On Monday, Columbia University hosted an online discussion with Dr. Mae Ngai, author of several critically acclaimed books, including Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America and The Chinese Question: The Gold Rush and Global Politics. The discussion, titled ICE and Mass Deportation: The View From History, delves into the American history of immigration.
In recent news, it can be noted that immigrants of all different statuses are being subjected to detention and/or brutality. Ngai notes that all immigrants should be treated the same, and the distinctions that classify an individual as “undocumented” and “legal” should not exist; historical context is the reason for these classifications.
“Why is it that we have all of these different categories of non-normative categories of immigration? Our country has gone through a history of having both open and closed borders…Before World War I, there were really only two main exceptions to open borders: Chinese laborers and then other Asians, and then people who were indigent, classified as insane, criminals, and anarchists,” explained Ngai.
“Other than that, we welcomed immigrants to come to the United States. Between 1880 and 1920, some 20 million people came, mostly from Europe—Italy, Poland, Russia, etc. You didn’t need a passport, you didn’t need a green card, you didn’t need a visa, you just came…We started to have closed borders after World War I…After that, until this day, we have had closed borders,” emphasized Ngai.
After the normative closure of the border in 1924, Congress passed a numerical limit on how many people were permitted to enter the United States. The limit was capped at 150,000 a year, and they used administrative means to deny migrants coming from Mexico visas, while favoring those from Western and Northern European countries. So, this act of 1924 made the crossing of the southern border accessible, but only if migrants did not have papers, which is where the origins of undocumented immigration stem from.
The racism from the act of 1924 went unfavored by the American people, so after World War II, a movement to end the act began, according to Ngai.
“The blatant racism of the 1924 act was very obviously aimed against certain people and favored others. It was opposed by many Americans, and in the years after World War II, there was a strong movement to reform the immigration laws to get rid of the obnoxious act. The 1965 act abolished the National Origin quotas and replaced them with a system of so-called equal quotas,” explained Ngai.
The act of 1965 raised the number of people permitted to enter the United States from 150,000 to 290,000, and this act stated that all countries are equal and receive equal opportunity to enter. However, this created longer waiting times for visas and also established a preference for those who were family members of U.S. citizens.
“These preference categories, family categories, and the unequal, so-called equal quotas, created long lines…For countries consistently maxed out on their quota, and they are Mexico, India, China, and the Philippines, the wait time is 10 to 25 years. That is one of the reasons why we have unauthorized and undocumented immigration,” said Ngai.
Then, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. This act legalized 2.3 million undocumented people and created the reinforcements we have today, such as the walls on the southern border.
“This is the general conceit of American immigration policy. ‘Well, we don’t know why all you people came when you shouldn’t have, but since you’re here, we’ll legalize you. But in exchange, we’ll stop future unlawful admissions from coming in,’” said Ngai.
Ngai’s discussion emphasized that today’s immigration system is the result of historical policy choices and how undocumented immigration emerged from these exclusionary practices instead of individual wrongdoing. As debates over enforcement continue, Ngai’s discussion and analysis highlight the need to understand immigration through a historical context instead of through stigma or fear.
