CROSSING THE BORDER

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

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JOANNE FREEMAN: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory.

Welcome to BackStory, the show that explores the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And I’m Nathan Connolly.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Now if you’re new to the podcast, Brian, Nathan, and I are all historians, and every week we take a topic in the news and explore it across American history. So this week, we have the second in our series on immigration, and basically we’re going to pick up where we left off in the early 1900s.

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Now, at that point, US officials were at their wits’ end. Illegal immigrants were sneaking into the United States from Mexico. As one government official complained,

ERIKA LEE AS GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL: We couldn’t stop them. If we had the Navy on the waterfront, we couldn’t stop them. Not even a Chinese wall 9,000 miles in length and built over rivers and deserts and mountains and along the sea shores would seem to permit a permanent solution.

JOANNE FREEMAN: This is historian Erika Lee. Now guys, this all sounds pretty familiar, right?

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Sadly, yeah.

BRIAN: Sounds huge to me, Joanne.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Huge and familiar. Also much like today, US officials at this point were doing their best to try and catch these people at the border and detain them, but there is a twist.

ERIKA LEE: The immigrants are not actually Mexican but are Chinese.

BRIAN: I did not see that coming.

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NATHAN CONNOLLY: So what, this is Chinese immigration from Mexico?

JOANNE FREEMAN: Chinese immigration from Mexico.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: So that must have been a lot of border guards then, yeah?

JOANNE FREEMAN: Well, not exactly.

ERIKA LEE: There’s only a few dozen of them in the early 1900s. But they’re patrolling their line, and they call themselves Chinese catchers.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Now, Erika Lee told me that the Chinese immigrants that were sneaking across the border were actually part of an international smuggling ring. These people were furnished with detailed maps, safe houses, and even fake ID papers.

ERIKA LEE: There’s even a case in the National Archives where the US immigration officials found a group of about 20 Chinese who were expertly disguised as Mexicans and were being housed in a hut a little south of the border and being taught a few words of Spanish. So that if they were caught, they could claim to be Mexican and not Chinese.

JOANNE FREEMAN: So it was easier to cross the border if you were Mexican and not Chinese.

BRIAN: And how many Chinese are we talking about Joanne?

JOANNE FREEMAN: A good question. Erika Lee says the numbers are hard to pin down, but she said that the best estimates are about 1,000 or 2,000 a year.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And why are they trying to get into the US from Mexico?

JOANNE FREEMAN: Another good question. Well, guys the basic reason is the Chinese Exclusion Act, which Congress passed in 1882. And this was the first time that the United States targeted immigrants based on race or on national origin.

ERIKA LEE: Asian immigrants are not only the first to be excluded or banned, they also become the first illegal or the first undocumented immigrants who try to come to the United States across the US-Canadian and US-Mexican borders.

BRIAN: So hold on. You’re saying that we didn’t have any illegal immigrants until the 1880s?

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And not only that, that the first illegal immigrants, quote unquote, were actually Chinese and not from Latin America?

JOANNE FREEMAN: Yeah, kind of a big double whammy there. Now Lee says that the Chinese Exclusion Act is a watershed moment in American history.

ERIKA LEE: It’s the first chapter in our long history of undocumented immigration and the ways in which immigration will find another way to come into the United States if there’s the means, the will, and jobs waiting for them on this side of the border.

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JOANNE FREEMAN: Today on BackStory we’re looking at how the United States tries to control who gets in and who’s kicked out, because the president has big plans.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Department of Homeland Security announced brand new priorities when it comes to their plan to deport illegal immigrants.

FEMALE SPEAKER: The White House is rejecting the charge that President Trump is pursuing mass deportation.

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DONALD TRUMP: We will soon begin the construction of a great Great Wall along our southern border.

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JOANNE FREEMAN: This is the second in our two-part series on immigration. Our earlier episode was about immigration bans, but today we’re going to be focusing on how the United States polices its borders. We’ll hear about a little-known deportation campaign in the 1930s that targeted Mexican immigrants and their American-born children, and we’ll also hear how the US immigration bureaucracy has grown dramatically over the 20th century.

BRIAN: As we just heard, there weren’t any federal restrictions on immigration before the 1880s. Businesses actively recruited immigrants, and they came from all over the world to work in factories, farms, and mines. And while many Americans were ambivalent or even hostile towards those newcomers, they kept coming as long as there were jobs.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Which brings us back to my conversation with historian Erika Lee. She pointed out that in the late 19th century, the federal government had just started to police immigration, and the Southern border of the United States was still pretty open.

ERIKA LEE: Mexico becomes the back door for Chinese immigration and later Asian and even European and Syrian immigration. Those immigrants who find themselves either locked out of the United States because of restrictive immigration laws or because they’re concerned that, for example, they might not pass the inspections at Ellis Island or another port of entry.

JOANNE FREEMAN: And so what’s bringing these people, what’s driving them to cross the desert to get into the United States from Mexico?

ERIKA LEE: This is the era of migration. We call it the Century of Migration from 1830 to 1930. 35 million immigrants came to the United States during this time period. Just over a million are from Asia, so they– just like all of the Ellis Island immigrants– are coming for the same reasons, for labor, for economic opportunity. Some are fleeing persecution.

JOANNE FREEMAN: But they’re being focused on as a group that has been declared illegal immigrants. So what is the problem with Chinese and Japanese and Korean people who are trying to get into the United States?

ERIKA LEE: Asian immigration sparks, really, the first large scale immigration debates in the United States, and the debate should be very recognizable to those of us living today. The arguments about an immigrant group that was just so different than previous immigrants, incapable of assimilation, from a country and a civilization that was diametrically opposite from Americans and from America. But again, also because they were racially so different, more like African-Americans than like European immigrants.

JOANNE FREEMAN: So it’s racial and it’s cultural and it’s ideological and it’s the full spectrum of things to be anxious about.

ERIKA LEE: Absolutely.

JOANNE FREEMAN: You through economics in there, too. Yeah. It’s pretty much everything bundled into one.

ERIKA LEE: Right.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Well, so let me ask you a question that’s more geographically based. We are focusing– so far, we’ve been talking about the Mexican border. Does that border stay a leaky border? I mean, so does the back door kind of become a leaky front door?

ERIKA LEE: Absolutely. And over the course of the early 20th century, there are US agents paying informants for any information about Chinese who are landing in Mexico and moving north, and there’s also a system of patrolling the border. So we do see an increase in the border patrol from just three officers patrolling the Mexico-California border and 1891 to over 80 by the early 1900s.

JOANNE FREEMAN: So it sounds like part of what we’re talking about on the border between the United States and Mexico. We’ve been focusing obviously on the story of Asian immigrants trying to get across, but surely there were Mexican people trying to get across, too. How does that play out?

ERIKA LEE: So one of the ironies of the Chinese Exclusion Act is that it does ban one group at the same time that there is such immense labor needs in the southwest. This is a time period when the railroads are continuing to be built. Lumber is continuing to be milled. This is the birth of the great agricultural empires in California and many other states.

Chinese had provided the labor in all of those industries. When they become excluded and when other Asians become excluded, this is when we start relying on Mexican immigrants. And so there is a tacit and maybe also explicit understanding at the border that we need them as laborers and because the US government is getting pressure from southwestern employers to keep those gates open to Mexican laborers.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Wow. So let me take us for a moment away from the border and take us into the United States. So let’s say we’re focusing on some Asian immigrants who are illegally in the United States, but they’re in the United States. Are they living in fear? Are they afraid that they’re going to get caught and sent back across the border? Or do they assume that once they’ve crossed that border that they can sort of incorporate themselves in, and it’s not– they’re not living in fear so much?

ERIKA LEE: It’s absolutely a life under the shadows, and I’ll never forget this one immigration file of a young Chinese-American man in San Francisco. He’s suspected of coming in under fraudulent pretenses. The Immigration Service has placed him under surveillance. They catch him unawares coming to work at a Chinese restaurant. He’s a low level Chinese restaurant cook.

And he runs for his life, but he leaves his wallet behind. And I remember opening up an immigration file, and his wallet falls out. And there was no money in it. And I’m just thinking, you know, what– he must have had to live the rest of his life just fearful that anywhere that he was going to show up, it might be the last time that he went to work or went home. And what went through that guy’s mind, what happened to him, you know.

JOANNE FREEMAN: But let’s take a little bit of a longer view. How does the story that we’ve been unfolding here about early border control– what does that do to shape immigration policy in the long run? So what’s the impact of this ongoing sort of struggle that we’ve been talking about largely taking place on the Mexican border?

ERIKA LEE: We have border patrols. And then when that doesn’t work, we start instituting interior enforcement, meaning we go after those who we suspect are already in the United States without documentation. We go into their businesses, their schools. We’re watching them. We require registration.

It completely changes our relationship to immigration from one of complete welcome to one of guarded and measured restriction to one of exclusion and punishment. So that we have normalized racial profiling for certain immigrant groups. And once it becomes normalized, it becomes so much easier to expand that mentality and those policies to other groups.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Right. So there’s models that are being set, but everything that we’re describing here makes more friction and more tension rather than making things operate any more smoothly.

ERIKA LEE: Right. I mean, for the Chinese in America, not only are they singled out for exclusion, they also cannot become naturalized citizens by law. And so those two things combined– but also the constant threat of deportation– for the Chinese in America, it reinforces self-segregation. It’s clear that we’re not wanted here.

We can only do so much. We can work here, but we can’t become citizens. So for many Chinese-American families, mine included, many don’t root themselves here until several generations have passed, because you just never when you might be kicked out.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Erika Lee is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota. She’s the author of At America’s Gates, Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943.

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BRIAN: It’s time to take a short break. When we get back, what so-called self-deportations look like up close. But first, a quick message for our listeners.

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Hey, Nathan. What podcast you listen to besides BackStory, of course?

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Well, I like Intercepted with Jeremy Scahill. I’ve used the Black Media Archive podcast for doing research and teaching. Serial actually is one my wife first introduced me to, so that’s good.

BRIAN: I thought you ate oatmeal for breakfast. Oat bran, I’m sorry.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And bacon. But Serial, S-E-R-I-A-L, is a good one.

BRIAN: OK, so you’re all over this. Now your task is to spread the word. Just talk to your friends about your favorite podcast, all right. Go to your favorite social media, whatever it is– Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. You want to use #trypod. That’s T-R-Y-P-O-D, as in try podcasts, Nathan. So all of your friends can find out about your favorite podcasts.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Aah. That’s how you spread the word. We can do this.

BRIAN: Terrific. Over and out.

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NATHAN CONNOLLY: Who says that?

OK, we are back. Now Joanne, I think most of our listeners would be surprised to learn that the Chinese were America’s first so-called illegal immigrants. I put that in quotes.

And that much like undocumented people today, they live mostly in the shadows. I have to ask, though, were they also deported? I mean, that’s obviously the big story we think about today.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Well, some Chinese were deported but in much smaller numbers than today. So for example, in 1904, the government expelled nearly 1,800 Chinese citizens.

BRIAN: Yeah, but I think, Joanne, we got to think about the size of the federal government at that time. I mean, we had virtually no Army, a very small Navy. But I think what must have been a shock to the system, Joanne and Nathan, is going from zero to 1,800. The fact that just a few years before we really had no apparatus for deporting people, the fact that all of a sudden, 1,800 Chinese are deported must have left a lasting impression.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Remember, there were only about 80 officers policing the entire US-Mexican border in the early 1900s, which compared to today is mighty small.

ADAM GOODMAN: And there are more than 21,000 border patrol agents, 18,000 and change of whom are patrolling the US-Mexico border.

BRIAN: This is historian Adam Goodman, who studies deportation. He says that the government’s ability to police immigration has soared over the last hundred years. Here’s just one example. Last year, US immigration and Customs Enforcement– that’s known as ICE– deported over 240,000 people.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Yeah, that’s crazy. I mean I have to imagine that’s a large police force, or at least a well-developed bureaucracy.

BRIAN: Well, it happened over a lot of time, Nathan. In fact, the US border patrol, the first official version of this, wasn’t established until 1924. As illegal Chinese immigration tapered off, the government redirected its attention to the Mexican migrants who had been traveling back and forth freely and legally for decades, and nearly all of those deported over the past century have been Mexicans. Goodman says the federal government has developed three ways to deport immigrants.

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ADAM GOODMAN: The most commonly understood mechanism is formal deportation, which historically was usually by order of an immigration judge and carried more serious consequences if someone tried to re-enter the country in the future.

BRIAN: But formal deportations involve arrests, detentions, and court dates, and the process can take a while, which is why those deportations are pretty rare. Plus, they’re expensive.

ADAM GOODMAN: The vast majority of people throughout US history, around 50 of the 55 million people deported in US history, in fact, have been deported through what the government euphemistically terms voluntary returns, or voluntary departures.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Oh, come on. What does that mean, voluntary?

BRIAN: Yeah. Well, Goodman says there’s nothing voluntary about these deportations.

ADAM GOODMAN: Usually it happens after an immigration official apprehends a migrant who is in the country without authorization, perhaps detains that migrant for a certain amount of time, and then encourages or coerces or in some cases tricks that individual and assigning a voluntary departure slip.

BRIAN: Obviously, that’s a lot faster and cheaper than detaining people and putting them on trial. Deportees sometimes even have to pay their own way home, but there is one more way the government cracks down on undocumented immigrants.

ADAM GOODMAN: And that’s through fear campaigns and scare tactics that are meant to get people to self-deport. Because they recognized it would be impossible to actually apprehend and deport all of the undocumented people in the country.

JOANNE FREEMAN: You know, that’s really a reminder, Brian, about how possible it is for the government to frighten people and how powerful that capability can be.

BRIAN: And it’s especially powerful for governments that don’t want to spend a lot of money. You know, it doesn’t cost a lot of money to scare people.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Fear as fiscal responsibility, is that right?

BRIAN: That’s right, Nathan.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: So Brian, give me an example.

BRIAN: Well, there’s a very stark example from the 1930s, Nathan. We’ll get back to my conversation with Adam Goodman in a moment, but first, let’s dive into this Depression-era story. Back then, an estimated 500,000 to 2 million Mexican nationals and Mexican-Americans were pressured to leave the United States.

This little known episode was called Mexican Repatriation, but some of those targeted say that’s just a euphemism. Ed Ayers and I explored this moment for another BackStory episode last year. Here’s Ed.

ED: Now, there never was a coordinated program or a top-down mandate from President Hoover or Roosevelt to expel people of Mexican descent, but the White House did set the tone by staging raids across the country to deport Mexican-American families. Francisco Balderrama, a historian who has studied these repatriation programs, says the goal was to ease unemployment for Anglo-Americans.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: This expulsion of Mexican nationals and American citizens of Mexican descent is done frequently because of the argument there’s not enough jobs, that jobs were for real Americans.

ED: Balderrama says that Mexican nationals were targeted because they were one of the more recent immigrant groups to arrive at the start of the 20th century.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: And the key thing to keep in mind– under more prosperous times, particularly the roaring 1920s– Mexican workers were regarded as essential. But now with the Great Depression, they are regarded as foreign. They’re regarded as unwanted. They’re regarded as they’re not supposed to be here.

ED: The private sector also tried to get Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans to leave the country. In some cases, businesses would simply refuse to hire Mexican workers.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: At the same time, we have private businesses– we have US Steel, Southern Pacific Railroad– that are telling their Mexican workers, you would be better off in Mexico and providing them with transportation to the border and to Mexico.

ED: Anti-Mexican sentiment was so pervasive that it even trickled down to local governments. Balderrama says Los Angeles County is a perfect example.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: And it’s important to focus on LA county because it had the largest concentration of Mexican nationals and American citizens of Mexican descent at that historical moment. And it became kind of the model about how to do this elsewhere in the country.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: This is an interview with Mrs. Emilia Valenciana for the–

ED: Christine Valenciana has spent the past four decades collecting stories of those affected by this Depression-era repatriation, including her mother’s.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: OK, Mom, now why don’t you start by telling me where you’re from, first.

EMILIA VALENCIANA: Los Angeles, California.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: When were you born?

EMILIA VALENCIANA: April 10, 1926.

ED: Valenciana recorded this interview back in 1971. It was part of a college oral history project. She collected the voices of people who’d been affected by LA County’s repatriation program.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: My grandfather, Natividad Castanada, who had been here in Los Angeles since 1909, he was employed as a stonemason bricklayer, skilled craftsman, and then there’s no work for him.

EMILIA VALENCIANA: You know that here he was left with a family and a couple of children to raise and no work, living off of welfare. And we went to Mexico because my dad asked the county– he asked to be sent.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: My mother was nine years old when this happened. She had never been to Mexico.

EMILIA VALENCIANA: My dad asked if we wanted to go with him. We told him, yes, you know, that our place was with him. He was our father. We weren’t going to be left here and be made wards of the state. That’s what we would’ve been, wards of the state. So we left with my father.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: Now do you know for sure if he asked the county?

EMILIA VALENCIANA: He told me–

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: Did he tell you he asked the county?

EMILIA VALENCIANA: He told me he asked the county that he wanted to be sent back to Mexico. So I guess, I guess they paid for our fare, Christine.

ED: Many of Valenciana’s interviewees said the same thing. No one had forced them to go to Mexico. Rather, their families wanted to go back, and they went of their own accord.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: Perhaps listeners are going to say it’s voluntary. Well, that’s the easy way out, and that’s not really looking at the complexity of the problem. We’re really looking at human beings. I mean, I can’t believe that my grandfather who had been here since 1999 had any intentions of ever returning to Mexico.

ED: But she says Los Angeles County actively encouraged people to leave. One of the county officials who ran this program was Rex Thompson. He was the head of charities for Los Angeles County during the early 1930s. Valenciana interviewed him in the early 1970s. Thompson acknowledged that he weighed the costs of providing aid to a Mexican family versus sending them to Mexico.

REX THOMPSON: We had thousands of Mexican nationals who were out of work and Mexican families were costing us $110 a month. I can remember those figures. We could ship them back and feed them well and decently by train for $74 a family.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: You know, there was a campaign to get Mexicans to be removed, and so the county agencies, they would send out people. They were recruiters, basically.

REX THOMPSON: Social workers that were Americans of Mexican decent but actually fluent in the language or that were Mexican nationals fluent in the language to go out– and I want to emphasize– offer repatriation to these people. Well, I’m glad to say that they were a proud people, and most of them didn’t want to be on relief.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: That interview is very important because it really is the voice and the thinking of the time of the policymakers, and the predominant voice that people think they’re doing something good. I mean, he really believed that what he did was the greatest humanitarian act that they could have been done.

ED: The reality was harsher. Balderrama says these social workers didn’t explain the full consequences of repatriation.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: According to American law, then if a county pays for your transportation to return to Mexico or to go to Mexico, then your stamped that you can’t re-enter the country.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: Well in the case of my grandfather, his passport– and again he had been here since 1909– stamp it deported. Well, he had no way to get back here.

ED: Balderrama says that more than half of those who went to Mexico during the Great Depression were American citizens.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: Well, simply it’s unconstitutional because you cannot deport an American citizen from his or her country.

ED: Many of them were children who’d never even been to Mexico.

EMILIA VALENCIANA: Because kids, you know, used to pick on me because I was an American citizen. There are a lot of people who did discriminate against us because we were Americans. We didn’t belong there. Isn’t it strange now, here the Anglos discriminate us, discriminate against us because we’re Mexicans. So really, where do we belong?

ED: Valenciana’s mother eventually made it back to the United States, but many others never returned to the land of their birth.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: It’s a lost Generation. I mean, there are people that were lost in Mexico, people without the documentation, people that were denied their right to a life as an American.

ED: It’s hard to know if these programs actually provided more jobs or relief for so-called real Americans, but Valenciana thinks that’s beside the point. If the government wants to ease unemployment, it should try to help all Americans.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: In terms of unemployment, well, who has the right to be employed? Who has the right to make that determination?

EMILIA VALENCIANA: I feel that this country should have done something for their citizens instead of getting rid of them like the way they did.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Christine Valenciana and Francisco Balderrama helped us tell that story. Valenciana is a professor emerita in education at California State University Fullerton. And Balderrama is emeritus professor at California State University Los Angeles and co-author of Decade of Betrayal, Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s.

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BRIAN: That story shows how fear tactics are experienced by those who are targeted. But before we wrap up the show, I want to return to my conversation with historian Adam Goodman because a lot has happened since the 1930s. Goodman says formal deportations have spiked over the past 20 years.

Back in 1986, there were fewer than 25,000 formal deportations. That number has jumped to about 400,000 a year. One reason for the surge is a 1996 law signed by President Bill Clinton that made more crimes deportable offenses. Another is the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.

ADAM GOODMAN: Immigration and security have increasingly become inseparable in the minds of officials and policymakers, especially since 9/11. So the funding for immigration enforcement and for the deportation machine has increased dramatically. Immigration detention has also increased, as well as the number of agents on the line.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: So you’ve mentioned President Clinton in the ’90s being a part of this. We know in 2001, it was George W. Bush who was president. President Obama was called by many of his critics to be the “Deporter in Chief.” What difference does Donald Trump make in any of this?

BRIAN: I ask Goodman that very question.

ADAM GOODMAN: I think it’s a little bit too early to say since things are changing so rapidly, but I think we can say at this point at least that many of Trump’s enforcement actions have been similar to those carried out under Obama, in terms of immigration raids, deporting people who are supposedly criminals. And I think the big difference we see between the previous administration and this administration is the ramping up of the fear campaigns and the scare tactics that are meant to push immigrants out of the country, perhaps, and time will tell.

BRIAN: So if these fear tactics are so successful, what do we even need a giant wall for?

ADAM GOODMAN: The border between the United States and Mexico today is as secure as it ever has been. There are already 650 miles of border wall. Migration from Mexico has dropped considerably, and in fact, net migration is at zero or even below zero. So the symbolic importance of arguing for the wall and carrying out the scapegoating and the fear campaign is meant to place the blame on immigrants for perhaps larger political economic problems and questions of unemployment and economic suffering that so many Americans are feeling today. That is old, and that is tried and true throughout American history.

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BRIAN: Adam Goodman is a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He’s writing a book on the history of deportations.

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BRIAN: Joanne, Nathan, what I take away from this show is that fear is actually a key policy in the history of immigration.

JOANNE FREEMAN: It’s not just fear. It’s the theater of fear. It’s a performance that is meant to get people fearful, that is meant to encourage people to take action, to quote unquote, self-deport, which is a term that I hate.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: You mentioned a theater of fear, Joanne, I mean, I wonder who that performance is for, right. Is it as much for the average American voter, who needs a greater sense of security from the notion that a wall is going to be built? Or is it for the undocumented, who is meant to basically hightail it out of the country before ICE knocks on their door?

JOANNE FREEMAN: It kind of has to be a little bit of both, right?

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Yeah.

JOANNE FREEMAN: There you have the craft in statecraft, is that if you come down too hard on one side or another, you’re going to get pushback.

BRIAN: And I think one of the reasons that this tactic is so psychological, if you will, is we have very mixed feelings about immigration in the first place. I mean, for much of American history for most immigrants that come here, they’re basically being encouraged to come here, often to fill America’s insatiable need for labor.

JOANNE FREEMAN: It’s such an ingrained part of American identity, too, that we are a nation of immigrants. But so much of this is about national identity, insiders, outsiders, aliens. I mean the clash, I guess, of symbolism and brute-level reality that we’re talking about here is really striking.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: So here’s the thing, and this links Chinese Exclusion. It links Mexican-American immigration. It links the concerns now about terrorists, right?

I mean, we imagine the country as a white country, and we’re much more ready to accept migrants from Britain, parts of Europe, even from Russia, frankly, than we are from the places of the world that we consider to be the global south or East Asia. I mean, that’s just a fact. When nativism gets stoked up and it has its greatest traction, it’s against those people who are considered to be nonwhite.

I mean, the fact that we have concerns now about Russian interference in the election or that there are concerns during World War II about German Nazis landing on American shores, none of that had the same kind of visceral consequence that has had relative to Arab people, relative now to South Asian people, relative to Mexican-Americans, I mean, we have to just be willing to acknowledge, at least for a moment, that with the fear button, it rings. And it resonates largely because the country imagines itself– and the white Americans of this country imagine the nation to be– a white nation, and it needs to stay that way in order for the country to be America.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Although I think you have to broaden the definition of white. I think it is racial, but I guess what I’m thinking of is I’m going back to early America when the Irish, for example, were considered a “them” and not an “us.” Catholics were considered a “them” and not an “us.” So I do think it is very much about race, but even that in and of itself isn’t always framed the same way.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Well, no. I would completely agree with that. And in the sense that the “them” is always a nonwhite “them,” that’s all I would say, is that the Irish get incorporated.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Right.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: But, you know, I think in a weird way, I mean, it’s hard to disentangle race and immigration and policy. And maybe we shouldn’t disentangle it, but I think at the base of this we should ask the question, is it possible to have an effective immigration policy that’s not based on fear, right. I’d like to hope so.

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NATHAN CONNOLLY: So that’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your burning history questions. You can find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to back backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at BackStoryRadio, and feel free to review the new show in the iTunes store. Whatever you decide to do, don’t be a stranger.

BRIAN: This episode of BackStory was produced by Andrew Parsons, Brigid McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Millner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Joe Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from Sequoia Carrillo, Emma Craig, Aidan Lee, Courtney Spagna, Robin Blue,  and Elizabeth Spach.

Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from [? Ketsa ?] and Podington Bear.

JOANNE FREEMAN: BackStory produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment, and by History Channel. History made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the Dorothy Compton Professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.