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Immigration Forum Comment: Foreign Relations and Migration
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 March 2016
Extract
In the fall of 2015, a great debate began taking shape internationally and in the United States over how to reconcile foreign-policy interests, national security concerns, and a response to a profound refugee crisis emerging in Europe as a result of the conflict in Syria. World leaders vacillated, demagogues pontificated, and social media memes employed bad historical analogies to shame fellow citizens into action. Despite the sudden urgency, the arguments blasting from twenty-four-hour news stations and ill-drawn cartoons depicting seventeenth-century pilgrims as forlorn refugees given safe harbor by Native Americans at Plymouth Rock did not represent a new line of thinking in the longer history of international migration management. The public is once again debating how to balance humanitarianism against fear, and which sentiment should play the greater role in governing the decision to admit new migrants. As the papers in this forum ably show, policies, procedures, and perspectives on migration have always had an international-relations component that can trump the local concerns that often dominate domestic debates.
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References
1 Long (in social media terms) after the meme had circulated, President Obama invoked it himself in his weekly address. Barack Obama, “This Thanksgiving, Recognizing the Greatness of American Generosity,” 25 Nov. 2015, at www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/11/26/weekly-address-thanksgiving-recognizing-greatness-american-generosity, accessed 16 Dec. 2015.
2 Russell Berman, “Donald Trump's Call to Ban Muslim Immigrants,” The Atlantic, 7 Dec. 2015, available at www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/donald-trumps-call-to-ban-muslim-immigrants/419298, accessed 16 Dec. 2015.
3 See Aristide Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
4 See Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
5 This is something I have discussed at length in my own work. See Meredith Oyen, The Diplomacy of Migration: Transnational Lives and the Making of U.S.–Chinese Relations in the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); see also Charlotte Brooks, Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015).
6 For example, note the Japanese protests over Japan's planned inclusion in Asian restriction under the Johnson-Reed of 1924. See “Restriction of Japanese Immigration by Act of Congress, and the Abrogation of the Gentlemen's Agreement,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1924, Volume II, Japan (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1924), 333–421.
7 The contested visits of both U Nu and subsequent Burmese leader Ne Win are both discussed in Kenton Clymer, A Delicate Relationship: The United States and Burma/Myanmar since 1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 218–33; William J. Daugherty, “Jimmy Carter and the 1979 Decision to Admit the Shah into the United States,” American Diplomacy: Foreign Service Despatches and Periodic Reports on U. S. Foreign Policy, April 2003, at www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/archives_roll/2003_01-03/dauherty_shah/dauherty_shah.html, accessed 16 Dec. 2015.
8 For example, Edward Wong, “Dalai Lama Said to Be Denied South African Visa,” New York Times, 5 Sept. 2014; Michael Birnbaum, “Russia Grants Edward Snowden Residency for Three More Years,” Washington Post, 7 Aug. 2014.
9 Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 111–46.
10 Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 126–34.