To Be An American. Bill Ong Hing

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СКАЧАТЬ Americans disoriented and ostracized. Sent out into the white world, they were spurned because of their facial features and class status, notwithstanding their “Americanization.” Those who returned to the reservation found themselves in a foreign and unfamiliar cultural landscape.²²

      Eventually, private access to Native American lands declined and the impetus for assimilation correspondingly diminished. The movement also faltered in part because of the emergence of a racist perspective that Native Americans could not attain the level of accomplishment of the white race. Other factors which led to the termination of the assimilation programs included the fading of religious and scientific transcendent ethics, the increasing secularization of society, and studies by anthropologists and ethnologists which contributed to the public’s awareness of the depth, complexity, and uniqueness of the Native American cultures. In the 1920s, white artists and intellectuals from Taos and Santa Fe rallied behind the Pueblo tribes to oppose legislation that would have aided white squatters in their land claims against the Pueblos; their success awakened much of the country to the values of Native American culture and to the threat posed by the ongoing policies of assimilation.²³

      Nativist sentiment eventually caught up with Mexicans by the time of the Great Depression. Not surprisingly, the popular criticism of Mexican nationals was economic in tone—their high-paying jobs would be freed up for native workers if they were removed. Thousands of Mexicans were deported and thousands more were pressured to leave. Between 1930 and 1940, the Mexican-born population in the United States declined from 639,000 to 377,000. The protection-of-the-labor-market reasoning was used against Mexicans again in 1954, when “Operation Wetback” was implemented by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the midst of the post-Korean War recession and over a million undocumented Mexicans were deported.²⁴

      SPURNING CATHOLICS AND OTHER SOUTHERN AND EASTERN EUROPEANS

      As economic conditions in western Europe improved in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigration from Germany, the United Kingdom, and Ireland declined. But at the same time, immigration from southern and eastern Europe rapidly increased. During the first decade of the twentieth century, which remains the decade that witnessed the greatest immigration to the United States, 1.5 million immigrants entered from Russia and another 2 million from Italy and Austria-Hungary. The constant flow of Italians, Russians, and Hungarians fueled racial nativism and anti-Catholicism. This culminated in passage of the Act of February 5, 1917, which contained a controversial literacy requirement that excluded aliens who could not “read and understand some language or dialect.”

      The reactionary, isolationist political climate that followed World War I, manifested in the Red Scare of 1919–20, led to even greater exclusionist demands. The landmark Immigration Act of 1924, opposed by only six senators, once again took direct aim at southern and eastern Europeans whom the Protestant majority in the United States viewed with dogmatic disapproval. The arguments advanced in support of the bill stressed recurring themes: racial superiority of Anglo-Saxons, the fact that immigrants would cause the lowering of wages, and the unassimilability of foreigners, while citing the usual threats to the nation’s social unity and order posed by immigration.

      The act restructured criteria for admission to respond to nativist demands and represented a general selection policy that remained in place until 1952. It provided that immigrants of any particular country be limited to 2 percent of their nationality in 1890. The law struck most deeply at Jews, Italians, Slavs, and Greeks, who had immigrated in great numbers after 1890, and who would be most disfavored by such a quota system.

      RENEWING THE ATTACK ON MEXICANS

      The national origins quota system and statutory vestiges of Asian exclusion laws were abolished in the 1965 amendments to the immigration laws. But by the time I started practicing immigration law as a legal services attorney ten years later, the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment particularly directed at Mexicans was conspicuous. I went to the local INS office in San Francisco on a daily basis to represent people in custody, most of whom were Mexican. Although INS employees acknowledged that Mexicans did not make up the majority of undocumented aliens in the country, Mexicans were targeted by INS sweeps. Even in the mid-1970s, exclusionists were advancing a labor displacement theory, and Congress was considering an employer sanction law that was referred to as the Rodino Bill. Exclusionists constantly complained about undocumented workers coming across the U.S.-Mexico border, and the Commissioner of the INS routinely alleged that 12 million undocumented aliens were in the United States. INS agents and officers whined about how we were all going to have to learn Spanish unless something was done.

      In truth, restrictions on Mexican immigration were initiated even in 1965. Between 1965 and 1976, while the rest of the world enjoyed an expansion of numerical limitations and a definite preference system, Mexico and the Western Hemisphere were suddenly faced with numerical restrictions for the first time. Additionally, while the first-come, first-served basis for immigration sounded fair, applicants had to meet strict labor certification requirements. Of course, waivers of the labor certification requirement were obtainable for certain applicants, such as parents of U.S. citizen children. As one might expect given the new numerical limitations, by 1976 the procedure resulted in a severe backlog of approximately three years and a waiting list with nearly 300,000 names.²⁵

      During the 1965–76 experience, two noteworthy things happened. First, Mexicans used about 40,000 of the Western Hemisphere’s allocation of 120,000 visas annually. Second, during this eleven-year period, the State Department wrongfully subtracted about 150,000 visas from the Western Hemisphere quota and gave them to Cuban refugees.²⁶

      In 1977, Congress imposed the preference system on Mexico and the Western Hemisphere along with a 20,000 visa per country numerical limitation. Thus, Mexico’s annual visa usage rate was virtually cut in half overnight, and thousands were left stranded on the old system’s waiting list.²⁷ The eleven-year misallocation of visas to Cuba eventually led to a permanent injunction and a “recapturing” of the wrongfully issued visas in Silva v. Levi.²⁸ However, Mexicans again received the short end of the stick when the State Department’s formula for reallocation, which failed to provide sufficient visas for thousands of Mexicans on the Silva waiting list, was upheld. As a result, in February 1982 INS authorities began to round up those Silva letter recipients who had not been accorded immigrant visa numbers in order to advise them of the termination of the Silva injunction against their deportation and the end of their work authorization derived from their Silva letter class status. The recipients were further informed that unless provisions of the existing immigration law qualified them to remain in the United States, they would have thirty days for voluntary departure. Because of the public outrage, as of August 20, 1982, the INS ceased to enforce departure in cases involving former Silva letter recipients subject to deportation or exclusion proceedings. However on February 1, 1983, the Enforcement Branch of the INS ordered that the processing of Silva letter recipients be resumed.²⁹

      To make matters worse, in the first year of the preference system and the 20,000 limitation on countries of the Western Hemisphere, Mexico lost 14,000 visas due to a congressional mistake. The effective date of the new law was January 1, 1977. Since the government’s fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30, by January 1, one full quarter of fiscal year 1977 had expired. During that first quarter, 14,203 visas were issued to Mexicans pursuant to the immigration system which prevailed in the Western Hemisphere before the new law became effective. The State Department СКАЧАТЬ