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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2019
War is central to U.S. immigration history. Yet too often that fact has been obscured by folktales that rhapsodize about the feel-good Ellis Island story: lured by the American Dream, strangers come to a promised land, put down roots, and triumph over adversity through industry, resolve, and pluck.
For their invaluable help and guidance with this essay, I thank Carly Goodman, Jason McGraw, Michelle Moyd, Arissa Oh, the two anonymous reviewers, the staff of Modern American History, and especially Brooke Blower for her encouragement and keen editorial eye. Immense gratitude to Mae Ngai, my advisor, for teaching me the fundamentals of immigration history.
1 Julian Lim and Maddelena Marinari make the important point that “exclusion and inclusion have always occurred in tandem” in U.S. immigration policy, “sustain[ing] a nation of both nativists and immigrants.” See Lim, and Marinari, , “Laws for a Nation of Nativists and Immigrants,” Modern American History 2, no. 1 (Mar. 2019): 49–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 See, for instance, Lee, Erika, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003)Google Scholar; Ngai, Mae M., Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ, 2004)Google Scholar; Zolberg, Aristide R., A Nation By Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, MA, 2006)Google Scholar; Hernández, Kelly Lytle, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley, CA, 2010)Google Scholar; Parker, Kunal M., Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000 (New York, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kang, S. Deborah, The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US–Mexico Border, 1917–1954 (New York, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One important exception is Hoffnung-Garskoff, Jesse, “The Immigration Reform Act of 1965,” in Blower, Brooke and Bradley, Mark Philip, eds., The Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn (Ithaca, NY, 2015), 125–40, here 128–9Google Scholar. Hoffnung-Garskoff argues that historians “should seek to understand and represent immigration as a consequence of relationships between the United States and particular other parts of the world, and as a constituent part of some of those relationships.” He posits that the standard pre-1965/post-1965 periodization should be replaced by a more useful “Cold War/post–Cold War” divide.
3 Sánchez, George J., “Race, Nation, and Culture in Recent Immigration Studies,” Journal of American Ethnic History 18, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 66–84Google Scholar. See also Kramer, Paul A., “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (Dec. 2011): 1348–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Kramer, Paul A., “Geopolitics of Mobility: Immigration Policy and American Global Power in the Long Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 123, no. 2 (Apr. 2018): 393–438CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Goodman, Adam, “Nation of Migrations, Historians of Migration,” Journal of American Ethnic History 34, no. 4 (Summer 2015): 7–16, here 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 For the history and critiques of the “nation of immigrants” paradigm, see Gabaccia, Donna R., “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (Dec. 1999): 1115–34CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Mae M. Ngai, “‘A Nation of Immigrants': The Cold War and Civil Rights Origins of Illegal Immigration,” with an exchange between Eric S. Maskin and the Author, Occasional Papers of the School of Social Science, April 2010, Paper No. 38, https://www.sss.ias.edu/files/papers/paper38.pdf (accessed Feb. 18, 2019). Goodman, “Nation of Migrations, Historians of Migration,” emphasizes the multiplicity of migrations in U.S. history including European settler colonialism, African slavery, and “internal” migrations such as indigenous removals and the Great Migration of African Americans.
6 The example of the “refugee” is illustrative. In her study of Chinese migration to Hong Kong during the Cold War, Laura Madokoro prefers “migrant” to “refugee” as a category of analysis as a way to problematize both the narrowness and the contentiousness of the category “refugee” as applied by historical actors. She cautions that a migrant's “refugee” status does not derive from “essential traits.” It results from an “intensely subjective … ‘refugeeing process’ involving governments and humanitarians determining who deserves assistance, as well as migrants themselves deciding whether or not to characterize themselves accordingly.” Madokoro, Laura, Elusive Refugee: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 6–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Ngai, Impossible Subjects.
7 Dudziak, Mary L., War-Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (New York, 2014), 12–3Google Scholar; Sherry, Michael S., “War as a Way of Life,” Modern American History 1, no. 1 (Mar. 2018): 93–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Young, Marilyn B., “‘I was thinking, as I often do these days, of war’: The United States in the Twenty-First Century,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 1 (Jan. 2012): 1–15, here 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cited in Sherry, “War as a Way of Life.”
9 Definitions of “refugee” and “asylee” are not fixed, but have shifted depending on political agendas and changing circumstances. As Carl Bon Tempo observes, “Colloquially, an immigrant is a person who chooses to leave his or her homeland, while a refugee is a person who is forced to leave the homeland for fear of persecution and cannot return without endangering himself or herself. Such a distinction, however, only goes so far. In the American historical context, refugees typically have fled political persecution, though the nature of that persecution—its ideological sources, relationship to geopolitics, and the exact definition of persecutory acts—has evolved over time and in response to circumstances.” Tempo, Carl Bon, “Refugees, Asylees, and Immigrants,” in Barkan, Elliott Robert, ed., Immigrants in American History: Arrival, Adaptation, and Integration (Santa Barbara, CA, 2012), 1528Google Scholar. See also Madokoro, Chinese Migrants in the Cold War.
10 Loescher, Gilbert Damian and Scanlan, John A., Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America's Half-Open Door, 1945–Present (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Tempo, Carl J. Bon, Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War (Princeton, NJ, 2008)Google Scholar; Porter, Stephen R., Benevolent Empire: U.S. Power, Humanitarianism, and the World's Dispossessed (Philadelphia, PA, 2016)Google Scholar.
11 Bon Tempo, “Refugees, Asylees, and Immigrants,”1528.
12 Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate, 70.
13 Bon Tempo, “Refugees, Asylees, and Immigrants,” 1528; Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate, 60–85.
14 Notably, U.S. military bases served as way stations for Hungarians, Cubans, and Vietnamese en route to permanent resettlement in the United States. Camp Kilmer, NJ, was the first major military-run refugee camp in the United States. Jana Lipman, “U.S. military bases used to welcome foreign refugees. Now, they are being used to scare away migrants,” Washington Post Made by History, July 5, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/07/05/military-bases-used-to-welcome-refugees-to-the-u-s-now-american-bases-are-being-used-to-scare-them-away/?utm_term=.7a29a4ef2a4e (accessed Feb. 18, 2019).
15 Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate, 3–4.
16 Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate, 145–79.
17 Bon Tempo, “Refugees, Asylees, and Immigrants,” 1534; García, María Cristina, “Central American Migration and the Shaping of Refugee Policy,” in Hoerder, Dirk and Faires, Nora, eds., Migrants and Migration in Modern North America: Cross-Border Lives, Labor Markets, and Politics (Durham, NC, 2011), 347–63, here 347, 356Google Scholar.
18 García, “Central American Migration and the Shaping of Refugee Policy,” 356; García, María Cristina, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada (Berkeley, CA, 2006), 70Google Scholar.
19 García, Seeking Refuge, 34, 70; Abrego, Leisy J., Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love Across Borders (Stanford, CA, 2014), 13Google Scholar; García, Seeking Refuge, 34.
20 García, Seeking Refuge, 70; García, “Central American Migration and the Shaping of Refugee Policy,” 353.
21 García, “Central American Migration and the Shaping of Refugee Policy,” 354.
22 Macekura, Stephen, “‘For Fear of Persecution’: Displaced Salvadorans and U.S. Refugee Policy in the 1980s,” Journal of Policy History 23, no. 3 (July 2011): 357–80, here 375–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 García, “Central American Migration and the Shaping of Refugee Policy,” 356.
24 Bon Tempo, At America’s Gates, 200–1. Notably, the Trump administration has been trying to rescind this criterion since June 2018. See Matt Zapotosky, “Judge Strikes Down Trump Administration Effort to Deny Asylum for Migrants Fleeing Gang Violence, Domestic Abuse,” Washington Post, December 19, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/judge-strikes-down-trump-administration-effort-to-deny-asylum-for-migrants-fleeing-gang-violence-domestic-abuse/2018/12/19/61687d00-03b1-11e9-b6a9-0aa5c2fcc9e4_story.html?utm_term=.776c770daf86 (accessed March 6, 2019).
25 Bon Tempo, At America's Gates, 203–4.
26 Bon Tempo, At America's Gates, 203; Nguyen, Tram, We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11 (Boston, MA, 2005); 203Google Scholar; García, María Cristina, The Refugee Challenge in Post–Cold War America (New York, 2017), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Bon Tempo, At America's Gates, 203–4.
28 “Taking Names,” This American Life, June 28, 2013, https://www.thisamericanlife.org/499/taking-names (accessed Feb. 18, 2019).
29 Bon Tempo, “Refugees, Asylees, and Immigrants,” 1535; García, The Refugee Challenge in Post–Cold War America, 142–5.
30 Bon Tempo, At America's Gates, 205.
31 García, The Refugee Challenge in Post-Cold War America, 156.
32 Ibid., 154.
33 Ibid., 157.
34 Alicia Parlapiano, “The Travel Ban Has Been Upheld. Here are Some of Its Effects So Far.” New York Times, June 27, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/27/us/politics/trump-travel-ban-effects.html (accessed Feb. 19, 2019).
35 Outside the scope of this essay but relevant is what might be considered a parallel history of U.S. citizens who have migrated around the world to build and work in fortified U.S. settlements. Blower, Brooke L., “Nation of Outposts: Forts, Factories, Bases, and the Making of American Power,” Diplomatic History 41, no. 3 (June 2017): 439–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
36 Ngai, Impossible Subjects; Poblete, Joanna, Islanders in the Empire: Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawai‘i (Urbana, IL, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Greene, Julie, “Moveable Empire: Labor Migration, U.S. Global Power, and the Remaking of the Americas,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15, no. 1 (Jan. 2016): 4–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fernandez, Lilia, “Of Migrants and Immigrants: Mexican and Puerto Rican Labor Migration in Comparative Perspective, 1942–1964,” Journal of American Ethnic History 29, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 6–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
37 Lorraine Boissoneault, “Puerto Ricans Got U.S. Citizenship 100 Years Ago—But Their Identity Remains Fraught,” March 7, 2017, Smithsonian.com, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/100-years-ago-puerto-ricans-got-us-citizenship-it-only-made-things-more-complicated-180962412/ (accessed Feb. 18, 2019).
38 Shannon Collins, “Puerto Ricans Represented Throughout U.S. Military History,” U.S. Department of Defense, October 14, 2016, https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/974518/puerto-ricans-represented-throughout-us-military-history/ (accessed Feb. 18, 2019); Harry Franqui-Rivera and Monique Aviles, “The Puerto Rican Experience in the U.S. Military: A Century of Unheralded Service,” CUNY Hunter Centro Center for Puerto Rican Studies, https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/digital-humanities/pr-military/puerto-rican-experience-us-military-century-unheralded-service (accessed Feb. 18, 2019).
39 Espiritu, Yen Le, Home Bound: Filipino Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries (Berkeley, CA, 2003), 27–31Google Scholar; H. G. Reza, “Navy to Stop Recruiting Filipino Nationals,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 27, 1992, http://articles.latimes.com/1992-02-27/local/me-3911_1_filipino-sailors (accessed Feb. 18, 2019).
40 On the bracero program see Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects; Cohen, Deborah, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010)Google Scholar; Loza, Mireya, Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kang, The INS on the Line.
41 On the H2 visa program, see Hahamovitch, Cindy, No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton, NJ, 2011)Google Scholar. The H2 visa program began in 1943.
42 Azuma, Eiichiro, “Japanese Agricultural Labor Program: Temporary Worker Immigration, US-Japan Cultural Diplomacy, and Ethnic Community Making Among Japanese Americans,” in Marinari, Maddalena, Hsu, Madeline Y., and García, María Cristina, eds., A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: U.S. Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924–1965 (Urbana, IL, 2019), 162–86Google Scholar; Loza, Mireya, “The Japanese Agricultural Workers' Program: Race, Labor, and Cultural Diplomacy in the Fields, 1956–1965,” Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 4 (Nov. 2017), 661–690CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
43 Azuma, “Japanese Agricultural Labor Program,” in Marinari, Hsu, and García, eds., A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered, 162–86; Loza, “The Japanese Agricultural Workers' Program,” 661–90.
44 Laney, Monique, German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past During the Civil Rights Era (New Haven, CT, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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46 Ibid., 71.
47 Ibid., 72, 131–2. The 1945 War Brides Act, a.k.a. G.I. Brides Act (Public Law 271), admitted 114,000 women outside the quotas. Public Laws 471 and 450 (1946 Fiancées Act and its 1948 extension) widened its predecessor to include the betrothed. Public Laws 213 (1947) and 717 (1950) granted temporary ingress to “racially inadmissible” (i.e., Asian) spouses.
48 Ibid., 132–3. Zeiger notes the American Legion supported the loopholes for racially ineligible military brides.
49 This followed the precedence set by Congress's repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1943 as a goodwill gesture to China, the United States' Pacific ally during World War II. See Oyen, Meredith, The Diplomacy of Migration: Transnational Lives and the Making of U.S.–Chinese Relations in the Cold War (Ithaca, NY, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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53 Zeiger, Entangling Alliances, 206–14. Arissa Oh explains that Korean law stipulated citizenship passed from father to child, so babies fathered by U.S. G.I.s were rendered “stateless nonpersons who would never find legal or social acceptance.” Oh, To Save the Children of Korea, 7.
54 Oh, To Save the Children of Korea, 8, 127–37. White Americans were more hesitant to adopt Korean-black children.
55 Ibid., 2, 95–8, 203–6. The U.S. government refused to issue visas for children adopted by single parents including widows, widowers, and unmarried people.
56 Varzally, Allison, Children of Reunion: Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Family Migrations (Chapel Hill, NC, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Not all Vietnamese children adopted by Americans were G.I. babies.
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59 Lipman, “‘The Face is the Roadmap,’” 40–1, 47–53.
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62 Kramer critiques the notion of “exchange” as a misleading one in several ways: they were seldom two-way (with the exception of Europe, U.S. students generally did not visit the home countries of foreign exchange students); and the geopolitical power dynamics shaping them were “deeply asymmetrical.” Kramer, “Is the World Our Campus?,” 778–9.
63 Kramer, “Is the World Our Campus?,” 796.
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70 Sherry, “War as a Way of Life,” 4.
71 Zolberg, A Nation by Design, 1.
72 Chavez, Leo, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (Stanford, CA, 2013)Google Scholar, is a deep dive into the case of Latinx migrants.
73 Gabaccia, Foreign Relations, 59–60.
74 Neuman, Gerald L., Strangers to the Constitution: Immigrants, Borders, and Fundamental Law (Princeton, NJ, 1996), 35–6Google Scholar. The states were Georgia (1793), South Carolina (1794), and North Carolina (1795).
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76 Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 18–9, 59, 237–8; Marinari, Maddalena, “Divided and Conquered: Immigration Reform Advocates and the Passage of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act,” Journal of American Ethnic History 35, no. 3 (Spring 2016): 9–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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81 Hernández, Migra!, 17–82; Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.–Mexico Border, 11–2.
82 Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.–Mexico Border, 14–5; Kang, The INS on the Line, 159.
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95 Lipman, Guantánamo, 206–7.
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99 Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.–Mexico Border, 66, 128–9, 132; Mendoza, “Caging Out, Caging In.”
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104 American Immigration Council, “Fact Sheet: The Cost of Immigration Enforcement.” On ICE, see Carly Goodman, “Angry that ICE is ripping families apart? Don't just blame Trump. Blame Clinton, Bush and Obama too.” Washington Post Made By History, June 11, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/06/11/angry-that-ice-is-ripping-families-apart-dont-just-blame-trump-blame-clinton-bush-and-obama-too/?utm_term=.c159f86c9b09 (accessed Feb. 18, 2019).
105 American Immigration Council, “Fact Sheet: The Cost of Immigration Enforcement.”
106 Kang, The INS on the Line, 168.
107 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “Fiscal Year 2017 ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Report,” https://www.ice.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report/2017/iceEndOfYearFY2017.pdf (accessed Feb. 18, 2019); Livia Luan, “Profiting from Enforcement: The Role of Private Prisons in U.S. Immigration Detention,” Migration Policy Institute, May 2, 2018 https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/profiting-enforcement-role-private-prisons-us-immigration-detention (accessed Feb. 18, 2019).
108 Luan, “Profiting from Enforcement.” Luan notes that in 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Jennings v. Rodriguez that detained migrants are not entitled to periodic bond hearings—in other words, that they can be held indefinitely without chances for bail.
109 Torrie Hester, “Deportability and the Carceral State,” at 141.
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113 A starting point on Southeast Asian deportations is Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, “The Devastating Impact of Deportation on Southeast Asian Americans,” April 15, 2018, https://www.searac.org/resource-hub/immigration/resources-toolkits-immigration/the-devastating-impact-of-deportation-on-southeast-asian-americans/ (accessed March 6, 2019). On the deportation of Central Americans by the United States and Mexico, see Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas and Victoria Rietig, “Migrants Deported from the United States and Mexico to the Northern Triangle: A Statistical and Socioeconomic Profile,” Migration Policy Institute, Sept. 2015, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/migrants-deported-united-states-and-mexico-northern-triangle-statistical-and-socioeconomic (accessed Feb. 18, 2019). In the case of the United States, Cecilia Manjivar, Leisy J. Abrego, and Leah Schmalzbauer note that Guatemalan, Honduran, and Salvadoran immigrants (alongside Mexican immigrants) are “vastly overrepresented among detainees and deportees.” See Manjivar, , et al. Immigrant Families (Cambridge, UK, 2016)Google Scholar.
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123 Minutemen Civil Defense Corps press release, June 28, 2006, reprinted in Ngai, Mae M. and Gjerde, Jon, eds., Major Problems in American Immigration History, 2nd ed. (Boston, 2013), 585–6Google Scholar.
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127 On DACA, see National Immigration Law Center, “Status of Current DACA Legislation,” updated February 7, 2019, https://www.nilc.org/issues/daca/status-current-daca-litigation/ (accessed March 6, 2019). For updated TPS information, see U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, “Temporary Protected Status,” https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/temporary-protected-status (accessed March 6, 2019).
128 The White House, “It's Time to End Chain Migration,” Dec. 15, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/time-end-chain-migration/ (accessed Feb. 18, 2019); Donald J. Trump, State of the Union Address, Jan. 30, 2018, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trumps-state-union-address/ (accessed Feb. 18, 2019).
129 In December 2018, the federal government identified 2,737 children who had been separated under Trump's “zero tolerance” policy but also admitted that the total number is “unknown” due to the absence of formalized tracking mechanisms. Miriam Jordan, “Family Separation May Have Hit Thousands More Migrant Children Than Reported,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/us/family-separation-trump-administration-migrants.html (accessed Feb. 18, 2019); Elizabeth Oglesby, “Another Migrant Child Death, We Need a Border Truth Commission,” The Hill, Dec. 27, 2018, https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/423057-another-migrant-child-death-we-need-a-border-truth-commission (accessed Feb. 18, 2019).
130 Dara Lind, “Denaturalization, Explained: How Trump Can Strip Immigrants of Their Citizenship,” Vox, July 18, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/7/18/17561538/denaturalization-citizenship-task-force-janus (accessed Feb. 18, 2019); Masha Gessen, “In America, Naturalized Citizens No Longer Have an Assumption of Permanence,” New Yorker, June 18, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/in-america-naturalized-citizens-no-longer-have-an-assumption-of-permanence (accessed Feb. 18, 2019).
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133 Michael D. Shear and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “Trump Sending 5,200 Troops to the Border in an Election-Season Response to Migrants,” New York Times, Oct. 29, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/us/politics/border-security-troops-trump.html (accessed Feb. 18, 2019).
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135 W. J. Hennigan, “Pentagon Sends Troops to Texas Border as Trump Again Raises Fears About Caravans,” Time, Feb. 6, 2019, http://time.com/5523065/pentagon-sends-troops-to-texas-border-as-trump-again-raises-fears-about-caravans/ (accessed Feb. 18, 2019).
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147 Jason Lemon, “Donald Trump Has Doubled Rejection Rate for Veterans Requesting Family Deportation Protections,” Newsweek, July 5, 2018, https://www.newsweek.com/trump-doubled-rejection-rate-veterans-requesting-family-deportation-1010571 (accessed Feb. 18, 2019); Horton, “The Pentagon Promised Citizenship to Immigrants Who Served”; Laignee Barron, “US Army Veteran Deported to Mexico After 2 Tours in Afghanistan,” Time, Mar. 26, 2018, http://time.com/5215153/army-veteran-deported-tammy-duckworth/(accessed Feb. 18, 2019).
148 Edwidge Danticat, Foreword to Nguyen, We Are All Suspects Now, xi.
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