Does Racism Dictate Immigration?

The Lessons of History Reveal Racism is the Root Cause of Immigration Law

Hispanic News and the Blue Dogs of the Democratic Party begin a new series Racism Against Hispanics with approximately seven parts. This part serves as an introduction by setting the stage for how immigration law has been mandated by pubic opinion. Namely those that are already here pressure Congress to adopt legislation preventing the entry of new immigrants. The cornerstone of all immigration law has been racism beginning with prostitutes, Chinese, Irish, Japanese, non-Anglo-Saxons, non-Protestants and now Latin Americans mostly Mexicans in the United States.

"Americanism" has been defined as the elimination of foreigners, foreign ideologies, and foreign characteristics.

Judge James M. Munley, the Federal District Judge who ruled on the Hazleton Court Case said it best, "More than one hundred years of federal regulation have made the federal supremacy over immigration an intricate affair."

If there is one salient benefactor in all of this, it is the United States Supreme Court whose Supremacy Clause in the United States Constitution provides federal law is the supreme law of the land. Accordingly, the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution invalidates state laws that interfere with or are contrary to federal law.

Of nearly equal importance is the venerable principle of constitutional law that holds all persons in the United States have rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, whether they are citizens or not.

Comprehensive immigration reform failed this year and in all probability will not be introduced until 2013 in the second term of the next president. Without immigration reform, the Dream Act will sit on a shelf as our young drop out of school unable to bear the burden of paying out of state tuition.

More damaging are countless laws now being passed by states and cities that mandate the undocumented can not work without a valid Social Security card. In the forefront of this destructive racism is Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano approving this requirement. Payson, Arizona and Lake Havasu, Arizona, have imposed "clever" ways of racism requiring employers to sign an affidavit attesting all employees have a Social Security card.

The purpose of this series of articles is to bring to the forefront racism is the root cause of all anti-Hispanic bashing. Hispanic News is determined to bring legal action against Payson and Lake Havasu for racist practices. We are also working in other states to end racism against Hispanics —

Jon Garrido

Phoenix (By Jon Garrido, Hispanic News and the Blue Dogs of the Democratic Party. Edited sources identified below) August 22, 2007 — The country of immigrants has long tried to put restrictions on newcomers to keep the nation’s culture from changing. It has never worked. This is the year that leaders in Congress vowed to pass comprehensive immigration reform, addressing the problems for both low-skill and high-skill workers. But so far the effort has seen nothing but setbacks. After introducing a bipartisan proposal in the Senate in May, Senator Edward Kennedy (D – Mass.) saw the legislation get pulled in early June before it could get a full vote. The biggest sticking point is what to do about the undocumented already in the country, estimated at 12 million. While Kennedy’s legislation would allow most of those people the ability to become citizens, anti-immigrant forces have attacked the proposal as “amnesty” for those who have broken American laws.

A crackdown on undocumented workers is underway. Michael Chertoff, secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, announced on August 10 that the federal government would start a nationwide effort to penalize companies that hire undocumented. The drive is expected to hit businesses hardest in labor-intensive industries, such as construction, agriculture, cleaning, and maintenance.

History offers lessons for the present. For nearly 150 years, the U.S. was truly a country of immigrants, letting in almost everyone who wanted to find their future in the land of opportunity. But in the 1920s, the U.S. passed several laws restricting the number of new arrivals, and for decades afterward, an explicit goal was to make sure that immigrants didn’t change the culture of the country. "The history of America is always around trying to control groups that are deemed unfit," says John Carson, a history professor at the University of Michigan.

It never worked

Whether they were Irish or Italian, Russian or Chinese, the newcomers always ended up changing the country, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. The same is true today, as a Latin American wave of immigrants arrive mostly from Mexico. Yet the fundamental character of the U.S. has remained amazingly resilient. The country has grown more diverse in language, food, and customs, but the core principles of freedom, opportunity, and individual rights are unchanged.

In the 1830s and 1840s, a large surge of Irish refugees escaping the potato famine at home descended upon American shores. New York State and Massachusetts tried to limit immigration by passing laws regulating and taxing passenger shipping companies. In both 1849 (the Passenger Cases) and 1876 (Henderson v. New York) the Supreme Court rejected these attempts. In the latter case, Justice Samuel F. Miller declared that the regulation of immigration Was the exclusive right of Congress, and he particularly emphasized that "whenever the statute of a State invades the domain of legislation which belongs exclusively to the Congress of the United States, it is void, no matter under what class of powers it may fall."

In 1845, the great potato rot touched off a mass migration. The disaster eliminated the sole subsistence of millions of peasants, thrusting them over the edge of starvation. For five weary years, the crops remained undependable, and famine swept through the land. Untold thousands perished, and the survivors, destitute of hope, wished only to get away.

The only mode of escape was emigration. Starving families that could not pay landlords faced no alternative but to leave the country in hopes of a better future. And thus the steadily scaling number of Irish who entered the U.S. between 1820 and 1830 skyrocketed in the 1840s. Nearly 2 million came in that decade. The flow persisted increasingly for another five years, as the first immigrants began to earn the means of sending for relatives and friends. The decade after 1855 showed a subside in the movement, but smaller numbers continued to arrive after the Civil War. Altogether, almost 3.5 million Irishmen entered the U.S. between 1820 and 1880.

1875

After several states pushed to control immigration, the Supreme Court declared that regulation of the issue is the responsibility of the federal government.

1882

The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed into law in May, 1882, prohibited Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S. for 10 years. The proposal gained support as large numbers of Chinese arrived in the country, particularly in the West, to work on the railroads and participate in the gold rush.

The Henderson decision came at a time when several states were beginning to show alarm about their alien residents. California, in particular, suffered several years of severe economic depression, which bred resentment on the part of Caucasians about the Chinese in the state who worked for low wages. A working class movement led by Dennis Kearney demanded that "The Chinese Must Go!" and, surprisingly, people from all over the USA enthusiastically endorsed this sentiment. Congress responded with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which proved to be the first of many laws during the next forty-two years that restricted the opportunities of foreigners who wished to settle in this country.

States often wanted to give greater protection to citizens than to aliens and, at first, the Court was quite definite in proclaiming that they could not do so. Later, it retreated from this position. In 1880 San Francisco's Board of Supervisors passed a regulation requiring special permission for individuals to operate laundries in the city. At the time 240 of the 320 laundries were owned and operated by people of Chinese ancestry. As additional individuals began applying for these licenses, the Board of Supervisors turned down the petitions of more than two hundred Chinese persons but quickly granted the requisite permission to eighty non-Chinese applicants. Yick Wo, an alien resident in California for 22 years, took legal action to receive one of the licenses, and his case eventually reached the Supreme Court. Justice Stanley Matthews, in what has become the bedrock opinion granting equal protection of the laws to non-citizens, supported Yick Wo and denounced the administration of the San Francisco ordinance. The Supreme Court thereby established the principle that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution requires states to grant equal protection of the laws to all persons "without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality." Matthews asserted: Though the law itself be fair on its face and impractical in appearance, yet, if it is applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal hand, so as practically to make unjust and illegal discriminations between persons in similar circumstances then this constitutes denial of equal justice.

Yick Wo v. Hopkins: An Arizona statute blatantly discriminated against foreigners in their choice of employment and once again the Supreme Court stood firm. The law called for 80 percent of all workers in any company, corporation, or business to be either qualified electors or native born citizens. As a result of this act, Mike Raich, a citizen of Austria employed as a cook in a Bisbee restaurant, lost his job because 70 percent of the employees there were foreigners. He sued his employer, William Truax, for reinstatement and the case went up to the Supreme Court. Justice Charles Evans Hughes, for the majority, declared state might "deny its lawful inhabitants, because of their race or nationality, the ordinary means of earning a livelihood." He then pointed out: The authority to control immigration-to admit or exclude aliens-is vested solely in the federal government. The assertion of an authority to deny to aliens the opportunity of earning a livelihood when lawfully admitted to the state would be tantamount to the assertion of the right to deny them entrance and abode, for in ordinary cases they cannot live where they cannot work. And if such a policy were permissible, the practical result would be that those lawfully admitted to the county under the authority of the acts of Congress, instead of enjoying in a substantial sense and in their full scope the privileges conferred by the admission, would be segregated in such of the states as chose to offer hospitality.

1917

Congress once again revised its naturalization statutes in 1917 granting the opportunity of applying for citizenship only to free white persons and those of African ancestry. Most Asians had already been barred by earlier legislation. Then in two cases, Ozawa v. U.S. (1922) and U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), the Court ruled that neither Japanese nor Hindus of full Indian blood were Caucasians and hence those people were ineligible for citizenship. The decade beginning with American entry into World War I proved particularly harsh for all nonwhite, non-Anglo-Saxon, and non-Protestants in the United States. "Americanism" came to mean the elimination of foreigners, foreign ideologies, and foreign characteristics and gave rise to, among others, the passage of the Espionage and Sedition Acts in 1917 and 1918, respectively,

1921

With the Emergency Quota Act, the U.S. set for the first time in its nearly 150-year history a limit on the number of new immigrants who could come to the country. The U.S. population was 108 million, and 800,000 immigrants arrived that year.

1924

The National Origins Act was passed, replacing the Emergency Quota Act. Its goal was not only to limit the number of new arrivals to the country, but also to try to ensure that the new immigrants didn’t change the nation’s ethnic makeup. The number of people who could be admitted from any country was limited to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already in the U.S. The legislation was a response to rising immigration from Italy, Hungary, China, Japan, and India. The law’s supporters wanted to maintain the predominant culture of Northern European immigrants and limit competition for jobs.

1927

The National Origins Formula capped immigration from all countries at 150,000, far below the 1 million mark that had been crossed several times in the previous 20 years. Quotas were maintained so new immigrants were granted entry based on the number of people from that country already living in the U.S.

Harry S. Truman, also cared about the welfare of immigrants and aliens — even if his own Court appointees did not always seem equally concerned — and the temper of the United States was undergoing change. The wartime experiences of many adults contributed to the new climate of opinion. The managing editor of Yank, a World War II army publication, wrote in 1945 that many the soldiers that he had known, especially those had served overseas, were conscious of the that changes had to take place in, this country, especially "the need for wiping out racial and religious discrimination." Against the rigidity of the restrictive immigration legislation of the 1920s, one contrast the War Brides Act of 1946 and the Displaced Persons Acts of 1948 and 1950 brought more than 400,000 foreigners to this country-before Truman's tenure in the White House ended in 1953.

1949

Clarke v. Deckenbach, 274 U.S. 392, 396 (1927): Since the justices were willing to approve different treatment for citizens and aliens based on classifications affected with a public interest, and since they acknowledged that local authorities knew more about conditions in their own communities than did the justices in Washington, the Supreme Court upheld the Cincinnati pool room ordinance. Reasoning of this kind also allowed states deny aliens hunting and fishing licenses as well practicing in professions such as law and medicine.

But twenty-one years after Clarke, in the more liberal post-World War II atmosphere toward immigrants and minorities, the Court ostensibly put an end to several blatantly prejudicial state statutes. One case concerned the issuance of fishing licenses to "aliens ineligible for citizenship." Prior 1943, California granted fishing licenses to any qualified person; after Japanese Americans had been relocated inland during World War II, the California Fish and Game Commission adopted a proviso prohibiting the issuance of licenses to "alien Japanese." Two years later, in 1945, the stipulation changed to "persons ineligible for citizenship," although people of Japanese ancestry were obviously the target. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the state argued that the prohibition was basically a fish conservation measure; Justices Frank Murphy and Wiley Rutledge demolished that argument with the observation that the amendment in question came out of a legislative committee concerned with Japanese resettlement problems, not one interested in fish. But Justice Black, for the Court, succinctly argued: It does not follow, as California seems to argue, because the United States regulates immigration and naturalization in part on the basis of race and color classifications, a state can adopt one or more of the same classifications to prevent lawfully admitted aliens within its borders from earning a living in the same way that other state inhabitants earn their living.

Takahashi v. Fish and Game Commission, 334 U.S. 410, 418-419 (1948): That decision defeated the last attempt of any state to bar Asians from lawfully engaging in vocations for which they possessed the necessary skills and qualifications.

The only area in which the Supreme Co had consistently upheld state discrimination against immigrants regarded restrictions against foreigners owning land. As early as 1879, the Supreme Court acknowledged that "by common law, an alien cannot acquire real property" (Phillips v. Moore), and this dictum was repeated several times thereafter. In 1913 California, in one of its periodic crests of anti-Asian feelings, passed a law forbidding "aliens ineligible for citizenship". (i.e. Asians) from acquiring agricultural lands. Many Japanese immigrants evaded this law by buying property for their American-born children and either acting as custodians themselves or hiring non-Asian Americans to manage their children's holdings.

Fred Oyama was born in California in 1928. His father started buying land for him in the 1930s and during the child's minority the elder Oyama served as guardian. In 1942 the federal government evacuated all Japanese persons and Americans of Japanese descent on the West Coast and shipped them to inland relocation centers. While the Oyamas were in one of these centers, the state of California filed a petition with the courts claiming that the elder Oyama had deliberately tried to evade the state's Alien Land Laws by purchasing agricultural grounds in his son's name. The California courts agreed and allowed the state to confiscate Fred Oyama's property. After the Japanese internment ended, Oyama sued to regain his son's property and the case reached the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Fred Vinson delivered the Court's verdict: In our view of the case, the State has discriminated against Fred Oyama; the discrimination is based solely on his parents' country of origin; and there is absent the compelling justification which would be needed to sustain discrimination of that nature. He then went on: Fred Oyama faced at the outset the necessity of overcoming a statutory presumption that conveyances financed by his father and recorded in Fred's name were not gifts at all. Fred was assumed to hold title for the benefit of his parent. Oyama v. California, 332 U.S. 633, 640, 641 (1948) Although the majority of the court was not quite willing to overturn the legality of California's Land. Law (which Congress made unnecessary in 1952 when it granted people of Japanese ancestry the right to become citizens), Justices Murphy and Rutledge called the statute "nothing more than an outright racial discrimination." Congress and the Rights of Aliens in the Post-War Era The Oyama case showed how far both the justices and society had come since the 1920s when both the Court and Americans in general were eager to justify circumscribing the rights of aliens.

1952

The Immigration & Nationality Act maintained the quota system, although it loosened restrictions on immigration from Asia. The legislation also gave the government new powers to bar or deport undocumented if they were suspected of Communist activities.

1965

During the next decade, under the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, Americans witnessed the passage in 1965 of the most liberal immigration bill of the twentieth century. All national quotas were replaced with provisions emphasizing family unification and job needs in the United States; limits of 20,000 emigrants per year from any one country were instituted. The altered stipulations paved the way for more Asians and Southern and Eastern Europeans to enter the United States.

This new spirit of tolerance and welcome pervaded the American scene and once again the Supreme Court seemed to respond to the political atmosphere. Thus when Arizona and Pennsylvania tried to discriminate against aliens in the distribution of welfare benefits, the Court struck those laws from the books. Justice Harry Blackmun, for the majority, reemphasized that all persons were entitled to, equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment. He noted: Classifications based on alienage, like those based on nationality or race, are inherently suspect and subject to close judicial scrutiny. Aliens as a class are a prime example of a "discrete and insular" minority for whom much heightened judicial solitude is appropriate.

The Immigration Act passed this year discontinued the practice of using national origin to determine how many people could enter the country.

1986

The Immigration Reform & Control Act of 1986, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, was supposed to reduce illegal immigration to the U.S. It granted amnesty to those illegal aliens living in the U.S., but imposed stiff penalties on new illegal arrivals and any companies that dared employ them. However, the legislation failed to stop the flow of new immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America.

2007

This is the year that leaders in Congress vowed to pass comprehensive immigration reform, addressing the problems for both low-skill and high-skill workers. But so far the effort has seen nothing but setbacks. After introducing a bipartisan proposal in the Senate in May, Senator Edward Kennedy (D – Mass.) saw the legislation get pulled in early June before it could get a full vote. The biggest sticking point is what to do about the undocumented already in the country, estimated at 12 million. While Kennedy’s legislation would allow most of those people the ability to become citizens, anti-immigrant forces attacked the proposal as “amnesty” for those who have broken American laws. Kennedy and other prominent Senators say they are not giving up and vow to try once more to pass a proposal.

The above was edited from the Hazleton Court Case Ruling by United States District Court Judge James M. Munley and from The Supreme Court and the Rights of Aliens by Leonard Dinnerstein, University of Arizona and from Business Week