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

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The US occupied the Philippines until 1946, while Puerto Rico today remains a colony. The US imposed statehood on Hawai’i and Alaska in 1959. Since that time, the Kanaka Maoli indigenous Hawaiians have challenged the legitimacy of statehood and organized for independence. As an island colony, Hawai’i was on the 1946 United Nations’ list for decolonization with the right of self-determination and independence, as was Puerto Rico. The US government sat on the committee at the UN in 1953 that removed Hawai’i from the list. At that time, prior to the 1960s and ‘70s independence movements in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, the UN was primarily European and funded mainly by the United States, where its headquarters are located.

Wilson had been in office for two years and had exhibited his own deeply racist views by resegregating the federal civil service. Although Washington, DC, was a totally segregated city, federal civil service had been desegregated since Reconstruction.

To obstruct the entry of Jews fleeing Germany, the State Department rigidly enforced a law that required immigrants to present a supportive police affidavit from their home countries, which, of course, was impossible for Jews fleeing the country.

Given the famines and chaos of imperialist intervention, as well as the disintegrating Qing regime, mass exodus of emigrants from China from the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth century should come as no surprise. Few of those fleeing sought promised lands, rather, survival as China sank into a colonized backwater. Many Chinese migrants to the United States, mostly men, sent a portion of their earnings from gold seeking or labor back to families at home and living under dire circumstances.

until 1875 the only legal guide to US immigration was the race-based Naturalization Act of 1790, which allowed citizenship only to “free white persons,” a measure that remained on the books until the 1952 Walter-McCarren Act.

In 1875, the US Supreme Court declared that regulation of immigration was a federal matter but did not specify the terms of immigration. The immigration service was established only in 1891. Tellingly, the first federal immigration laws, which created the foundation for US immigration, were based on exclusion. It is crucial to recognize that when and how “immigration” as such began, it was based on overt, blatant racism. That law was the Chinese Exclusion Act of May 6, 1882, which suspended Chinese immigration for a ten-year period and barred resident Chinese from US citizenship, and in 1902, was renewed indefinitely. The laws were widely evaded. Exclusion was repealed by the Magnuson Act on December 17, 1943, which allowed 105 Chinese individuals to enter per year.

However, except for Chinese exclusion, prior to World War 1, as historian Mae Ngai points out, the United States had virtually open borders; immigration was encouraged and unfettered.39 In the wake of the US entering the European war, xenophobia surged, and the US Congress in 1917 enacted an extremely restrictive immigration law that became the basis of the comprehensive Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act, Asian Exclusion Act, and National Origins Act), the primary determinant of eligibility for citizenship being whiteness, under the guise of “the nationality of the immigrant.”40 The 1917 law for the first time imposed a literacy test and increased the fee paid by arriving immigrants; it also gave more leeway to immigration officials to make decisions over whom to exclude. And, most restrictive of all, it excluded anyone from what was defined as the Asiatic Barred Zone, except Filipinos, who could travel freely to and within the US because of colonial status. There were no quotas or restrictions on Western Hemisphere populations.

Less well known is Nazi officials’ interest in US racially determined immigration laws and citizenship requirements. Writing four years after the 1924 immigration act, Adolf Hitler, in the unpublished 1928 sequel to Mein Kampf, admiringly characterized the United States as “a race-state,” referring to the US racist immigration measures that began with Chinese exclusion in 1882 and expanded to other nationalities in 1924.

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.

Jack London was a leading anti-Chinese bigot in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he was born in 1876. He died of alcohol-related disease at age forty in 1916, but he contributed a lot during his short life to yellow peril panic, mainly because he was a literary celebrity.

Once London became more successful and wealthy, he lost interest in socialism. California historian Kevin Starr calls this stage of London’s life “post-socialist,” writing that by 1911, “London was more bored by the class struggle than he cared to admit.”

Hoover, no flaming liberal, opined that mass internment of Japanese could not be justified on the basis of security.78 The Germans and Italians who were detained had been under surveillance for some time and clearly had ties with the Nazi and Fascist regimes, but the nearly thirteen hundred detained Japanese Americans had no such complicity.

Not only were Japanese Americans removed from their homes, allowed to take only one suitcase each and deposited in military-guarded concentration camps, but so too were the Japanese living in the US colony of the Philippines. And so too were the Aleuts, the Indigenous people of the islands in the Bering Sea, off the coast of the US colony of Alaska. US authorities admitted that based on security, they had no suspicion of Aleuts, but they framed incarceration as being “for their own good.” White US American settlers living on one of the Aleutian Islands were not evacuated or incarcerated. Nearly nine hundred Aleuts were forced onto ships and dropped off on the southeast Alaska mainland. The navy herded them into abandoned mining camps with no services.

Civilian casualties were higher in the Korean War than in World War II or the war in Vietnam. Massive numbers of Koreans were driven from their homes and became refugees. Refugees were constantly killed in US bombing raids of anything that moved.

But the US ran a covert war in Laos for nine years, 1964–1973, called the “Secret War in Laos,” which was secret to no one except the US public.

Since the bombing ended, more than fifty thousand Lao civilians have been killed or maimed by the unexploded eight million US bombs left behind.

Genocide historian Ben Kiernan writes that the Khmer Rouge “would not have won power without U.S. economic and military destabilization of Cambodia. . . . It used the bombing’s devastation and massacre of civilians as recruitment propaganda and as an excuse for its brutal, radical policies and its purge of moderate communists and Sihanoukists.”

Even after the Vietnamese drove out the Khmer Rouge regime of terror, the United States, along with Western Europe and China, continued to support them. Although the United States publicly condemned the Khmer Rouge, several presidential administrations, plus China and the US-dominated Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), gave military support to the Khmer Rouge. During the Reagan administration, the US increased its covert aid to the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) from four million to ten million dollars for its resistance to the Vietnam-aligned Cambodian government.122 As a result of Chinese, US, and Western opposition to the Vietnamese intervention that overthrew the Khmer Rouge, the United States insisted that the disgraced and defeated Khmer Rouge, rather than the Cambodian Vietnam-aligned government, be allowed to hold Cambodia’s United Nations seat until 1982. After 1982, the UN seat was filled by a Khmer Rougedominated coalition, CGDK, which it held until 1993. The United States did not recognize and open relations with unified Vietnam until 1995.123 And, of course, the Clinton administration and subsequent ones did not even consider war reparations.

Indeed, as of 2020, the US had been at war against Asian peoples for 122 years, killing millions of civilians and creating internal and migrating refugees and immigrants, many to the United States.

The US Asian wars began with the invasion and occupation of the Philippines, 1898–1944. Since 1969, ten years after Philippine independence, the United States military has been involved in counter-insurgency in the Philippines against groups resistant to continued US domination, and with the post-9/11 “War on Terror,” against the Muslim community.

In 1967, in a six-day war, Israel captured the West Bank Palestinian area, which it has occupied since that time, inviting Jews in the diaspora to build settlements, which is illegal under international law.

The 2019 El Paso massacre was not the first mass shooting targeting Mexican Americans and Mexican citizens on the border. The July 18, 1984, massacre of Mexican Americans at a McDonald’s in the border city of San Ysidro, California, was the largest mass shooting up to that time in the modern era of mass shootings in the United States, with twenty-two left dead, including the shooter, and nineteen wounded.

Many people in the US are unaware that thousands of Mexican American men and women were lynched in the former Mexican territory, now the US Southwest, beginning with the gold rush in Northern California and increasingly in Arizona and New México.15 Violence against Mexicans in Texas dates back to the US slaver settlers who came to dominate the southeast of the Mexican state of Tejas in the 1820s, following Mexican independence from Spain. But it was after the US war against México, annexing the northern half, with Anglo settlers pouring in, that lynching took off. Distinct from the lynching of African Americans, who mostly were individually hung in spectacles with large crowds, Mexican Americans were more often lynched in groups and only occasionally as spectacle.

One aspect of Anglo racism in the Southwest was not wanting their children to go to school with Mexican children. By 1928, segregation of Mexican American children in schools was widespread in California and Texas. In eight California counties, enrollment in sixty-four schools was 90 to 100 percent Mexican American, and in Texas, school boards created forty separate Mexican American schools. In 1930 in the San Diego County town of Lemon Grove, the local school board attempted to construct a segregated school for seventy-five Mexican and Mexican American elementary school children. The Mexican parents organized and took the school board to court and won. The Superior Court of San Diego County ruled that the move violated California state laws because ethnic Mexicans were considered white under the state’s Education Code.

The federal Census Bureau classified Mexicans as white up to 1930, when it responded to congressional pressure and started enumerating Mexicans as a separate racial group, “Mex,” along with “Negro,” “Indian,” “Chinese,” and “Japanese.”

The Lemon Grove case was isolated as a local event and set no precedent affecting California or elsewhere; segregation of Mexican and Mexican American children continued in some places to the 1970s. While the Lemon Grove case was in process, forced “repatriation” of Mexicans and Mexican Americans was in full swing.

Abuse of Mexican workers was rampant. During the Bracero Program, more undocumented workers entered than those under contract. There was no penalty for employers to hire the undocumented workers, and employers actually preferred them, as they were more vulnerable and could not make demands for higher pay or better conditions or try to form a union. They were criminalized as “illegal aliens.” The employers could withhold wages, call the INS, or abuse the workers in any way, knowing they had no legal standing and had families in México dependent on them.

Tim Z. Hernandez’s project reveals the longtime and continuing cruelty of US immigration policies at the border and of mass deportations. The twenty-eight deportees killed in the plane crash were among the estimated four hundred thousand deported mostly by trains in the preceding year. The US Justice Department took no responsibility for identifying the crash victims or compensating their families; rather, the department emitted a terse disclaimer: “No liability attaches to the government in connection with the Coalinga accident.”

The original idea for such an operation came from a dubious figure, Harlon B. Carter, the head of the US Border Patrol. His plan was to use the US military to round up and deport undocumented Mexicans. He titled it Operation Cloudburst and was able to get it to President Eisenhower, who considered it but turned it down due to the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally prohibits military use to enforce domestic law. Although Eisenhower didn’t accept Carter’s plan, it planted the idea that soon became “Operation Wetback,” which Carter was appointed to lead on the border. Carter was a convicted murderer before he became a border guard. He was born in 1931 in Laredo, Texas, where his father was a border guard. When he was seventeen, Carter shot and killed a Mexican American teenager, Ramón Casiano.

Deportations had been climbing, from over ten thousand expulsions in 1942, when the Bracero Program began, to over nine hundred thousand in 1953. Swing and Carter were threatening many more, and the Border Patrol proceeded to convert public parks to concentration camps to hold a thousand or more people at a time.

In October 1954, Swing declared that the operation had forced more than a million Mexicans deep into México. However, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez clarifies that although the treatment of the detained and deported Mexican workers was brutal and hundreds of thousands were deported, the actual number was likely closer to three hundred thousand. “Operation Wetback” is often cited as the event that led to mass deportations and more rigid border enforcement, but that was not the case. Nor did it reduce the number of undocumented Mexicans in the US, and it did not end unauthorized entry at the border. Rather, after “Operation Wetback” ended, the Border Patrol deescalated, dispatching two-men patrols on foot or horseback. Hernandez writes, “In other words, after General Swing declared ‘conquest’ at the border, he kept apprehensions low at the U.S.-México border by changing patrol tactics.”59 Miserable as it was for the Mexicans who were deported and the communities affected, “Operation Wetback” was a cynical show for the public, because agribusiness and mining giants demanded the workers.

And it only got worse in 1976, when Congress amended the Hart-Celler Act, limiting México to twenty thousand immigrant visas annually and allowing only limited family reunification. In 1980, with the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980, the visa limit fell to 18,200.

NAFTA soon wiped out subsistent farmers and commercial operators in México as they could not compete with the cheap, GMO-modified corn from Iowa that was mainly producing ethanol and animal feed.

ICE sweeps during the Bush administration netted 8.3 million “voluntary returns.” Undocumented Mexican immigrants who were caught in the sweeps were transported to the border without fingerprinting or paperwork. There were two million formal deportations during the period.

When Donald Trump began his campaign for the presidency, warning of masses of Mexicans entering the US illegally, they were actually leaving.

Many Mexican parents, in an attempt to protect their children, had not encouraged them to learn Spanish. These young people rejected earlier generations’ attempts to assimilate and be accepted as white.89 Instead, they proudly embraced their mestizo ancestry and promoted the Spanish language. They called for community control of institutions and self-determination, indeed revolution. They identified with the working class and poor people, the farmworkers movement, and with Emiliano Zapata and the women soldiers of the Mexican Revolution.

Before there were the independent states of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, there was the Federal Republic of Central America that also included Costa Rica and what is now the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Panama was not a part of Central America but rather was a province of Colombia. When the US determined that the interoceanic canal should go through the Panama province, the Republic of Colombia refused, so the US incited a secessionist movement and recognized Panama as an independent state in November 1903.

Since independence, the United States has never allowed Central Americans to pursue their own destiny. With its foothold of British Honduras (now Belize) as a colony and indirect economic control of eastern Honduras and Nicaragua (the Mosquitia), British imperialism, through unequal trade in Central America after its independence, paved the way for US economic dominance and military interventions. The Federal Republic of Central America did not survive British imperialism, and the small separate states, governed by elites of two warring parties and reliant on mono-agribusiness—bananas and coffee—owned by foreign companies, were too weak to defend their countries from the predatory Great Britain and United States.

Under the guise of protecting US lives and interests during political disturbances, in March 1853, US Marines landed on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua for two days, and in July 1854, US naval forces bombed and burned San Juan del Norte on the Nicaraguan coast over a period of nearly a week.98 US pro-expansionist William Walker, under the banner of manifest destiny, believed Central America was destined to be the key to global trade and should be annexed by the United States. In April 1855, Walker and fifty-seven mercenaries (called filibusters at the time) sailed from San Francisco to Nicaragua to support one side in an ongoing civil war, but within a few months the mercenaries seized control of the country with a plan to make it a white settler country, introducing slavery, with Walker as president. President Franklin Pierce recognized the regime as legitimate. The other Central American countries combined their armies, with support from South American states as well, and forced Walker out in May 1857, executing him in a firing squad.99 Although Walker’s plan failed, it was a dress rehearsal for longer official US occupations and military interventions. After sending troops to eastern Nicaragua for varying lengths of time in 1894, 1896, 1898, 1899, 1907, and 1910, the US occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933, leaving once the first Somoza family dictatorship was installed and ruled for more than four decades. During the same time frame, the US invaded and occupied Haiti ...

With resistance suppressed, the Sandinistas voted out of power, and the collapse of the Soviet Union removing the motive of anticommunism for intervention, the US abandoned war-torn Central America and turned to invading Iraq in 1991. The body count from Reagan’s wars in Central America was horrendous, with sixty-five thousand dead in El Salvador, fifty thousand in Nicaragua, and more than two hundred thousand in Guatemala, the majority rural Mayans.

By 1982, some two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand refugees from El Salvador—a country of only five million people—and tens of thousands of Guatemalans had fled to the US. Under the 1980 Refugee Act and international law, they had the right to asylum, but the migrants’ applications were turned down, while there was no limit on those claiming asylum from socialist Cuba and Nicaragua, or the European socialist states.105 The Reagan administration categorized the refugees as “economic migrants,” maintaining that the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments had not violated their human rights.

By 1986, around fifty thousand people had been forced to return, and some did not survive the military regimes in their home countries.

Hate and anticommunism were highly profitable.

Although the majority of Nicaraguans were poor and rural, land distributions to the peasantry in the 1980s endured, and the government supported small farmers and agricultural cooperatives, creating universal food self-sufficiency, as well as community health care, especially preventive care. In 2018, Nicaragua ranked second in Latin America and the Caribbean (after Venezuela) in reducing the gap between rich and poor, the poverty level reaching a low 7.6 percent in 2013 (the US poverty rate was 11.8).120 The Trump administration’s secretary of state, John Bolton, branded Nicaragua, along with Cuba and Venezuela, as a “troika of tyranny,” and the US government imposed severe economic sanctions on Nicaragua while fomenting violence there in 2018. The Nicaraguan economy was set back and the future of possible Nicaraguan emigration is not clear, although there were few Nicaraguans in the caravans of Central Americans that arrived at the border in 2018.

Unlike past administrations, President Trump and his twisted assistant Stephen Miller trumpeted their intentions and practices with glee. But it was George W. Bush’s administration that first separated asylum-seeking parents from their children.

For the Indigenous peoples, whose homelands span the 1848 border between México and the United States, the border itself is static invasion. The barriers and walls that have been constructed, and the ones being planned, cut through their living rooms and fields. The territories of thirty-six US federally recognized tribes, including the Kumeyaay, Cocopah, Quechan, Tohono O’odham, Yaqui, Tigua, and Kickapoo, straddle the two-thousand-mile border. Tens of thousands of Native people live near the border in the Mexican states of Baja California, Sonora, and Chihuahua and are not recognized as Indigenous by US authorities. They cross the border into the US for their kin’s cultural events and sacred sites, to attend burials and visit family. Like other “nonresident aliens,” they are required to pass through the rigid security checkpoints where they are subject to interrogation and delay, often rejection. The kind of border wall being planned by the US government would make their visitations much more difficult, if not impossible.

International agreements that the US government is party to, including the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, confirm Indigenous peoples’ rights to draw on cultural and natural resources across international borders. Several US laws also confirm such rights. United States law also requires that federally recognized tribal nations on the US-México border must be consulted in federal border-enforcement planning.

The border has long been a nightmare for people, both migrants and Indigenous residents, but the walls and barriers that have been constructed and proposed also cut through one of the most diverse and biologically rich regions of North America. The border region is home to species whose survival depends on an ecosystem stretching from well into the United States to México, with more than fifteen hundred plants and animal species, ninety-three of them listed by the International Union for Conservation and Nature as critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable. The wall affects not only habitats but also the flow of food, protection, and even mating partners. An extended network of national parks, archaeological monuments, and wilderness and nature reserves straddles the border, protecting wildlife habitat and cultural resources on both sides. The US Fish and Wildlife Service warned that an impermeable barrier and bright light at night will destroy many endangered species.

Délano Alonso acknowledges that the project of dismantling ICE can’t be left to the will of the government; rather it will require reimagining society’s vision of justice and “a reckoning with the racial and economic injustice built into the ‘nation of immigrants’ from its very origins.” The words “illegal” and “immigration” must be decoupled in our public and private conversations.

The United States has never been “a nation of immigrants.” It has always been a settler state with a core of descendants from the original colonial settlers, that is, primarily Anglo-Saxons, Scots Irish, and German. The vortex of settler colonialism sucked immigrants through a kind of seasoning process of Americanization, not as rigid and organized as the “seasoning” of Africans, which rendered them into human commodities, but effective nevertheless.