That’s especially true when undocumented immigrants are characterized as criminals—often merely on the basis of their legal immigration status. This rhetoric isn’t new—it has long been used to justify immigration crackdowns. But the framing of unauthorized migration as illegal does have an origin point: a little-known law in 1929.

The law—Senate Bill 5094, also known as the Undesirable Aliens Act—was notable because it was the first time criminal penalties were attached to undocumented entry to the U.S. While the law’s passage was not big news in 1929, it is vital to understanding how we discuss undocumented immigration today.

To understand the 1929 bill, it’s important to understand the nativist wave that gripped the United States in the 1920s. That wave most famously produced the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which set national quotas for immigration in a way that was transparently designed to preserve the cultural dominance of Northern and Western Europeans. The law also marked a transition from earlier anti-immigrant campaigns that had targeted Catholics, Southern Europeans, Chinese, and other Asian migrants, because for the first time, the law targeted Mexican immigration.

As historian Mae Ngai documents in Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, immigration across the southern border went largely ignored until the 1920s. It was mostly seen as being regulated by labor demands in the Southwest, but this changed after World War I ushered in an era of harder borders. In 1924, the Border Patrol was founded to stop Mexican immigrants from entering illegally as undocumented entry began to be seen as a problem.

After the passage of Johnson-Reed in 1924, some members of Congress, looking for new targets for their anti-immigration work, pushed for a way to limit Mexican immigration to the United States through the extension of quotas to Mexico as well. In their arguments, Mexicans were often characterized as economic burdens, threats to American jobs, unclean and potentially diseased, and with a greater tendency towards criminality.

They also were not considered white. Representative Robert Green, a Democrat from Florida, would make the racial aspect of his opposition clear in a radio address on January 27, 1928, on the subject of “Immigration and the Crime Wave.” In this address, Green noted that quotas should be applied to Mexico because of the mixture of “White, Indian, and negro” blood, which placed a “very great penalty” upon any society attempting to assimilate it. Making a eugenicist argument, he continued, “influx of all types of undesirable aliens and their amalgamation with our people will cause a general weakening, physically and mentally, of our civilization.”

One of the most outspoken, and ultimately successful, critics of Mexican immigration was Democrat John Box of Texas. Box had opposed quotas for Mexican immigrants in Johnson-Reed because he feared it would kill the legislation, but, beginning in 1926, he introduced a number of bills specifically seeking to limit legal Mexican immigration. Box would become so associated with the push for restriction of Mexican immigration that one House bill he introduced, H.R. 6465, which would have imposed quotas on immigration from both Canada and Mexico, was nicknamed the Box Bill.

During a January 1928 address at an immigration conference organized by the briefly popular, anti-communist Key Men of America, he declared: “One purpose of our immigration laws is to prevent the lowering of the ideals and the average of our citizenship, the creation of race friction and the weakening of the Nation’s powers of cohesion, resulting from the intermixing of differing races. The admission of 75,000 Mexican peons annually tends to the aggravation of this, another evil which the laws are designed to prevent or cure.”

Box catered to his Key Men audience, not only by calling them a “patriotic organization,” but by tying immigration to their fears of communism. “In proportion to her population, Mexico is now by far the most bolshevistic country in the Western Hemisphere,” Box later said in testimony before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. And he didn’t stop there, suggesting Mexican immigrants were poor, illiterate, criminal disease-carriers who posed threats not only to American culture but also to the very safety of its citizens.

In the same Key Men address, Box claimed, “the Mexican peons are illiterate and ignorant. Because of their unsanitary habits and living conditions and their vices, they are especially subject to smallpox, venereal diseases, tuberculosis, and other dangerous contagions….Few, if any, other immigrants have brought us so large a proportion of criminals and paupers as the Mexican peons.”

Despite this, the Box Bill failed in the Congress—but Box and other restrictionists would adopt a new tactic in their push to restrict Mexican immigration by targeting the undocumented. When Senator Coleman Blease, a known white supremacist from South Carolina, introduced Senate Bill 5094, also known as the Undesirable Aliens Act the next year, Box became one of its most outspoken supporters. The bill proposed to criminalize illegal entry—making it a misdemeanor—and to turn illegal re-entry into a felony, which made the immigrant inadmissible to the United States in the future. Reentry after deportation also carried penalties of up to two years in prison, a fine of up to $1,000, or both. Illegal entrants would face misdemeanor charges and one year in prison, a $1,000 fine, or both.

The bill was not unopposed. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, submitted a protest at committee hearings. “It is one thing to deport a person for coming here illegally; it is quite another thing to imprison for a year or fine him a thousand dollars, especially as he might be quite ignorant of the law when he starts his journey,” the ACLU memo said. But the ACLU’s criticism proved to be a lonely one and the Hoover Administration supported attaching criminal penalties to illegal entry. The Senate Committee’s report included a letter from the Secretary of Labor, James Davis, noting that a deterrent penalty was necessary if undocumented entry was to be dissuaded.

The bill passed with little fanfare and without a recorded vote, but the debate set many of the terms for immigration discussions for the rest of the century and beyond by making dubious connections between immigration and a variety of social ills. Representative Green of Florida noted that, “if you will examine the criminal records you will find that…the percentage of criminals is largely foreign.” Representative Box would repeat the negative stereotypes he had drawn on in pushing for quotas on Mexican immigration: “They are badly infected with tuberculosis and other diseases; there are many paupers among them; there are many criminals; they work for lower wages; they are as objectionable as immigrants tried by the tests applied to other aliens. Republican Representative Roy Fitzgerald of Ohio would claim that Mexican immigrants were poisoning American citizens, and fellow Republicans John Schafer of Wisconsin and Thomas Blanton of Texas would accuse Mexican immigrants of taking the jobs of native-born Americans, with Blanton going so far as to suggest that Mexican immigrants would cause the starvation of the native-born.

The passage of the Undesirable Aliens Act shifted how Mexican immigration was treated in the U.S. Later that same year, 1929, the federal government, along with state and local governments, began a program of Mexican Repatriation as America slid into the Great Depression. This campaign sought to coerce Mexican immigrants to return to their country of origin through immigration raids and threats of penalties for those who could not prove they were in the country legally.

Indeed, the criminalization of undocumented entry, in combination with decreasing job opportunities during the Depression and aggressive tactics by the Immigration Service and other authorities, made the Mexican Repatriation a success. The program resulted in an estimated 20 percent of the Mexican population of the United States returning to Mexico.

The undocumented were now criminals, and could be treated as such. In this way, the Undesirable Aliens Act established a new pattern of American policymaking that holds to this day: The law, and the many that have followed it, have reinforced the tendency to see the solution to undocumented immigration as more punitive policy, instead of treating it as an issue of labor.

It has not mattered that such policies have not worked, or that they create pain for undocumented immigrants, who have contributed so much to America throughout its history. Instead, such policies are justified by the argument that they are just the law—laws that continue to rely on the dubious racist and nativist arguments of 1929.

The post The 1929 Law That Turned Undocumented Entry Into a Crime appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

MEMO
To: Acting U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Duke and Attorney General Jeff Sessions
From: The Golden (and Still Sovereign!) State
Re: An alternative to your mass deportation of Californians

This is a legal proposal, but I must start with the following stipulation.

You are monsters.

You are engaged in deportation of undocumented Californians, including many who are neither criminals nor threats to public safety, and are crucial members of our communities, our workplaces, and our families. In removing parents, you routinely orphan children who are U.S. citizens, and in the next breath say you are for “America First.” Your next targets for removal are the 800,000 young people known as “Dreamers,” people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. Some 220,000 Californians are Dreamers, the most of any state.

I take comfort that, if God is just, you are eventually going to hell. But that doesn’t solve my problem: all the damage you can do before you check into the Hotel Underworld.

As the state of California, I am suing you and doing everything I can to foil your rotten plans. My police departments and public institutions and religious communities are resisting your efforts to remove Californians. I am treating undocumented immigrants more like any California resident, including issuing them drivers’ licenses. And now, my legislature is in the process of passing legislation to make all of California a sanctuary.

California is slowly moving toward something extraordinary: creating a new legal concept of California residency that includes most of my two million-plus undocumented residents. This is a very American thing to do. While the U.S. Constitution requires uniform standards for citizenship, there is no such requirement of uniformity when it comes to legal residency.

In this context, your deportations are abusive. It is one thing for the federal government to grant legal permission to live and work in every state, and quite another to forcibly remove residents of a state against the will of that state’s people.

Tragically, my people can’t stop you entirely from mass deportation, since immigration enforcement is the province of the federal government. But we can slow you down, deluge you with litigation, pass sanctuary state legislation, target you with protests, and work politically with like-minded people in other states to undermine the very legitimacy of your government.

This ever-escalating conflict is dangerous to California and the country—and I fear that such a fight is exactly what you are trying to start. The president’s political advisor Roger Stone has called for a new Civil War, and, as the Charlottesville aftermath has made clear, President Trump is keen on refighting the last one.

But if civil war is not your intention, let’s make a deal that would protect Californians and perhaps de-escalate the conflict, at least over immigration.

Under this deal, Congress and your administration would grant California an exemption from federal immigration law, in much the same way I have special exemptions to go my own way on certain environmental policies such as air pollution.

In effect, I, California, would win the power to designate certain people—undocumented folks who meet standards that my elected officials determine—as California residents who would have a legal right to live and work here even if they are not U.S. citizens or legal residents of the United States. This residency would apply only in California, though I would hope that other states achieve similar carve-outs.

The federal government could still deport people, but with a couple of conditions. If a California resident were detained for immigration enforcement in another part of the country, he or she would have to be deported not overseas but back to California. And if the federal government decided to go ahead and deport a California resident out of the country, it would—under the contract I’m proposing—pay all the costs of that deportation.

In my view, you, the federal government, should cover the legal expenses of any California resident you deport, and the costs of providing care, replacement income, and schooling for children and other family members that the deported person leaves behind here. You won’t be able to do what you’re doing now: creating “ICE orphans” via deportation, and sticking California governments and families with the bill.

Here at home, we’d have to create standards for deciding who is a resident. A leading advocate for this idea, Dave Marin, the research and policy director for the California Freedom Coalition—which is working for greater autonomy for the state—points out that state legislation appropriating money for legal aid to the undocumented already offers a list of people that Californians consider our own. These include anyone who has family members who are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents; veterans of the U.S. military and their spouses; asylum seekers; the so-called “Dreamers”; and just about anyone else who hasn’t been convicted of a violent felony.

Such a concept of California residency is not new. In 2002, the state’s reform body, the Little Hoover Commission, suggested creating a “Golden State Residency Program” as a way of accelerating the integration of immigrants, including the undocumented, into California society. The proposal was that anyone who was participating in their local community should be considered a resident, with all the rights and responsibilities that that entails.

“Immigrants feature prominently in California’s contemporary and future prosperity,” Little Hoover’s report said. “Helping them integrate—meaning to develop a sense of belonging, to take responsibility for the quality of life in their neighborhoods, and to seize opportunities for success—is a key challenge for state and local leaders.”

Residency is not ideal; it still leaves sub-class of people who have full rights only in California. But it’s the best that can be done until the day when a federal administration fully legalizes undocumented people. And residency is principled in one fundamental way: Californians should get to decide who gets to live and work in our state—not a faraway federal administration that routinely slanders us.

Will you, the Trump administration, do this deal? I suspect not. Your preference so far has been to undermine the American institutions that produce compromise. And you prefer to lie and scapegoat diverse California—you think it fires up your racist base—rather than learn from our long experience with immigration.

One of America’s most notable traditions is our federalist system—letting states choose their own paths and then seeing how things work out. California is confident that being a haven that integrates immigrants into our society will produce far more greatness than your approach of removing millions of people and breaking up families in the process.

So what will it be? Will you make a deal that respects California’s sovereignty? Or are you dead-set on waging war against your country’s largest state?

The post Let’s Make a Deal to Keep Immigrant Families Together appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That is the phrase I grew up living in my native El Salvador.

I emigrated to Los Angeles in 2014, a long trip by land that took me two months. I needed to leave San Salvador: I had dreams of being a journalist, but I had no money. I could only afford two years at the Technological University of El Salvador. And economic life was too dominated by maras, or gangs. They are engaged in widespread extortion and selling drugs.

So with $100 in my pocket, I came here. I saw terrible things on the road, including human trafficking, and I crossed the border walking in the dark for five hours.

I thought I had passed the hardest tests to get here. But the tests keep getting more difficult. Today, more than ever, I need to rely on that phrase about not giving up.

This year, the environment has changed for immigrants. I see more immigration officers in my neighborhood, and more people have been removed.

Most importantly, I find it harder to secure and maintain a job. At first, I worked 10 hours a day, washing cars in Santa Monica. I got the worst sunburn from all that outdoor work, and my feet were wet all the time. It was a very low average salary for a place like California, but it was a steady paycheck. After six months of that, I found a job as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant. The pay was not good over my nine months, but the paychecks arrived on time.

Unfortunately, I was fired. The reason: I had not provided the necessary legal documents since I am undocumented. I have not been able to get such a regular job since then. And that means I had to stop taking English as a Second Language classes that I need for my education and to start a career. Instead, I have taken very different jobs like cleaning, gardening, painting, and assisting with the remodeling of apartments.

Since Donald Trump became president, everything has been more difficult. The people I know are more anxious and scared. And employers do not want to hire undocumented people. The president’s racism has real and serious consequences for people like me.

I am 25 years old, and I think I can be a great contributor to this great country. But to do that, I need protection from immigration enforcement and more freedom to work. People like me have found jobs, but we can lose them at any time. I wish there was some way to get documents in an approved way, and submit them so that I could work without being under a cloud.

This should be possible. The state of California has a system in which you can provide paperwork and learn to be a safe driver, and then get a driver’s license even if you are undocumented. I have a license, and therefore I am legal to drive because of it. That license allows me to do the work I have.

Instead of keeping people in fear, why not give immigrants ways to do things right? In this way, today’s work can be based on yesterday’s work, and you can actually get somewhere.

I am Roberto Flores. And maybe I still have not reached my goal, but I am closer to it than I was yesterday. And I am not quitting.

The post I Survived the Gangs and the Border Crossing—but Trump Has Put New Obstacles in My Path appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There are approximately two million undocumented minors in the United States today, and if I were to guess, I’d say about 20 percent of my students were part of that population. Such young people are often called “invisible” or “voiceless,” But in my time as a teacher there, I came to understand that undocumented students and their families are actually too visible.

Which is to say—undocumented students and families feel overly conspicuous as they constantly worry about exposure in matters from the life-or-death to the mundane: Should we go to the emergency room? Should we jaywalk? Is a trip to Sea World in San Diego, where there is lots of border patrol, worth it? How much is an immigration lawyer? Will this broken headlight doom me to exile? Can people tell my status?

Once, after a special awards dinner for the winners of the school’s creative writing contest, my students had a hard time finding a ride home from Pasadena. After a number of wrangling phone calls, one of their fathers made the drive. No one said it, but I eventually figured out that their parents were not comfortable driving that far, in older model cars, to “nice” neighborhoods, some without driver’s licenses.

During my last year, a sweet but a struggling Salvadoran-American student named Paola began hanging out with the military recruiters who visited once a week during lunch. When I asked her about her college plans, she told me that college wouldn’t give her a paycheck. I told her she’d make much more with a college degree than she would as an army private. She replied, “College won’t help me get my papers.”

I had no argument for that. She enlisted right after graduation. I follow her military career on social media, still amazed that a young woman who does not even weigh 100 pounds would serve in the military of a country she technically is not yet a part of.

An embrace at Chant Down the Walls, an undocumented students rally in downtown Los Angeles in 2016.

As their teacher, I wanted to help, but I didn’t know how. I am not a lawyer or a policy writer or a government official. So I turned to what had gotten me through my difficult years as a Vietnamese refugee who grew up just eight miles away in North Long Beach. I turned to art; I turned to literature. We watched movies like Sin Nombre and A Better Life and we read books like Enrique’s Journey, Voice of Witness, and Underground America.

Most profound of all, we read a book called Nueve Años Inmigrantes. It’s a book of poetry filled with striking lament and imagery, written by the Salvadoran-American poet Javier Zamora. In it, he writes about living apart from his parents and then traveling alone over 4,000 miles across multiple borders to reunite with them as a nine-year-old. My students, Salvadoran in background or not, were amazed—they saw themselves and heard their families’ stories in these poems. Someone who looked and lived like them—young, immigrant, and undocumented—had written a book.

For Itzel, a former student of mine who is now a sophomore at UCLA, Zamora’s work triggered difficult memories from her past. One morning her dad was driving her to middle school. He didn’t have identification and was mistaken for someone else by the police. He was detained, deported, and then estranged from his family for two years. He eventually reunited with his family after a second harrowing, $5,000 border-crossing. “My dad risked his life two times for me to have a better life,” Itzel said.

So when the poet Zamora, who is a good colleague and even greater friend, made the trek from New York City to South L.A. during his winter break to guest teach my classes two years in a row, it was a metaphor come to life: The pebble in the pond and its lingering ripples. “My job as a poet is to create conversations about all the things that make us human,” Zamora said recently. “When I hear that students, immigrant students, undocumented students, Salvadoran students are reading my work, I just go. It’s my duty.”

After one period, a group of Salvadoran students lingered into their lunch to talk with Zamora. I stood in the hall and gave them a private moment, recognizing a mutual understanding that comes too rarely for marginalized people. Through the glass window of my classroom door, I saw Paola poring her heart out and visibly crying. When I mentioned that moment to Zamora years later, he remembered vividly. “We connected through our shared history, but she was also shocked by my personal story—scholarships to prestigious schools, a book, a voice, of whatever size, in America,” he recalled. “She was crying because of the possibilities she had never imagined.”

After Zamora’s visit, my classes discussed what it meant to be an immigrant or from a family of immigrants. We vented about the unfairness of it all, the push and pull of people and commerce, the negative stereotypes, the hassle of paperwork, the power of words and laws and the paper they are printed on. Then we took matters into our own hands, using keyboards, colored pencils, and art paper. We wrote stories and poems and comic books about our lives. We reimagined our visibility, our voicelessness, and our pain. In the most banal of places—a high school classroom in an ignored neighborhood—we uncloaked our invisible yet too visible lives. Most importantly, we did it on our own terms.

A few weeks ago, I ran into Zamora at a writing conference. Since visiting my class, he has completed his MFA in poetry at New York University, won a National Endowment of the Arts grant, and then received a prestigious Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. A second book of poetry, Unaccompanied, is forthcoming. The NEA grant prompted an immigration lawyer to take up his case. The fellowship will most likely mean a Green Card due to an “Extraordinary Ability Visa”—which sounds like something out of a comic book.

I was ecstatic to hear that my friend would not have to leave the country—but angry at the irony of it all: He had to write poetry about being undocumented in order to receive his documents. I thought of Itzel having to save up $1,600 to renew her Deferred Action status while now double majoring in math and political science. I pictured Paola in her fatigues literally marching for her papers. I remembered an undocumented student named Jacqueline, one of our valedictorians my first year in South L.A. She was accepted to a number of colleges, but her status limited financial aid grants. She ended up at a local community college and bitterly watched her friends go off to other schools.

I remembered how at the end of the Vietnam War, my refugee family was technically undocumented for a time. I thought of the seven million current Syrian refugees with no clothes, shelter, or documents.

Sitting next to Zamora at the conference, listening to poets read different kinds of documents—poems about war and exile and bearing witness—I hugged my friend and wiped tears from my eyes, emotional about the possibility of my students being truly visible one day.

The post Using Art to Help Undocumented Students Become More Visible, On Their Own Terms appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.