Immigration and Cities in Historical Perspective
On Wednesday, March 13, 2024, the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest hosted Dr. Uzma Quraishi, Professor of History at Sam Houston State, and Dr. Lilia Fernández, Professor of History at the University of Illinois Chicago. Dr. Quraishi specializes in immigration, race and ethnicity, Asian American history, and the Cold War. Dr. Fernández is an expert in Latinos/as/x in the mid-to-late twentieth-century United States. Both scholars investigate the intersections of race, class, and immigration. The event was moderated by Daniel Cortes, Assistant Professor of Law and Director of the Clinic for Asylum, Refugee, and Emigrant Services at Charles Widger School of Law, Villanova University.
What does the history of immigration reveal about the United States? Dr. Uzma Quraishi and Dr. Lilia Fernández explored this question in this recent Lepage event by examining the intersection of immigration and the urban places of Houston, Texas, and Chicago, Illinois, respectively. Contextualizing their urban histories in the history and theory of immigration to the US clarifies how, for both scholars, race and place are woven together into the immigrant experience.
Immigration, according to Dr. Fernández, “draws more heat than light;” the political controversy and debate it inspires obscures that it is also a deeply social and human issue. That people move from one place to another, sometimes across borders, is not new. Throughout history, when resources run out, natural disasters strike, or work conditions deteriorate, people migrate. “The United States is no different in that regard.” For Dr. Fernández, twentieth-century immigration to the US has often been a “response to labor gains.” As people saw working conditions or wages as better in the US than in their current location, they came looking for work. Often employers encouraged immigrants to come, especially to remedy shortages in skilled labor. This was the case in the late 1960s when US companies recruited many doctors, engineers, and scientists from South Asia due to domestic labor shortages.
However, while economic-based immigration policies have welcomed some, it has excluded many others. According to Dr. Quraishi, the US’s immigration policy is grounded in “maintaining a healthy economy…not in ensuring human rights for people of the working classes.” Like many other countries, the US government reviews immigration pleas from a self-interested perspective, asking “will this person help the economy and society, or will they hurt it?” Deeming a group unfit for immigration contributes to the construction of racial prejudice.[1] Economic-based immigration policies thereafter buttress racial assumptions about people groups “stealing” jobs from those already in the US.
Alongside economics, Dr. Quraishi sees anti-immigrant sentiment as “tethered to US foreign relations.” After 9/11, as the US undertook wars in the Middle East, immigration laws began to restrict and surveil Muslims. Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the United States saw China as a geopolitical competitor, there was an intense increase in hate crimes against East-Asian Americans. Dr. Quraishi believes these anti-immigrant, racist sentiments lie dormant, waiting for acceptable moments to reappear.
Indeed, according to Dr. Quraishi, the history of racialized, anti-immigrant sentiment and anti-Asian immigration laws provide the background for seeing contemporary racism not as an anomaly, but rather as a recurring theme of American life. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred immigrants from China from entering the US or becoming citizens. Similar laws from the late nineteenth century were aimed at Asia in general and China in particular to keep out prostitutes (as if there were no prostitutes in America). The 1917 Immigration Act drew a fictional line around what the US considered to be Asia, further expanding who was ineligible for entry from southeast Asia to Afghanistan. As if these were not restrictive enough, the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act further blocked people's immigration from Japan and stipulated that people from Asia could only gain citizenship through birth. This law gave rise to a series of laws related to Jim Crow that targeted Asian people, barring them from owning land, attending white schools, or swimming in public pools.
These restrictive and racializing laws remained in effect until the 1952 McCarran Walter Act, which created a small quota for Asian immigration, and the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, which finally removed all legal restrictions targeting Asian immigration. However, while Hart-Celler opened the floodgates to immigration, it was only passed because lawmakers did not expect it to make any change in the demographic makeup of the country. Thus, according to Dr. Quraishi, just because these laws changed “does not mean minds were changed.”
While white Americans and policymakers may not have thought differently about race after racist immigration laws were undone, those who migrated to US cities provide a more critical perspective on US race and immigration. Both Dr. Quraishi and Dr. Fernández take the perspective of immigrants in exploring the history of immigration to US cities in the twentieth century. This allows them to use the history of immigration to understand larger power hierarchies in everyday American life.
Dr. Fernández’s historical scholarship is rooted in the immigrant experience in Chicago as her grandparents immigrated to Chicago in 1950. Being a grandchild of immigrants and a native of Chicago during the final decades of the century has informed her historical interests.
Historical study is for Dr. Fernández an effort to rectify the omissions, erasures, and denigrations of “people who came from similar backgrounds, or from my community.” She described how her work is not only informed by her positionality but also is an expression of her “collective heritage” and finally an endeavor to “know who I was.”
One example is in her research on the local consequences of the construction of the University of Illinois Chicago. In 1963, the land was cleared for the campus, forcing the current residents, who were largely Latino/a immigrants, to move south and west. In her experience, the people who know and talk about this injustice are “the people who lived through it and experienced it.” Dr. Fernández takes their perspective in researching the local, racial power imbalances that made it all but impossible for those from her community to resist displacement. For these people, racial aggression and displacement were embedded in their immigrant experience.[2]
Similarly, Dr. Quraishi demonstrated that race and place were interwoven in the immigrant experience of Pakistanis and Indians who moved to Houston.[3] Largely coming to Houston for higher education, these immigrants experienced the racism of southern Jim Crow laws, even after they were undone in the 1960s. While on the surface, Pakistanis and Indians were able to obtain jobs and gain long-term residence in the suburbs of Houston, in the 1970s, they were frequently illegally barred from places such as restaurants and housing on the basis of race. For Dr. Quraishi, these injustices were the outgrowth not only of Jim Crow laws but also the long history of Anti-Asian immigration laws. These practices of place-making — determining who is allowed to be where — are intimately connected to practices of race-making. Thus, the experience of these Pakistani and Indian immigrants to Houston “shows that race continued to be a salient feature of Southern life in the post-Jim Crow era.”
These histories of Chicago and Houston, against the backdrop of the theory and history of immigration law in the United States, reveal not only the diverse identity of this country but also the glaring injustices experienced by immigrants. The stories of immigrants counter the hegemonic narrative of the US as a welcoming land of opportunity for all. That Latina/o people experienced internal displacement and Indians and Pakistanis were often barred from dining and housing demonstrates the injustices that followed people of color in the United States, before and after Jim Crow.
At the individual level, these histories of immigration can give contemporary residents in the US “tools to better humanize and respect each other as immigrants.” However, as post-Jim Crow racism continues to be rooted in the histories of Jim Crow and restrictive immigration laws, what the US needs is a change of immigration law and changes in place-making. Ultimately, as Dr. Quraishi declared, the US needs to build a new immigration policy that starts not from a self-interested, economic theory but rather “from a human rights-based beginning.”
[1] For further reading see Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, Revised edition (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014).
[2] For further reading see Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago, Reprint edition (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
[3] For further reading see Uzma Quraishi, Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston during the Cold War, (Chapel Hill: Univ of North Carolina Press, 2020).
