Michele Wuker, “Immigrant Voting Rights Re-

ceive More Attention,” Migration Information Network, Novem-

ber 1, 2004, w w w.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm

?id=265.

14. Hayduk, Democracy for All, 4. 15. Joaquín Avila, “Political Apartheid in California: Consequences

of Excluding a Growing Non-Citizen Population,” UCLA Chicano

Studies Research Center, Latino Policy and Issues Brief 9, December 2003,w w w.chicano.ucla.edu/press/siteart/LPIB_09Dec2003.pdf.

n o t e s

212

m y t h 1 : i m m i g r a n t s t a k e a m e r i c a n j o b s

1. F. Froebel, J. Heinrichs, and O. Krey, The New International Division of Labour (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

2. In the 1980s dozens of states, from Connecticut to Florida to

Oregon, established enterprise zones in economically distressed

areas, oƒering businesses tax and other incentives to locate there.

For some analyses of these eƒorts, see the bibliography by the

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Enter-

prise Zones: Case Studies and State Reports,” w w w.huduser.org/

publications/polleg/ez_bib/ez_bib3.html.

3. Rakesh Kochhar, “Growth in the Foreign-Born Workforce and Em-

ployment of the Native Born,” Pew Hispanic Center, August 10,

2006, http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=69.

4. U.S. Census, “U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services,”

April, 2006. w w w.census.gov/foreign-trade/Press-Release/2006

pr/04/ftdpress.txt.

5. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Status of the Civil-

ian Non-Institutional Population, 1940 to Date,” ftp://ftp.bls.gov/

pub/special.requests/ lf/aat1.txt or w w w.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat1.pdf.

m y t h 2 : i m m i g r a n t s c o m p e t e w i t h l o w - s k i l l e d w o r k e r s a n d d r i v e d o w n w a g e s

1. Steven Greenhouse and David Leonhardt, “Real Wages Fail to

Match a Rise in Productivity,” New York Times, August 28, 2006. 2. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education found

college costs increased sharply with respect to average income in

the previous decade, so that in 2006 the cost of sending a child to

college was over 30 percent of an average family income. See “Mea-

suring Up 2006: The National Report Card on Higher Education,”

September 7, 2006, http://measuringup.highereducation.org/.

See also Christian E. Weller, “Drowning in Debt: America’s Middle

Class Falls Deeper in Debt as Income Growth Slows and Costs

Climb,” Center for American Progress, May 2006, w w w.american

progress.org/ kf/ boomburden-web.pdf.

n o t e s

213

3. Robert Frank, “U.S. Led a Resurgence Last Year Among Million-

aires Worldwide,” Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2004. 4. Esther Cervantes, “Immigrants and the Labor Market: W hat Are

‘The Jobs that Americans Won’t Do’?” Dollars and Sense, May–June 2006, 31.

5. This remark was widely reported, and widely criticized, in the

United States. See “Mexican Leader Criticized for Comment on

Blacks,” May 15, 2005, http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/05/14/

fox.jackson/.

6. Sociologist Michael Piore gave the classic description of this phe-

nomenon among early-twentieth-century European immigrants

in Birds of Passage (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

7. Doris Meissner, “U.S. Temporary Worker Programs: Lessons

Learned,” Migration Information Source, March 1, 2004, w w w

.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?ID=205.

8. Nancy Folbre, The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (New York: New Press, 2001); Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Rus-

sell Hochschild, “Introduction,” in Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), 7–9.

9. Bruce Western, Vincent Schiraldi, and Jason Ziedenberg, “Ed-

ucation and Incarceration,” Justice Policy Institute, 2003, w w w

.justicepolicy.org/downloads/EducationandIncarceration1.pdf.

See also Ira Glasser, “Drug Busts=Jim Crow,” The Nation, July 10, 2006, 24–26.

10. “Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States,” The

Sentencing Project, April 2006, w w w.sentencingproject.org/pdfs/

1046.pdf.

m y t h 3 : u n i o n s o p p o s e i m m i g r a t i o n b e c a u s e i t h a r m s t h e w o r k i n g c l a s s

1. Kim Moody uses this phrase in “Global Capital and Economic Na-

tionalism: Protectionism or Solidarity?” Against the Current, 2000, w w w.solidarity-us.org/node/951.

n o t e s

214

2. William D. Hay wood, Bill Haywood’s Book: The Autobiography of William D. Haywood (New York, 1929), 181. Cited in David Roedi- ger, Working Toward W hiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became W hite: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 121.

3. Gompers, “Talks on Labor,” American Federationist 12 (September 1905), 636–37, cited in Roediger, Working Toward W hiteness, 87.

4. Roediger, Working Toward W hiteness, 80, citing Andrew Neather, “Popular Republicanism, Americanism and the Roots of Anti-

Communism, 1890–1925” (PhD diss., Duke, 1993), 242; Henry

W hite, “Immigration Restriction as a Necessity,” American Federa- tionist 17 (April 1910), 302–304.

5. Peter Kwong, Forbidden Workers: Illegal Chinese Immigrants and American Labor (New York: New Press, 1997), 147.

6. Philip S. Foner, U.S. Labor Movement and Latin America: A History of Workers’ Response to Intervention (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), 28–29.

7. Samuel Gompers, “Imperialism—Its Dangers and Wrongs,” Anti-

Imperialism in the United States, 1898–1935 ( Jim Zwick, website

ed.), w w w.boondocksnet.com/ai/ailtexts/gompers.html.

8. Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., “American Unionism and U.S. Immigra-

tion Policy,” Digital Commons at ILR, Cornell University (back-

grounder, Center for Immigration Studies, 2001, 1–11), http://

digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ hr/22, 1.

9. Roediger, Working Toward W hiteness, 84. 10. Kwong, Forbidden Workers, 141. 11. Rogin, Blackface, W hite Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood

Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, rpr. ed. 1998), 57.

12. Kwong, Forbidden Workers, 141. 13. Rogin, Blackface, W hite Noise, 57. 14. Herbert Hill, “Racism within Organized Labor: A Report of Five

Years of the AFL-CIO,” Journal of Negro Education 30, no. 2 (Spring 1961), 109–118.

15. Kwong, Forbidden Workers, 152.

n o t e s

215

16. Kwong, 152–53.

17. Briggs, “American Unionism,” 6.

18. Briggs, “American Unionism,” 7.

m y t h 4 : i m m i g r a n t s d o n ’ t p a y t a x e s

1. On the growth of the informal economy in New York and other

major cities in the era of globalization, see Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), especially chaps. 8 and 9.

2. Brent Haydamack and Daniel Flaming, “Hopeful Workers, Mar-

ginal Jobs: LA’s Oƒ-the-Books Labor Force,” Economic Round-

table, with Pascale Joassart, December 2005, synopsis available

at w w w.economicrt.org/summaries/ hopeful_workers_marginal_

jobs_synopsis.html.

3. Eduardo Porter, “Illegal Immigrants are Bolstering Social Security

with Billions,” New York Times, April 5, 2005. 4. Porter, “Illegal Immigrants are Bolstering Social Security.”

m y t h 5 : i m m i g r a n t s a r e a d r a i n o n t h e e c o n o m y

1. Steven A. Camarota, “The High Cost of Cheap Labor: Illegal Immi-

gration and the Federal Budget,” Center for Immigration Studies,

August 2004, 7, w w w.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscal.pdf.

2. Camarota, “High Cost of Cheap Labor.”

3. Sarah Beth Coƒey, “Undocumented Immigrants in Georgia:

Tax Contributions and Fiscal Concerns,” Georgia Budget and

Policy Institute, January 2006, w w w.gbpi.org/pubs/garevenue/

20060119.pdf.

4. Robin Baker and Rich Jones, “State and Local Taxes Paid in Col-

orado by Undocumented Immigrants,” Bell Policy Center Issue

Brief no. 3, June 30, 2006, w w w.thebell.org/pdf/IMG/Brf3taxes

.pdf.

5. Thomas D. Boswell, June Nogle, Rob Paral, and Richard Langen-

dorf, Facts About Immigration and Asking Six Big Questions for Florida

n o t e s

216

and Miami-Dade County, Bureau of Economic and Business Re- search, University of Florida, Gainesville, November 2001.

6. See Ronald D. Lee and Timothy Miller, “Immigrants and Their

Descendants,” Project on the Economic Demography of Interage

Income Reallocation, Demography, UC Berkeley (1997); National

Research Council, The New Americans (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1997), chaps. 6 and 7; Alan J. Auerbach and Philip

Oreopoulos, “Generational Accounting and Immigration in the

United States,” University of California, Berkeley, March 1999,

http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~burch/immigration13.pdf.

7. Jeƒrey S. Passel, “Unauthorized Migrants: Numbers and Charac-

teristics— Background Briefing for Task Force on Immigration and

America’s Future,” Pew Hispanic Center, June 14, 2005, 31, http://

pewhispanic.org/files/reports/46.pdf.

8. Passel, “Unauthorized Migrants,” 34–35.

9. Passel, “Unauthorized Migrants,” 42.

m y t h 6 : i m m i g r a n t s s e n d m o s t o f w h a t t h e y e a r n o u t o f t h e c o u n t r y i n t h e f o r m o f r e m i t t a n c e s

1. Inter-American Development Bank, “Sending Money Home: Re-

mittances from Latin America to the U.S., 2004,” w w w.iadb.org/

exr/remittances/images/Map2004SurveyAnalysisMay_17.pdf.

2. IADB, “Sending Money Home,” 1.

3. B. Lindsay Lowell and Rodolfo O. de la Garza, “The Developmental

Role of Remittances in U.S. Latino Communities and in Latin

American Countries,” Inter-American Dialogue, June 2000, 8–9,

w w w.iadialog.org/publications/pdf/ lowell.pdf.

4. Lowell and de la Garza, “Remittances,” 13.

5. Jane Collins, Threads: Gender, Labor, and Power in the Global Apparel Industry (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003).

6. Catherine Elton, “Latin America’s Faulty Lifeline,” MIT Center

for International Studies, “Audit of Conventional Wisdom” series,

March 20, 2006, http://web.mit.edu/CIS/pdf/Audit_03_06_Elton

.pdf.

n o t e s

217

p a r t t w o : i m m i g r a n t s a n d t h e l a w

1. Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, Part I, 1849, available in many editions including online at http://thoreau.eserver.org/

civi11.html.

2. Satya Sagar, “U.S. Elections: Let the W hole World Vote!” ZNet,

February 27, 2004, w w w.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?

itemID=5049&sectionID=33.

m y t h 7 : t h e r u l e s a p p l y t o e v e r y o n e , s o n e w i m m i g r a n t s n e e d t o f o l l o w t h e m j u s t a s i m m i g r a n t s i n t h e p a s t d i d

1. Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation By Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

2. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 18.

m y t h 8 : t h e c o u n t r y i s b e i n g o v e r r u n b y i l l e g a l i m m i g r a n t s

1. United Nations International Research and Training Institute for

the Advancement of Women, Fact Sheet, w w w.un-instraw.org/

en/index.php?option=content&task=blogcategory&id=76&Itemid

=110; see also the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at

w w w.unhchr.ch/udhr/ lang/eng.htm.

2. Passel, “Unauthorized Migrants,” 2.

3. Passel, “Unauthorized Migrants,” 3; Passel, “Size and Characteris-

tics,” 4.

4. Passel, “Size and Characteristics,” 1.

5. Passel, “Unauthorized Migrants,” 4.

6. Passel, “Unauthorized Migrants,” 9.

7. Bill Ong Hing, Defining America through Immigration Policy (Phila- delphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 200.

8. Passel, “Unauthorized Migrants,” 9.

9. Passel, “Size and Characteristics,” 6–7.

n o t e s

218

10. Passel, “Unauthorized Migrants,” 26.

11. Passel, “Unauthorized Migrants,” 27.

12. See Aviva Chomsky, Linked Labor Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), forthcoming.

13. Lance Compa, “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S.

Meat and Poultry Processing Plants,” Human Rights Watch, 2004,

12, w w w.hrw.org/reports/2005/usa0105/usa0105.pdf.

14. Compa, “Blood, Sweat, and Fear,” 16.

m y t h 9 : t h e u n i t e d s t a t e s h a s a g e n e r o u s r e f u g e e p o l i c y

1. Sample questions are provided on the U.S. Citizenship and Im-

migration Services website: w w w.uscis.gov/graphics/citizenship/

flashcards/Flashcard_questions.pdf.

2. David W. Haines, ed., Refugees in America in the 1990s: A Reference Handbook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 3.

3. Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Pol- icy and Immigrants Since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 71–87.

4. Haim Genizi, America’s Fair Share: The Admission and Resettlement of Displaced Persons, 1945–1952 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993). See also Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, chaps. 3–5, for numerous examples of the overt and covert restrictions

against Jews.

5. Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 108–110. 6. Ong Hing, Defining America, 245–47. 7. Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick, City on the Edge: The Transfor-

mation of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 51.

8. Ong Hing, Defining America, 247; Portes and Stepick, City on the Edge, 52.

9. Howard W. French, “Between Haiti and the U.S. Lies a Quandary,”

New York Times, November 24, 1991. 10. Anthony DePalma, “For Haitians, Voyage to a Land of Inequality,”

New York Times, July 16, 1991.

n o t e s

219

11. DePalma, “For Haitians, Voyage to a Land of Inequality.”

12. Portes and Stepick, City on the Edge, 53. 13. Barbara Crossette, “Court Halts Expulsion of Haitians as Hundreds

More Leave for U.S.,” New York Times, November 20, 1991. 14. Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti (Monroe, ME: Common Courage

Press, 1994), 270.

15. Farmer, Uses of Haiti, 270–71, citing Cathy Powell, “ ‘Life’ at Guan- tánamo: The Wrongful Detention of Haitian Refugees,” Reconstruc- tion 2, no. 2 (1993), 58–68.

16. Roberto Suro, “U.N. Refugee Agency Says U.S. Violates Standards

in Repatriating Haitians,” Washington Post, January 11, 1995. 17. Farmer, Uses of Haiti, 273. 18. Daniel Williams, “Suddenly, the Welcome Mat Says ‘You’re Ille-

gal,’ ” Washington Post, August 20, 1994. 19. “12,000 Remain at Guantánamo,” Washington Post, August 19,

1995.

20. “U.S. Policy Changed with Guantánamo Safe Havens,” Washington Post, February 5, 1995.

21. Bob Herbert, “In America, Suƒering the Children,” New York Times, May 27, 1995.

22. For a detailed account of these events, see María Cristina Gar-

cía, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

23. Michael McBride, “Migrants and Asylum Seekers: Policy Re-

sponses in the United States to Immigrants and Refugees from

Central America and the Caribbean,” International Migration 37, no. 1 (March 1999), 296.

24. Ong Hing, Defining America, 239, 250. 25. Jay Matthews, “500,000 Immigrants Granted Legal Status: A Mile-

stone for Central American Refugees,” Washington Post, December 20, 1990.

26. Ong Hing, Defining America, 249, 254.

n o t e s

220

m y t h 1 0 : t h e u n i t e d s t a t e s i s a m e l t i n g p o t t h a t h a s a l w a y s w e l c o m e d i m m i g r a n t s f r o m a l l o v e r t h e w o r l d

1. I’m referring here to HR 4437 of 2005, which criminalized and im-

posed mandatory sentences on those who provided aid or services

that helped an immigrant to enter or remain in the United States.

Almost any kind of humanitarian or social service to an undocu-

mented immigrant could have been prosecuted under this provi-

sion.

2. James Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: New Press, 2005), 25.

3. “Back in the Day: Indiana’s African-American History,” The In- dianapolis Star, February 2002, w w w2.indystar.com/ library/fact files/ history/ black_history/.

4. Zolberg, Nation by Design, 120–24 [quote from p. 124]. 5. Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 407, w w w.law.cornell.edu/supct/

html/ historics/USSC_CR_0060_0393_ZO.html.

6. Scott v. Sandford, 410. 7. Ian F. Haney López, W hite by Law: The Legal Construction of Race.

(New York: NYU Press, 1996), 39.

8. Zolberg, Nation by Design, 192. 9. Marian L. Smith, “ ‘Any woman who is now, or who may hereafter

be married’ . . . Women and Naturalization, ca. 1802–1940,” Pro- logue Magazine [published by The National Archives] 30, no. 2 (Summer 1998), w w w.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1998/

summer/women-and-naturalization-1.html; Haney López, W hite by Law, 128.

10. Haney López, W hite by Law, 91. 11. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 22–23. 12. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 26. 13. See critique in PR Newswire, “Hidden Facts in the New Census

Hispanic Data,” Puerto Rico Herald, June 13, 2005. 14. The list is reproduced in Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 28–29. 15. Haney López, W hite by Law, 42–45. 16. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 7–8. 17. The phrase was originally coined by Rayford Logan in The Negro in

n o t e s

221

American Life and Thought: The Nadir in 1954. James Loewen de- cries its loss and tries to re-highlight it in Sundown Towns, chap. 2.

18. Dan Baum, “The Lottery: Once You Have a Green Card, W hat

Next?” The New Yorker, January 23, 2006, w w w.new yorker.com/ fact/content/articles/060123fa_fact.

19. “2007 DV Lottery Instructions,” United States Department of

State, http://travel.state.gov/visa/immigrants/types/types_1318

.html.

m y t h 1 1 : s i n c e w e a r e a l l t h e d e s c e n d a n t s o f i m m i g r a n t s h e r e , w e a l l s t a r t o n e q u a l f o o t i n g

1. George Benton Adams, “The United States and the Anglo-Saxon

Future,” Atlantic Monthly 78 (1896), 35–45; quotes from pp. 36, 44. 2. John Fiske, “Manifest Destiny,” Project Gutenberg, 2003, w w w

.gutenberg.org/files/10112/10112.txt.

3. Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and its Present Crisis (Astor Place, NY: American Home Missionary Society, 1885), w w w

.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=11531335; “Josiah Strong on Anglo-

Saxon Predominance, 1891,” w w w.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/

protected/strong.htm.

4. David Roediger and James R. Barrett, “Inbetween Peoples: Race,

Nationality, and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working Class,” Journal of American Ethnic History 16, no. 3 (Spring 1997), 3–45; Roediger, Working Toward W hiteness; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became W hite (New York: Routledge, 1995).

5. David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of Cal- ifornia Press, 1995), 14–16.

6. Camille Guerin-González, Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 26.

7. Juan González, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (New York: Penguin), 100.

8. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 54. 9. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 21.

n o t e s

222

10. Arnoldo de León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Towards Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 3.

11. Guerin-González, Mexican Workers, 29. 12. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 64. 13. Ong Hing, Defining America, 120. 14. Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., “Guestworker Programs: Lessons from the

Past and Warnings for the Future,” Center for Immigration Stud-

ies, March 2004, w w w.cis.org/articles/2004/ back304.html.

15. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 72; Guerin González, Mexican Workers, 111.

16. Ruth Ellen Wassem and Geoƒrey K. Collver, “RL 30852: Immigra-

tion of Agricultural Guest Workers: Policies, Trends, and Legisla-

tive Issues,” Congressional Research Service Report for Congress,

February 15, 2001, http://ncseonline.org/NLE/CRSreports/Agri

culture/ag-102.cfm.

17. Ong Hing, Defining America, 130. 18. Ong Hing, Defining America, 131. 19. Wassem and Collver, “RL 30852.”

20. Jeƒrey S. Passel, “Estimates of the Size and Characteristics of

the Undocumented Population,” March 21, 2005, 6, http://pew

hispanic.org/files/reports/44.pdf.

21. “Nativity of the Population, for Regions, Division, and State, 1850–

1990” (table), U.S. Census Bureau, March 9, 1999, w w w.census

.gov/population/w w w/documentation/twps0029/tab13.html.

22. “Population by State and U.S. Citizenship Status, With Percentages

by U.S. Citizenship Status, 2003” (table), U.S. Census Bureau, w w w

.census.gov/population/socdemo/foreign/ST023/tab1-17a.xls.

23. Camarota, “Immigrants at Mid-Decade.”

m y t h 1 2 : t o d a y ’ s i m m i g r a n t s t h r e a t e n t h e n a t i o n a l c u l t u r e b e c a u s e t h e y a r e n o t a s s i m i l a t i n g

1. Toni Morrison, “On the Backs of Blacks,” Time (special issue, “The New Face of America”), December 2, 1993, w w w.time.com/time/

community/morrisonessay.html.

n o t e s

223

2. Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets (New York: Vintage Books, 1991 [1967]), 24–27.

3. Loewen, Sundown Towns, 88. 4. Alex Stepick, Guillermo Grenier, Max Castro, and Marvin Dunn,

This Land Is Our Land: Immigrants and Power in Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 122.

5. Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and Carola Suárez-Orozco, Transforma- tions: Immigration, Family Life, and Achievement Motivation among Latino Adolescents (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 60. Stepick et al. describe the same phenomenon among Haitian

immigrants in Miami in This Land Is Our Land. 6. Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters, “Public School Graduation

Rates in the United States,” Manhattan Institute for Public Pol-

icy Research, Civic Report 31, November 2002, w w w.manhattan-

institute.org/ html/cr_31.htm. See also Gary Orfield, ed., Dropouts in America: Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2004).

7. Pew Hispanic Center and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation,

“Survey Brief: Bilingualism,” Pew Hispanic Center, March 2004,

http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/15.9.pdf.

8. “Poverty Status of the Population in 2003 by Sex, Age, and Hispanic

Origin Type: 2004” (table), U.S. Census Bureau, w w w.census.gov/

population/socdemo/ hispanic/ASEC2004/2004CPS_tab14.2a

.html.

9. Mary C. Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and Immigrant Realities (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 5.

m y t h 1 3 : t o d a y ’ s i m m i g r a n t s a r e n o t l e a r n i n g e n g l i s h , a n d b i l i n g u a l e d u c a t i o n j u s t a d d s t o t h e p r o b l e m

1. Calvin Veltman, “The Status of the Spanish Language in the United

States at the Beginning of the 21st Century,” International Migration Review 24, no. 1 (Spring 1990), 108–123. Even among four-year- olds, children of Spanish speakers tend to have significantly higher

levels of English than their parents; by their teenage years, almost

all children born in the United States are fluent in English (p. 113).

n o t e s

224

2. Hyon B. Shin and Rosalind Bruno, “Language Use and English-

Speaking Ability: 2000,” Census 2000 Brief, issued October 2003,

2, w w w.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-29.pdf.

3. Calvin Veltman, “Modelling the Language Shift Process of His-

panic Immigrants,” International Migration Review 22, no. 4 (Win- ter 1988), 549.

4. Richard Alba, John Logan, Amy Lutz, and Brian Stults, “Only En-

glish by the Third Generation? Loss and Preservation of the

Mother Tongue Among the Grandchildren of Contemporary Im-

migrants,” Demography 39, no. 3. (August 2002), 273. 5. James Thomas Tucker, “Waiting Times for Adult ESL Classes and

the Impact on English Learners,” NALEO (National Association of

Latino Elected and Appointed O~cials) Education Fund, June

2006, 3–4, http://renewthevra.civilrights.org/resources/ESL.pdf.

6. Pew Hispanic Center Fact Sheet, “Hispanic Attitudes Toward

Learning English,” June 7, 2006, http://pewhispanic.org/files/

factsheets/20.pdf.

7. See the U.S. English, Inc. website at w w w.us-english.org/inc/.

8. See w w w.onenation.org/fulltext.html for the texts of several of

these laws.

9. James Cummins, “The Role of Primary Language Development in

Promoting Educational Success for Language Minority Students,”

in Schooling and Language Minority Students: A Theoretical Frame- work, ed. C. F. Leyba (Los Angeles, CA: Evaluation, Dissemination and Assessment Center, California State University Los Angeles,

1981), 3–49.

10. See, for example, the recent comprehensive study funded by the

U.S. Department of Education: Diane August and Timothy Shana-

han, eds., Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006). See also J. D.

Ramirez, S. D. Yuen, D. R. Ramey, and D. Pasta, Longitudinal Study of Structured English Immersion Strategy, Early-Exit and Late-Exit Transitional Bilingual Education Programs for Language Minority: Final Report, vols. 1 and 2 (San Mateo, CA: Aguirre International,

n o t e s

225

1991), and Stephen Krashen and Grace McField, “W hat Works?

Reviewing the Latest Evidence on Bilingual Education,” Language Learner, November–December 2005, 7–10, 34, http://users.rcn .com/crawj/ langpol/Krashen-McField.pdf.

11. Rafael M. Díaz, “Thought and Two Languages: The Impact of Bilin-

gualism on Cognitive Development,” Review of Research on Educa- tion 10 (1983), 23–54; Kenji Hakuta, “Degree of Bilingualism and Cognitive Ability in Mainland Puerto Rican Children,” Child Devel- opment 58, no. 5 [Special Issue on Schools and Development] (Oc- tober 1987), 1372–1388; Kenji Hakuta, Mirror on Language: The Debate on Bilingualism (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

12. James Crawford, “Hard Sell: W hy Is Bilingual Education So Un-

popular with the American Public?” Arizona State University Lan-

guage Policy Research Unit, 2003, w w w.asu.edu/educ/epsl/LPRU/

features/ brief8.htm.

13. Crawford, “Hard Sell.”

14. Sarah Means Lohmann and Don Soifer, “Separate Unequal Classes

Set Bilingual Education Back,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 17, 2005. 15. Crawford, “Hard Sell.”

16. James Crawford, Hold Your Tongue: Bilingualism and the Politics of English Only (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992), chap. 8. Excerpt online at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/ homepages/

JWCRAWFORD/HYTCH8.htm.

m y t h 1 4 : i m m i g r a n t s o n l y c o m e h e r e b e c a u s e t h e y w a n t t o e n j o y o u r h i g h e r s t a n d a r d o f l i v i n g

1. My discussion here draws on the work of Saskia Sassen, Douglas S.

Massey, and others. Sassen’s argument is accessibly summarized in

“W hy Immigration?” NACLA Report on the Americas 26, no. 1 ( July 1992), pp. 14–19, Massey’s in “Closed-Door Policy: Mexico Vividly

Illustrates How U.S. Treatment of Immigrant Workers Backfires,”

American Prospect, July 1, 2003, w w w.prospect.org/print/ V14/7/ massey-d.html.

2. Victor Clark, cited in José-Manuel Navarro, Creating Tropical Yan-

n o t e s

226

kees: Social Science Textbooks and U.S. Ideological Control in Puerto Rico, 1898–1908 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 48.

3. García Ramis, Happy Days, Uncle Sergio, trans. Carmen C. Esteves (Fredonia, NY: W hite Pine Press, 1995), 33–34.

4. García Ramis, Happy Days, 55. 5. García Ramis, Happy Days, 153. 6. Quoted in Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Mi-

gration in Filipino History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 86.

7. Quoted in Choy, Empire of Care, 102. 8. See Tim Kane, “Global Troop Deployment, 1950–2005,” Heritage

Foundation, www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/cda06-

02.cfm. The Guantánamo naval base in Cuba is a particularly glar-

ing example of a long-term troop presence in defiance of the “host”

country’s opposition.

9. Medea Benjamin and Elvia Alvarado, Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: A Hon- duran Woman Speaks from the Heart (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1987), xviii-xix.

10. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 1, 23.

11. Sarah J. Mahler, American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Mar- gins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), chap. 4; Roger N. Lancaster, Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Inti- macy of Power in Nicaragua (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), esp. chap. 1.

12. Quoted in Avi Chomsky, “Innocents Abroad: Taking U.S. College

Students to Cuba,” LASA Forum 27, no. 3 (Fall 1996), 16–20; quote from p. 19.

13. These and many other useful statistics have been compiled by the

CIA. See w w w.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/docs/rankorder

guide.html.

14. Dan Baum, “Lottery.”

15. García Ramis, Happy Days, 14. 16. Massey, “Closed-Door Policy.”

17. John Barrett, “The Cuba of the Far East,” North American Review

n o t e s

227

164, February 1897, 173, 177, http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/cgi-

bin/moa/moa-cgi?notisid=ABQ7578-0164-19.

18. For comparison’s sake, U.S. investment in Central America was

valued at $21 million in 1897. Walter Lafeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York: Norton, 1993), 35.

19. Barrett, “Cuba of the Far East,” 178.

20. Available in many sources, including Rudyard Kipling, “The W hite

Man’s Burden: The United States & The Philippine Islands, 1899,”

in Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (Garden City, NY: Dou- bleday, 1929); online at w w w.historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5478/.

21. Quincy Ewing, “An Eƒect of the Conquest of the Philippines,”

Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898–1935 ( Jim Zwick,

website ed.), July 3, 2006, w w w.boondocksnet.com/ai/ kipling/

ewing.html.

22. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 110. 23. Alfred Beveridge, “The March of the Flag,” speech, September 16,

1898, w w w.fordham.edu/ halsall/mod/1898beveridge.html.

24. Benjamin R. Tillman, “ ‘The W hite Man’s Burden’ as Prophecy,”

Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898–1935 ( Jim Zwick,

website ed.), w w w.boondocksnet.com/ai/ kipling/tillman.html.

25. John Barrett, “The Problem of the Philippines,” North American Review 167, no. 502 (September 1898), http://cdl.library.cornell .edu/cgi-bin/moa/moa-cgi?notisid=ABQ7578–0167–26.

26. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 100. 27. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 99. 28. Quoted in Karl Stephen Herrman, From Yauco to Las Marías, Project

Gutenberg, w w w.gutenberg.org/files/10439/10439.txt.

29. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 101–102. 30. James A. Tyner, “The Geopolitics of Eugenics and the Exclusion of

Philippine Immigrants from the United States,” Geographical Re- view 89, no. 1 ( January, 1999), 63.

31. Tyner, “Geopolitics of Eugenics,” 65.

32. Tyner, “Geopolitics of Eugenics,” 65.

33. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 119. 34. Cited in Tyner, “Geopolitics of Eugenics,” 68.

n o t e s

228

35. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 120. 36. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 115. 37. Somini Sengupta, “The Color of Love: Removing a Relic of the

Old South,” New York Times, November 5, 2000; Somini Sengupta, “Marry at Will,” New York Times, November 12, 2000.

38. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 115. 39. Tyner, “Geopolitics of Eugenics,” 67.

40. Tyner, “Geopolitics of Eugenics,” 67.

41. See Aviva Chomsky, West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Com- pany in Costa Rica, 1870–1940 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni- versity Press, 1996).

42. U.S. Library of Congress, Federal Research Division, The Philip- pines: A Country Study (Washington, DC: GPO, 1991), http:// countrystudies.us/philippines/23.htm.

43. Library of Congress, The Philippines, http://countrystudies.us/ philippines/77.htm.

44. Choy, Empire of Care, chaps. 1–2. 45. Choy, Empire of Care, 75. 46. Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 165. 47. Choy, Empire of Care, 96. 48. Library of Congress, The Philippines, http://countrystudies.us/

philippines/24.htm.

49. Choy, Empire of Care, 13. 50. Choy, Empire of Care, 2. 51. Celia W. Dugger, “U.S. Plan to Lure Nurses May Hurt Poor Nations,”

New York Times, May 24, 2006. 52. This process is described in Paul Ong and Tania Azores, “The Mi-

gration and Incorporation of Filipino Nurses,” in The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring, ed. Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng (Philadelphia: Temple University

Press, 1994), 165–69.

53. Ong and Azores, “Migration and Incorporation,” 174–75.

54. Dugger, “Plan to Lure Nurses.”

55. Dugger, “Plan to Lure Nurses.”

56. Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 166.

n o t e s

229

57. Dugger, “Plan to Lure Nurses.”

58. Dugger, “Plan to Lure Nurses.”

59. “Filipino Remittances Hit $9.7 Billion,” BBC News, http://news

.bbc.co.uk/2/ hi/ business/4608786.stm. (The $9.7 billion figure

was for the first eleven months of 2005.)

60. Dugger, “Plan to Lure Nurses.”

m y t h 1 5 : t h e a m e r i c a n p u b l i c o p p o s e s i m m i g r a t i o n , a n d t h e d e b a t e i n c o n g r e s s r e f l e c t s t h a t

1. See the list of supporters at w w w.tedkennedy.com/content/177/

organizations-supporting-the-kennedy-mccain-immigration-

legislation.

2. See statement by the National Network for Immigrant and Ref-

ugee Rights and list of endorsers at w w w.nnirr.org/projects/

immigrationreform/statement.htm.

3. “Statement by AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney on President

Bush’s Principles for Immigration Reform,” January 8, 2004, w w w

.aflcio.org/mediacenter/prsptm/pr01082004.cfm.

4. Elizabeth Auster, “Guest Worker Proposals Divide America’s

Unions,” The Plain Dealer, April 6, 2006. 5. Wayne A. Cornelius, “Controlling ‘Unwanted’ Immigration: Les-

sons from the United States, 1993–2004,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31, no. 4, July 2005, 788, w w w.ccis-ucsd.org/ PUBLICATIONS/wrkg92.pdf.

6. “2006 State Legislation Related to Immigration: Enacted, Vetoed,

and Pending Gubernatorial Action,” National Conference of State

Legislatures, July 3, 2006, w w w.ncsl.org/programs/immig/06

ImmigEnactedLegis2.htm.

7. Bonnie Erbe, “Cities Fill Federal Void on Immigration,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 19, 2006; Mary K. Brunskill, “Pennsylvania City Passes Strict Anti-Immigration Act,” All-Headline News, July 14, 2006; Dan Sewell, “Country’s Interior Wages Own Campaign

Against Illegal Aliens,” Associated Press, November 22, 2005.

8. Paul Davenport, “Bill Passes Applying Trespassing Law to Illegal

Immigrants,” Associated Press, April 13, 2006; Jacques Belleaud,

n o t e s

230

“Governor Vetoes Attempt to Criminalize Immigrants’ Presence in

Arizona,” Associate Press, April 18, 2006.

9. “Earned Legalization and Increased Border Security Is Key to Im-

migration Reform According to Republican Voters: New Poll,”

Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, October 17, 2005, w w w

.manhattan-institute.org/ html/immigration_pol_pr.htm.

10. Opinion Research Corporation, CNN poll, June 8–11, 2006, w w w

.cnn.com/2006/images/06/21/ lou.dobbs.tonight.poll.results.pdf.

11. Lou Dobbs, Exporting America: W hy Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas (New York: Warner Business Books, 2004), http://unionshop.aflcio.org/shop/product1.cfm?SID=1&Product

_ID=496.

12. Jack Shierenbeck, “The New Lou Dobbs: Working Chumps’ Cham-

pion?” New York Teacher, March 21, 2004. 13. Lou Dobbs, “Our Borderline Security,” U.S. News and World Report,

December 27, 2004.

14. Lou Dobbs, “Disorganized Labor,” U.S. News and World Report, March 7, 2005.

15. Pew Research Center for People and the Press and Pew Hispanic

Center, “America’s Immigration Quandary: No Consensus on

America’s Immigration Problem or Proposed Fixes,” Pew Hispanic

Center, March 20, 2006, 15, http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/

63.pdf.

16. Pew Research Center, “America’s Immigration Quandary,” 16.

17. Pew Research Center, “America’s Immigration Quandary,” 18.

18. Pew Research Center, “America’s Immigration Quandary,” 11.

19. Teresa A. Sullivan, Elizabeth Warren, and Jay Westbrook, The Frag- ile Middle Class: Americans in Debt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 6.

20. “Government, Corporate Scandals Damage Public Trust in Insti-

tutions at the Bedrock of Society,” Lichtman/Zogby interactive poll,

May 23, 2006, w w w.zogby.com/News/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1116.

21. Michael P. McDonald and Samuel L. Popkin, “The Myth of the Van-

ishing Voter,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 4 (December 2001), 963–74.

n o t e s

231

22. Pew Research Center, “America’s Immigration Quandary,” intro-

duction.

23. Pew Research Center, “America’s Immigration Quandary,” 17,

figures from CBS/New York Times.

m y t h 1 6 : t h e o v e r w h e l m i n g v i c t o r y o f p r o p o s i t i o n 1 8 7 i n c a l i f o r n i a s h o w s t h a t t h e p u b l i c o p p o s e s i m m i g r a t i o n

1. “A Summary Analysis of Voting in the 1994 General Election,” Cal-

ifornia Opinion Index, January 1995, http://field.com/fieldpoll

online/subscribers/COI-94-95-Jan-Election.pdf.

2. “Summary Analysis of Voting.”

3. “Summary Analysis of Voting.”

4. Jan Adams, “Proposition 187 Lessons,” Z Magazine, March 1995. 5. Cornelius, “Controlling ‘Unwanted’ Immigration,” 777, 791 n. 7.

m y t h 1 7 : i m m i g r a t i o n i s a p r o b l e m

1. Leslie Berestein, “Migrants push east to avoid fortified border,

with tragic results,” San Diego Union-Tribune, September 29, 2004, w w w.signonsandiego.com/news/reports/gatekeeper/20040929-

9999-lz1n29mirgran.html.

2. Mark Stevenson, “Mexico Puts Up Maps for Migrants,” Desert News, January 25, 2006, w w w.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/

is_20060125/ai_n16022823; Richard Marosi, “Border-Crossing

Deaths Set a 12-Month Record,” Los Angeles Times, October 1, 2005. 3. Esther Pan, “Q&A: Homeland Security: U.S.-Mexico Border

Woes,” Council on Foreign Relations, February 22, 2006, repr. New York Times, February 22, 2006.

4. Sonia Nazario, Enrique’s Journey (New York: Random House, 2006), 5, xiv.

5. Laura Wides, “Study Says Immigration Patterns Changing with

New Border Security,” Associated Press, April 1, 2005.

6. Ong Hing, Defining America, 189. 7. Cornelius, “Controlling ‘Unwanted’ Immigration,” 783.

8. Programa para el Esclaracimiento Histórico, Guatemala: Memoria del Silencio, Anexo I, Caso Ilustrativo 64, American Academy for

n o t e s

232

the Advancement of Science, http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/

mds/spanish/anex01/v011/n064.html.

9. See Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence (Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 1991), 8.

10. Berestein, “Migrants Push East.”

11. James Smith, “Guatemala: Economic Migrants Replace Politi-

cal Refugees,” Inforpress Centroamericana, April 2006, w w w

.migrationinformation.org/Profiles/display.cfm?ID=392.

12. See also Nora Hamilton and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, Seeking Com- munity in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Gabrielle Kohl-

pahl, Voices of Guatemalan Women in Los Angeles: Understanding Their Immigration (New York: Garland, 1999).

13. Smith, “Guatemala.”

14. Berestein, “Migrants Push East.”

m y t h 1 8 : c o u n t r i e s n e e d t o c o n t r o l w h o g o e s i n a n d o u t

1. “On Indian Removal,” President Andrew Jackson, message to

Congress, December 6, 1830, available on many websites, includ-

ing Our Documents, w w w.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true

&doc=25.

2. Tyner, “Geopolitics of Eugenics,” 57.

3. Tyner, “Geopolitics of Eugenics,” 56.

4. See Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Nancy L. Gallagher, Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State (Hanover, NH: University Press of New En- gland, 1999); Bonnie Mass, “Puerto Rico: A Case Study in Popula-

tion Control,” Latin American Perspectives 4, no. 4 (Autumn 1977), 66–71.

5. Alexandra Minna Stern, “Sterilized in the Name of Public Health:

Race, Immigration, and Reproductive Control in Modern Cali-

fornia,” American Journal of Public Health 95, no. 7 ( July 2005), 1128–38.

n o t e s

233

6. Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Impe- rialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 83.

7. Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 87. 8. Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 106. 9. Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 124.

10. Stern, “Sterilized in the Name of Public Health,” 1132.

11. Stern, “Sterilized in the Name of Public Health,” 1133.

12. Jane Lawrence, “The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization

of Native American Women,” American Indian Quarterly 24:3 (2000), 400–419; 410. She is citing Bernard Rosenfeld, Sidney M.

Wolfe, and Robert E. McGarrah Jr., A Health Research Group Study on Surgical Sterilization: Present Abuses and Proposed Regulations (Washington, DC: Health Research Group, 29 October 1973), 2–7.

13. Lawrence, “The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization of Na-

tive American Women.” She is citing “Killing Our Future: Steril-

ization and Experiments,” Akwesasne Notes 9:1 (1977), 4–6. 14. J. J. Salvo, M. G. Powers, and R. S. Cooney, “Contraceptive Use and

Sterilization Among Puerto Rican Women,” Family Planning Per- spectives 24, no. 5, (September–October 1992), 219–23.

15. Andrea P. MacKay, Burney A. Kieke, Jr., Lisa M. Koonin, and Karen

Beattie, “Tubal Sterilization in the United States, 1994–1996,”

Family Planning Perspectives 33, no. 4 ( July–August 2001), w w w .guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3316101.html.

16. “Bennett’s Take on Blacks, Abortion Draws Fire,” Los Angeles Times, September 30, 2005, A29.

17. Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 196. 18. Laura Briggs, “Making ‘American’ Families: Transnational Adop-

tion and U.S. Latin America Policy,” in Haunted By Empire, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 613.

19. Laura Briggs, “Communities Resisting Interracial Adoption: The

Indian Child Welfare Act and the NABSW Statement of 1972”

(paper presented at the Alliance for the Study of Adoption, Iden-

tity and Kinship (ASAIK) Conference on Adoption and Culture,

n o t e s

234

University of Tampa, Tampa, FL, November 17–20, 2005, w w w

.u.arizona.edu/~lbriggs/.

20. “In Daddy’s Arms,” Boston Globe, July 26, 2006. For a great collec- tion on the politics of transracial and international adoption, see

Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Chin,

eds., Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption (Boston: South End Press, 2006).

m y t h 1 9 : w e n e e d t o p r o t e c t o u r b o r d e r s t o p r e v e n t c r i m i n a l s a n d t e r r o r i s t s f r o m e n t e r i n g t h e c o u n t r y

1. Terrorism: 2000–2001, U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI Publication 0308), www.fbi.gov/publications/

terror/terror2000_2001.pdf.

2. Steven A. Camarota, “The Open Door: How Militant Islamic Ter-

rorists Entered and Remained in the United States, 1993–2001,”

Center for Immigration Studies, w w w.cis.org/articles/2002/Paper

21/terrorism.html.

m y t h 2 0 : i f p e o p l e b r e a k o u r l a w s b y i m m i g r a t i n g i l l e g a l l y , t h e y a r e c r i m i n a l s a n d s h o u l d b e d e p o r t e d

1. Julia Preston, “Rules Collide with Reality in the Immigration De-

bate,” New York Times, May 29, 2006. 2. Visa Bulletin 8, no. 96, U.S. Department of State, August 2006,

http://travel.state.gov/visa/fr vi/ bulletin/ bulletin_2978.html.

These figures are updated monthly; for links to subsequent issues,

go to http://travel.state.gov/visa/frvi/ bulletin/ bulletin_1360.html.

3. “Detention and Death of 81-Year-Old Haitian Pastor ‘Appalling’

Says Humanitarian Agency Director,” press release, Church World

Service, November 22, 2004, w w w.churchworldservice.org/news/

archives/2004/11/245.html.

4. Tom Miller, “Latino USA” commentary, NPR, May 5–11, 2006,

audio at www.latinousa.org/program/ lusapgm683.html; tran-

scription at w w w.walterlippmann.com/docs608.html.

n o t e s

235

m y t h 2 1 : t h e p r o b l e m s t h i s b o o k r a i s e s a r e s o h u g e t h a t t h e r e ’ s n o t h i n g w e c a n d o a b o u t t h e m

1. For a summary of the law go to w w w.uscis.gov/graphics/shared/

aboutus/statistics/ legishist/act142.htm.

2. Eduardo Galeano, “Snapshots of a World Coming Apart at the

Seams,” in Appeal to Reason: 25 Years of In These Times, ed. Craig Aaron (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 194.

e p i l o g u e

1. “UN Population Report Says World Urban Population of 3 Billion

Today; Expected to Reach 5 Billion by 2030,” press release, United

Nations Population Division, March 24, 2004, w w w.un.org/esa/

population/publications/wup2003/pop899_English.doc.

t i m e l i n e

1. Descriptions of many of the laws named in this timeline can

be found at w w w.uscis.gov/graphics/shared/aboutus/statistics/

legishist/index.htm. For a narrative history of U.S. immigration

policy, see Marian L. Smith, “Overview of INS History,” in A His- torical Guide to the U.S. Government, ed. George T. Kurian (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), reproduced on the U.S. Citizen-

ship and Immigration Service website at w w w.uscis.gov/graphics/

aboutus/ history/articles/oview.htm.

2. Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 100.

n o t e s

236

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