EQUITY and IMMIGRANTS
In the Fight for Racial Equity, Don’t Forget About Immigrants
What does it look like for racism to impact the lives of immigrants? In the United States, immigration policy has a long history of reflecting the structural racism that exists in society. This history includes the Immigration Act of 1924, which placed strict national origin quotas on nonwhite immigrants. Under this Act, immigrants from African, Latin American, and Asian countries faced greater restrictions than those from European countries.
More recently, the past four years have seen a concerted attack on immigrants, primarily affecting immigrants from marginalized racial or ethnic backgrounds. Among other efforts, the Trump Administration rescinded Temporary Protected Status for immigrants fleeing countries impacted by war and natural disasters, issued travel and refugee bans that target people from Muslim countries, and separated children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Further, deportation rates are higher for immigrants from black and brown countries despite the fact that the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants are not criminals.
Now, all eyes — both at home and abroad — are on the Biden-Harris Administration. Their plans include reversing many of the Trump Administration’s anti-immigrant policies, and creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. This direction is a welcome change from the previous administration’s immigration policies. But immigration is not a stand-alone issue. Immigration is also a racial equity issue. And integrating immigration policy within broader plans to address racial equity will move our nation closer to bridging the divides that maintain systemic racism.
We often think about how racism creates barriers for Americans of color, but racism also affects immigrants. In the United States, revoking Temporary Protected Status primarily affects immigrants from El Salvador, Nicaragua and Sudan. The travel ban is commonly known as the “Muslim ban,” and the children in cages at the border are from Mexico and other Latin American countries. Black and brown immigrants are the ones facing exclusion and discrimination under the shifting sands of immigration policy.
Unfortunately, this dynamic that we see in the U.S. is a global problem. Immigration policy and racism are intimately intertwined in many countries. I have spent the last ten years analyzing how racial discrimination infiltrates immigration policy in the Dominican Republic. There, new policies and a new constitution changed birthright citizenship (also a goal of some U.S. anti-immigration activists). Today, if Haitian immigrant parents are undocumented, their Dominican-born children do not have access to Dominican citizenship. This change has created statelessness for hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. And those who are affected, many in their 30s with their own children, are seeing multiple generations of people living on the margins of society — unable to vote or attend school past eighth grade. In the Dominican Republic, Haitians are the black immigrants whose lives are uprooted when anti-immigrant sentiment and racism converge.
As another example, in India almost two million people may be stateless after the country’s government excluded them from a national register of citizens. The vast majority of those affected are from the Bengali Muslim community, an ethnic minority group in India. And in the United Kingdom, the decision to leave the European Union — known as “Brexit” — was partially related to racial tension resulting from a growing immigrant population. The campaign to leave, led by the right-wing political party in the United Kingdom, was steeped in “racially charged animus toward immigrants.”
In countries all over the world, immigration policies are creating human rights crises that are stacked against people from marginalized racial or ethnic backgrounds. Learning from the failures of both U.S. and international immigration policy can help identify past pitfalls and inform better approaches to combating the racism immigrants face. Keeping these lessons in mind will be important as the Biden-Harris Administration prioritizes racial equity to move forward on the path toward unifying a divided nation.
Racism against immigrants is racism too.
