Donald Trump may differ from other contemporary politicians in so openly stating his antipathy to immigrants of a certain sort. (He’s actually urged the opening of the country to more European immigrants.) Democrats like Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton sound so much less hateful and so much more tolerant. But the policies Trump is advocating, including that well-publicized wall and mass deportations, are really nothing new. They are the very policies initiated by Bill Clinton in the 1990s and — from border militarization to mass deportations — enthusiastically promoted by Barack Obama. The president is, in fact, responsible for raising such deportations to levels previously unknown in American history. [...]
A closer look at American history makes the notion that “we are a nation of immigrants” instantly darker than its proponents imagine. As a start, what could the very idea of a “nation of immigrants” mean in a land that was already home to a large native population when European immigrants started to colonize it? From its first moments, American history has, in fact, been a history of deportation. The initial deportees from the British colonies and the American nation were, of course, Native Americans, removed from their villages, farms and hunting grounds through legalized and extra-legal force everywhere that white immigrants wanted to settle. [...]
It was not until 1868, three years after the Civil War ended, that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution created the right to citizenship by birth, making it possible for the first time for non-whites to become citizens. But when Congress passed that amendment, it had in mind only some non-whites: previously enslaved Africans and their descendants. Here’s the crucial line in which Congress made sure of that: “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.” Since Native Americans were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, they were excluded from citizenship by birth. [...]
Once citizenship by birth had been established, Congress moved to preserve the white racial character of the country by restricting the entry of non-whites — first with the Page Act of 1875, prohibiting Chinese women from entering the country, then with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. That ban was, in turn, gradually expanded until, in 1917, the “Asiatic Barred Zone” was put in place. It would span significant parts of the globe, from Afghanistan to the islands of the Pacific, and encompass about half of the world’s population. Its purpose was to ensure that, all “Asians” being “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” none of them would enter the United States, and so their racially ineligible children would never be born here and obtain citizenship by birth.
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