On 14 January, the Trump administration announced a stop on issuing immigrant visas for applicants from 75 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as 10 countries from eastern Europe. The Department of Homeland Security justified the decision by claiming that immigrants from these countries are at “high risk” of reliance on welfare and becoming a “public charge”.
As an immigration scholar, I was immediately struck by the falsehood of this economic justification. The vast majority of immigrants have been legally disqualified from cash welfare since 1996. Those who do qualify for benefits like Snap and Medicaid use them at much lower rates than non-immigrants. Through their taxes, immigrants are net contributors – especially undocumented immigrants who are excluded from federal benefits.
I also noted a pattern uniting the countries on the list: nearly all were also restricted through the 1924 Immigration Act’s racial quotas.
Abolished in 1965, due to the civil-rights movement’s demands for equality of all races under the law, racial quotas were at the heart of the 1924 Immigration Act, also called the Johnson-Reed Act, which for four decades restricted immigration to the United States on the basis of nation of origin.
Albert Johnson, its lead author, was a representative from Washington, and a eugenicist, who believed that “our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood”. Johnson, who boasted about participating in Ku Klux Klan violence against south Asians, wrote the Immigration Act to exclude anyone who was not a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
The 1924 law set a cap on total immigration to just a fifth of the pre-first world war number. It used the 1890 census to determine annual quotas for who could come from where, allocating nearly nine out of 10 slots to people from northern and western Europe, with the remaining largely set aside for people from southern and eastern Europe. Asians were totally barred, save for a few slots for people from the Levant, and total African admissions were capped at 1,200 people each year.
The Immigration Act also established the category of “illegal alien” for the first time, as well as visa requirements. An accompanying act later that year allocated funds for the first border patrol.
Trump’s rhetoric almost a century later bears a jarring resemblance to Johnson’s. The president has also claimed that immigrants are “poisoning the nation’s blood.” He too has said that he prefers the “nice people” of Sweden, Norway and Denmark to people from “filthy, dirty, disgusting” countries like Somalia.