Since I moved to New York City five years ago, four of my sisters have gotten married. To four different men. I’m delighted for them but found myself grumbling about the travel on my flight back to New York after the last wedding in early August.
Then I glanced at the news headlines on my phone.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is detaining more people than ever. Another migrant drowned trying to reach El Paso. A Senate committee passed a bill making it harder for Central Americans to apply for asylum.
I remembered then just how easy it is for me to flit in and out of the United States.
Because I’m European and because I’m white, I’m welcome here.
Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, confirmed as much when he rewrote the words on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge”—that is, require some form of public assistance.
In my own case, as an immigrant from Ireland, I filled out some forms and was granted an O-1 visa without much fuss. Now I can come and go, complaining only about jet lag and legroom.
Consider, too, the story of Annie Moore, a seventeen-year-old girl who left my hometown of Cobh, County Cork, back in 1891 to become the first immigrant through the gates of Ellis Island. According to some versions of her arrival story, Moore was deliberately selected by officials there to be the white, English-speaking face of immigration.
Annie was an unaccompanied minor, traveling with her two little brothers. She had no passport, no visa, no particular skills, but she was welcomed with open arms and reunited with her parents.
Of course, you can see the contrast between her treatment then and that of her equivalent today, a Guatemalan girl who has traveled thousands of miles to seek safety and shelter in the United States. The latter is not only less likely to be welcomed, she may be forced to stay in Mexico or detained in a dangerously crowded camp at the U.S. border before being deported.
The United States’ immigration policies have always been racist. Today, we have the Travel Ban 3.0, indefinitely barring people from seven countries. Back then, they had the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which eventually banned almost every Chinese person and many other Asian people from entering the United States. This legislation lasted decades, having been pushed through by Senator John Franklin Miller, Republican of California.
“Forty centuries of Chinese life has made the Chinaman what he is,” Miller told the U.S. Senate in February 1882. “An eternity of years cannot make him such a man as the Anglo-Saxon.”
Miller’s blunt xenophobia is echoed now by another Miller. Trump aide Stephen Miller is reportedly the driving force behind the latest moves to block immigrants of color from poorer countries, from coming to and staying in the United States.
Hidetaka Hirota, author of the 2017 book Expelling the Poor, wrote in a recent op-ed in The Washington Post that laws denying entry to any “convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge,” as the Immigration Act of 1882 read, were actually building on “poor laws” imported by the British in colonial times.
This is just one more step toward reducing all immigration, except perhaps from Trump’s beloved Norway. As Politico has reported, visa denials are increasing across the board, particularly when the applicants are from poorer countries.
In an interview on PRI’s The World, Erika Lee, author of the upcoming book America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States, spoke about the history of the public charge, which she said has always been used as a cover for more racially discriminatory immigration restrictions. “[A]t a time when there has been no other way to restrict immigration,” she said, “immigration officials have used the broad category of ‘likely to become a public charge’ to, in effect, enact racial exclusion.”
I’m one of the lucky immigrants, and my whiteness, like Annie’s, plays a large role in that luck. We were allowed in, and encouraged to stay and make a life here.
Lady Liberty’s lamp has never shone equally for all of us, and that’s a tragedy.