Why Some Californians Struggle to Support Anti-Immigration Agendas, Part One: History

As a Californian who grew up in the border county of San Diego and now lives in the North San Diego city of Vista, which is approximately 50% Latinx, I’ve thought a lot about U.S. immigration policy. I’ve long had an aversion to anti-immigration rhetoric and enforcement and recent events have led me to reflect on why I personally struggle with the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, especially when I strongly believe in the rule of law in general. Over the years, I’ve had to comply with immigration policies in the five foreign countries I’ve lived and worked in, and I am a firm believer in upholding the U.S. Constitution. Thus, it can be difficult for me to reconcile this concept of myself as a rules follower with my views on immigration policy.

To better articulate my reasoning, I will be writing a series of three essays, of which this is the first. My goal is to shed light on why many Californians, including myself, have difficulty supporting anti-immigration agendas. For me, the reasons can be encapsulated within three overarching concepts: History, Humanity, and Hypocrisy.

Part 1: History

I was in elementary school when I came to the realization that my place in the world was based on the pure luck of having been born on this side of the U.S. border into white, albeit freckled, skin. This epiphany was escorted into my growing understanding of the world by a number of factors, one of which was my introduction to the history of the United States. 

Learning about slavery and the Civil Rights Movement and how children were treated differently because of the color of their skin, I realized how lucky I was to be born white in America. One of the first short stories I remember writing was flipping the script and imagining a planet where the majority of people were black and it was the whites who were treated poorly. (1) This empathy and ability to imagine the shoe on the other foot was inherent in me from childhood, which is why I find it so difficult to grasp why others lack the ability to do so.

A look at American history teaches us that we are all immigrants. According to geographical theories of migration, even the indigenous people at one time migrated up from Africa through Europe and eventually to the Americas across the Bering Strait. Migrating is a part of the human DNA. Humans have migrated as long as we have existed in search of better opportunities and a desire to feed ourselves and our families. Yet, if anyone has a claim to America First, it is certainly the Native Americans. European Americans were the original invaders. We came in our ships across oceans with our small pox and diseases. Our entire nation's origin story is deeply mired in our immigration story. Our annual celebration of Thanksgiving in remembrance of the welcome Europeans received as early immigrants is only one example of this. 

While some of my own personal ancestors migrated to this continent some 200 years ago, others of them, including my maternal great grandparents, came just a century ago from the Balkans.

My great grandmother, upon arriving to the U.S. would have been greeted by the Statue of Liberty inscribed with a poem by Emma Lazarus. “New Colossus” written in 1883 embodies the American spirit of immigration: 

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,With conquering limbs astride from land to land;Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall standA mighty woman with a torch, whose flameIs the imprisoned lightning, and her nameMother of Exiles. From her beacon-handGlows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes commandThe air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame."Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries sheWith silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

All of our lives we have lived with the symbol of Lady Liberty as the Mother of Exiles with a “world-wide welcome” for the “tired,” “poor,” “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Yet, as my great grandparents were setting sail for the U.S. from Croatia in hopes of being welcomed by the Mother of Exiles, the U.S. was already passing anti-Asian immigration laws across the nation, prohibiting people from China and surrounding countries from entering the U.S. The Chinese Exclusion Act was imposed to prevent Chinese competition with white immigrants, especially in places like California where after helping build the Transcontinental Railroad Chinese workers found success as entrepreneurs or in agriculture. European Americans saw their success as a threat.

Thus, while the wait to enter the U.S. at Ellis Island from Europe was typically a matter of hours, across the nation at Angel Island in California, immigration processing could take weeks, months, or even years due to efforts to keep out Asian immigrants. Again, the origin of my ancestors made me lucky – if one can consider a racist system working in my favor luck rather than deliberate intention. The laws also illustrated how the New Colossus of America came to resemble the giant Colossus of European myth after all - its conquering limbs astride the land.

The U.S. didn’t put its first restrictions on immigration from Europe until 1924, when it established quotas for each country based on a skewed census of the ethnic make up of the U.S. at that time. The census didn’t include formerly enslaved populations or people of Asian descent. Asian immigration was still blocked, and blacks, despite legal protections, were still treated as less than human, meaning African immigration quotas were not a reflection of the actual American population. The reason for the quotas was explicit, “The composition of our population will not change in the future decades in the same way in which it changed between 1885 and the outbreak of the World War.” The United States would then become “a more homogeneous nation” and a “vastly better place to live in.” In other words, back in the 1920s white Americans were worried about making America not only white, but what they considered the “right” kind of white. 

I say the word “making” rather than “keeping” with intention. While we perpetuate this narrative of America being the majority white, it wasn’t “white” when colonizers moved here from Europe. Once slavery was institutionalized in the South, blacks greatly outnumbered the whites in that region, but were counted, thanks to the flawed compromises in our Constitution, as less than full humans, obliterating representation. The Southwest wasn’t white when the U.S. annexed it in 1848 and the Gold Rush and railroads brought the Chinese by the tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans also immigrated to the U.S. before 1900. Before my grandparents did. The immigration caps of the 1920s were based on racism, eugenics, and xenophobia, ranking the value of human beings by the countries they were from. They also led to the U.S. refusing entry to Jewish people fleeing the Holocaust. 

Essentially, Europeans, Chinese, Mexican, Japanese and Filipino immigrants all came to California in search of work and opportunities. The difference between white immigrants and non-white immigrants was that white, English-speaking immigrants then established laws discriminating against other types of immigrants to create an unfair advantage. 

My family hadn’t yet migrated to California when my grandmother was born, but a few years before her birth in 1917 California enacted the Alien Land Act of 1913 which prevented Asian immigrants and their American born children from owning land in California, so even if they managed to overcome the Chinese Exclusion Act and get through Angel Island, opportunities for Asian Americans to make the best of the American Dream were that much more difficult. 

Similarly, Californios (turned Mexican-American when the U.S. seized California by force) faced racialized taxes and legal challenges aimed at making it harder for them to succeed. Immediately after California became part of the U.S. in 1848, white European American immigrants streamed into the state  by the hundreds of thousands in search of gold and related opportunities. They then enacted racist laws installing a “foreign tax” on Californios, the newly naturalized Mexican-Americans, who were made U.S. citizens when the U.S. took over California. This made it more expensive for Californios to claim mines. The “foreign tax” against the population that had already been in California was not only deeply ironic, but put locals at a disadvantage to the white American immigrants.  Additionally, English-speaking immigrants began enacting laws that took away land from Californios whose families had long been cultivating and ranching on it. The new laws seized land that had been granted but poorly recorded by the Mexican government years earlier. Land bought at a time when few were interested in cultivating it. Immigration of white European Americans changed all that.

Whenever white America sees another population as a threat to their advantages, it seeks to pass laws or enforce laws to hinder other group’s successes. The irony of this is that white Americans don’t want to work for the wages that immigrant workers are forced to accept. Anti-immigration lawmakers characterize immigrants as living off the  system, while creating conditions that make it impossible for workers to make a living wage. 

When Chinese immigration was restricted, skilled Japanese farm workers took the place of the Chinese in California’s agricultural industry until the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 when immigration quotas were established to further prevent Asian immigration. Another group of immigrants to the western U.S. in the early 1900s came as a result of the U.S. purchase of the Philippines in 1898. Between 1906 and 1935, over 100,000 Filipinos moved to Hawaii and other states, with a numerous amount of the immigrants ending up in the agriculture and canning industries. While many hoped to make money and move back to the Philippines, they soon discovered that the work didn’t pay enough to make the return trip. When the Philippines started to gain independence in 1934, Filipinos went from being American nationals to aliens and faced a great deal of discrimination including restrictions on owning land  or marrying outside their race. 

For many decades, migrant farm workers from Mexico traveled to California and other agricultural areas for the harvest and generally returned home to Mexico when the work was finished. However, when the Dust Bowl in the 1930s brought hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the midwest, the job losses of white workers during the Great Depression led to greater immigration enforcement and pushed tens of thousands of Mexicans to repatriate.

By the end of the Great Depression, the U.S. was inviting Mexican workers back to the fields. World War II led to a shortage of agricultural workers, so the U.S. and Mexico entered into an agreement for workers from Mexico to work the fields as part of the Bracero program, heralding in millions of Mexican workers for the 19 years of the program and increasing the trend of migration across the border. U.S. farmers hired hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers through this program, and hired just as many undocumented workers, because they could exploit their undocumented status and treat them more poorly. As a result workers were living and working in unsanitary conditions without running water or bathrooms.

Union groups called for an end to the Bracero program in order to bring all of the workers together in an effort to better conditions and pay for all. Many Filipinos joined the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) to organize for better working conditions. Led by Larry Itliong and Ben Hines, the AWOC imposed the Delano Grape Strike in order for all workers to get paid the same wages as those established under the Bracero program at all of the vineyards where they were harvesting. The strike was joined by Cesar Chavez and the United Farmer Workers, an organization that had a much larger Mexican American population.

When the Bracero program ended, it was thought that this would open up these jobs for more Americans. However, there were about “590,000 unemployed people in California, which should have been plenty to cover the 70,000 people who were needed to do stoop labor in the agricultural industry, but the nature of the work and the wages that were that were offered meant that a lot of these jobs went unfilled and tons of

fruits and vegetables rotted in the fields.”

Despite the end of the Bracero program in the 1960s the U.S. continues to benefit from migrant labor in agriculture, construction and other industries. The only person that seemed surprised to learn this was President Donald Trump in his recent admission, "Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.” 

Mexicans and other immigrants are flooding to the U.S. to find jobs, because the jobs are available here. While the majority of white Americans become increasingly detached from our food sources, Mexicans and other immigrants are bringing their agricultural skills and willingness to do hard manual labor to the fields. Eighty percent of California's agricultural workforce, more than 200,000 agricultural workers, are foreign born. Over half of the agricultural workers in Oregon, Washington, Florida, and North Carolina come from other countries. Which is not in any way to say that immigrants should be limited to these employment opportunities, but rather that people are finding work in the U.S. which is why they come here regardless of legal status, and as hard-working members of our society, migrants make up our communities.  

The post-World War II era, which led to an economic boom, and shortage of workers in the U.S. also led to the lifting of the ban on Asian immigration. In 1952 after almost 75 years of discrimination in immigration, the U.S. adjusted its caps on the number of people it admitted, though numbers still favored European immigration. This change reflects not only an economic demand, but an example of how travel, in this case the United States’ engagement in the war in the Pacific, helps to humanize people of other nations and how military service can be an equalizer. (2)

For those wondering, today’s immigration numbers, caps and quotas, give preferences to immediate relatives of U.S. citizens and skilled workers with every country given the same number of visas, regardless of country population. So that “the Marshall Islands, with a population of 42,000 people, and India, with a population of 1.4 billion” have the same number of green cards available. The backlog of Visa requests from Mexico is over a million meaning that it could take up to 25 years to get approval for immediate relatives to enter the U.S. legally, and by that time one’s aging father who needs care or mother who can help watch school children while their parents work, may no longer be around for a difference to be made.

California has long represented the American Dream, hence the myriad of songs dedicated to it like “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas and the Papas. My own father moved his then five kids to San Diego from Detroit, Michigan back in 1979 when I was three months old. He was chasing the dream of sunshine and job opportunities. Just like the immigrants who have come from China, Japan, the Philippines and Mexico.

When it comes to immigration, particularly in the west, the characterization of immigrants from Mexico and Latin America as invaders doesn’t sit well with us because of all of this history. We know Europeans invaded the American continents. We know the U.S. went to war and conquered California and the Southwest. We know that once white European immigrants became interested in California, they deliberately passed racist laws that limited legal opportunities for non-whites to live and own land here. We know that the minute the U.S. needs workers we turn to Mexico for cheap labor and invite them over the border. American industries then exploit these immigrants and subject them to discriminatory practices. Then, when workers demand to be treated as human beings and included in society, we demonize them. Our national and state histories are founded on immigration and the quest for a better life, which is why demonizing immigrants feels for so many of us like a demonization of all of us. 

For many of us Californians, our immigration problem is not that the undocumented immigrants are here contributing their hard work to our society and doing the labor that puts food on our tables and helps build our nation.  It is rather that they are left without legal status when the nation depends on these members of our society to keep our industries running smoothly. Thus, the solution is not to militarize deportations, but rather put those financial resources towards providing Visas for our community members. Rather than our society trying to shape itself around outdated immigration laws, we would like to see laws written that reflect the realities of our societies. 

Footnotes

 1. To be honest, even though I’d learned about black people being enslaved in Africa back in elementary school, I don’t think it was until I actually stepped foot on West African soil for the first time, that I realized how funny it was that at 7 years old, I thought I had to travel through space to find a paradigm so completely opposite to the one I’d grown up in.

 2. Of course, I also want to acknowledge the complexity of these relationships with women of other races and from more impoverished and war torn nations being exoticized and infantilized in cases. There is still a great deal of ethnocentrism and belief by American soldiers that they are “rescuing” women from less worthy societies and that they should be grateful and subservient to their rescuers. Additionally, the military still has a long way to go towards leadership representing the general population. Finally, war in some cases increases the racism through propaganda that demonizes races and not merely governments of countries we fight against.

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