Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

In her study of myths about immigration taking away US Americans’ jobs, Aviva Chomsky writes that it is “one of the most common arguments brandished to justify the need for a restrictive immigration policy.”55 Chomsky challenges the claim that immigration and immigrants reduce the jobs available, arguing that immigration is a minor factor in job loss and cites the US government and the US economic system itself as the main factors that maintain and exploit global inequalities. She points out that, due to the extremely restrictive quotas of the 1925 immigration law, immigration was very low when the Depression hit and unemployment soared to 20 percent, but the forced deportation of tens of thousands of Mexican workers during that time did not lower unemployment numbers. The post-World War II industrial boom shrank unemployment figures, again unrelated to immigration.