Our immigration policy is always white supremacy
On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, resulting in the removal and imprisonment of Japanese people— immigrants and U.S.-born — from areas “lying to the west of [the] Cascade and Sierra Nevada Mountains in Washington, Oregon and California”.
FDR issued the order, which invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, at the recommendation of Lt. General John L. DeWitt, who oversaw the purge and incarceration. Attempting to justify this domestic war crime, DeWitt claimed that “along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies, of Japanese extraction, are at large today. There are indications that these are organized and ready for concerted action at a favorable opportunity. The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”
In 1988, Congress agreed to pay each victim of the “internment” $20,000 in reparations, a gesture toward justice. Unfortunately, the profound and perpetual American desire to marginalize non-white people remains. And citing targeted people’s declarations of innocence and lack of criminality as evidence of guilt hasn’t yet fallen out of style.
Last month, once again invoking the Colonial Era’s Alien Enemies Act, the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelans, accusing them of being members of Tren de Aragua (TdA), a criminal gang Venezuelan officials say has been defunct since 2023. In a sworn statement attempting to justify this purge, acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office director Robert Cerna claimed, “The lack of criminal record does not indicate that they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their association with TdA, the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”
The goal of U.S. immigration policy has always been maintaining white supremacy — at least according to the lawmakers who’ve written it. The first law here of its kind, the 1790 Naturalization Act, exclusively applied to “free white person(s).” In 1882, powerful bigots came right out and named another immigration law the Chinese Exclusion Act. It barred Chinese immigrant laborers from entering this country for 10 years. That law was expanded upon in 1888 with the Scott Act, later affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1889. Three years later, in case anyone missed the point, there was the Act to Prohibit the Coming of Chinese Persons into the United States.
The 1917 Immigration Act created an “Asiatic barred zone” that included brown-skinned places like British India, a whole lot of Southeast Asia and the Middle East. It also included Jim Crow-style literacy tests for the Europeans who weren’t yet permitted to be white.
The 1921 Emergency Quota Act set limits on the number of “Asiatics” and not-yet-whites permitted to come live here, and those limits were further tightened by the 1924 National Origins Quota Act.
World War II messed with the wallets of the wealthy, creating “labor shortages,” so in 1942 — the same year as Executive Order 9066 — the Bracero Agreement recruited Mexican nationals to enter the U.S. as agricultural workers. And some reasonably humane steps were taken after the war. The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 allowed the entrance of over 200,000 victims of Nazi displacement.
President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act permitting some agricultural workers to apply for permanent-resident status after laboring here for 90 days. But Bill Clinton’s 1994 criminalization bill re-injected white supremacy into our immigration system, giving the Attorney General power to bypass deportation proceedings. This is what now gives Secretary of State Marco Rubio permission to arrest, imprison and attempt to deport former Columbia University graduate student and anti-genocide activist Mahmoud Khalil.
Then there’s the bipartisan 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which hinders immigrants’ ability to legally enter the country and to subsequently attain legal status. IIRIRA also made stripping immigrants of their status and deporting them far easier. This made crossing the border far more dangerous, so getting in usually meant staying in. Compared with the previous decade, there was a 350 percent increase in the number of people living here without authorization in the decade following IIRIRA.
George W. Bush’s Patriot Act aimed national white supremacy at anyone appearing to be Middle Eastern in heritage through mass surveillance, countless detentions and senseless deportations. Under Obama, nicknamed the Deporter in Chief, ICE opened a vigilante school called the Citizen’s Academy, the operation of which coincided with a sharp rise in immigrant deaths along the Southern border. Trump ran on a Muslim ban and border wall. One of the chief architects of Clinton’s criminalization bill, Joe Biden, kept building that wall and deported more people than Trump. Now Trump is back and ICE is disappearing brown people across the country in broad daylight.
As of this writing, ICE has reportedly abducted at least six people living in Maine. We can’t run from it even here, so join local mutual-aid groups and rapid-response teams. Donate, get organized, and please remember that this is bigger that any elected official or political party. These battles are only symptoms. What we’re really fighting is white supremacy.
Samuel James also writes “Banned Histories of Race in America” at samuelj.substack.com.
