Policy and Law
The chapters in the first section of the book focus on the intersections between immigration policy and US international history. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, US legislators, in response to the largest global migration in world history, wrested immigration policy away from state powers and centralized immigration control, but they also placed parts of immigration enforcement in the hands of consular offices, shipping companies, and authorities in sending countries. From the very beginning then, immigration policy, usually presented as an instrument of domestic policy, was profoundly intertwined with US foreign policy and international developments.
Challenging the traditional periodization of immigration control, Elliott Young traces the long history of remote control practices—such as medical inspections, visas, and passports—and their long-term repercussions for sending and receiving nations from the late nineteenth century to the present. Young also shows how remote control affected all immigrants, even those from the Americas who were exempted from the harsher provisions of the 1924 Immigration Act. For example, while American growers and other businesses actively recruited Mexican labor, immigration officials still found ways to curtail their entry because Mexicans did not conform to policymakers’ notions of ideal workers and citizens.
Expanding on Young’s argument that the success of restrictive US immigration policy depended heavily on international cooperation, Kathleen López explores the impact of US immigration restriction on the Caribbean. She powerfully shows how a major unintended consequence of the new quota system in the United States was the diversion of migrants to countries with less restrictive immigration policies in the Caribbean and Latin America. Immigrants from eastern Europe, for example, traveled in large numbers to Cuba, where some strategically tried to acquire Cuban citizenship and later migrate to the United States as non-quota immigrants. Others paid smugglers to transport them across the short stretch of ocean that separated Cuba from the United States. In response to these developments, the federal government encouraged steamship companies to collaborate in the policing of the high seas to capture smugglers and their human contraband. The United States also pressured countries to adopt more restrictive immigration policies to keep “undesirables” out of the hemisphere. Developing countries like Cuba acquiesced because immigration gatekeeping was a symbol of modernism and created leverage with the United States, its major economic market.
Although the commitment to immigration restriction remained strong throughout the entire period covered in this anthology, the outbreak of World War II and the geopolitical order that emerged with the onset of the Cold War forced legislators to reconsider and amend, at least superficially, the country’s immigration policy. These changing foreign policy priorities provided an opening for supporters of immigration to push for a more humane immigration system. Laura Madokoro examines how the refugee crises of the 1940s and 1950s presented Americans with a moral dilemma. In response to hundreds of thousands of people uprooted by war and revolution around the world, many Americans argued that their country, as the new world leader, had a humanitarian obligation to assist refugees and other displaced persons. Sensing an opening, religious and secular humanitarians emphasized the benefits of refugee admissions for the US economy and international relations, but they faced resistance from restrictionists in Congress who fought hard to maintain the status quo. The tension between those who supported an international vision of immigration policy and those who argued that immigration was the purview of domestic policy produced mixed policy results. Pro-refugee legislators succeeded in pushing for piecemeal legislation that allowed several hundred thousand refugees (mostly European) to relocate to the United States. They also succeeded in carving out a small refugee quota in the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, but it would not be until 1980 that Congress passed more comprehensive refugee legislation.
By looking at the international debates about immigration restriction, David Cook-Martín and David FitzGerald challenge yet another assumption about the reasons behind the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. While the authors do not deny that the language of Cold War civil rights contributed to the push for immigration reform in 1965, they argue that critical geopolitical developments in the Western Hemisphere influenced the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act just as deeply. By focusing on the elimination of restrictive immigration laws in Latin American countries, they demonstrate that the passage of the 1965 act was part of larger regional efforts to reduce racialized laws. The authors’ discussion of the influence of Latin American countries in debates over immigration policy in the United States underscores the need for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the United States and its neighbors. They also provide a fresh perspective on the role that foreign policy played in the passage of the act as much of the existing scholarship focuses on the role that US interests in Asia and Africa played during the debates over immigration reform.