Stanford University Press Blog

Immigrants Make America Great

Immigrants and native-born citizens equally benefit or suffer from a nation's policies.

By ERNESTO CASTAÑEDA

Photo by Ernesto Castañeda

In another instance of anti-immigrant rhetoric, John Kelly, President Trump’s chief of staff, stated that while not all immigrants are criminals, many immigrants have a hard time assimilating into American society:

[T]he vast majority of the people that move illegally into the United States are not bad people. They're not criminals. They're not MS-13. ... But they're also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society. They're overwhelmingly rural people. In the countries they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don't speak English; obviously that's a big thing. ... They don't integrate well; they don't have skills. They're not bad people. They're coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws. ... The big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States, and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long (NPR, May 10, 2018).

These types of statements have been commonplace since the 1990’s anti-immigrant ideological campaigns and policies such as California’s Proposition 187, barring undocumented immigrants from receiving social services and rights. There are also historical precedents for these types of arguments being directed to German, Swedish, Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants. Today as well as in the past, these arguments are less about facts and more about xenophobia and racial superiority complexes.

The administration of “illegality”

“Illegal” immigrants are universally demonized, but it is exclusionary immigration laws that produce “illegality.”

By ANNA TUCKETT

Matteo Salvini, 2018. Photo by Presidenza della Repubblica, via Wikimedia Commons.

Illiberal immigration policies and the xenophobic rhetoric that accompanies them are on the rise in the Western world. In Trump’s America, children are being prised away from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, making even the President’s Republican colleagues express discomfort. In the U.K., the unlawful detention and deportation of British-Caribbean citizens – the so-called “Windrush scandal” – has revealed the deeply pernicious consequences of Theresa May’s “hostile environment” policy for migrants. In mainland Europe, meanwhile, the anti-immigrant nationalist leader Victor Orban achieved a resounding victory in the Hungarian national election in April, while in Italy the formation of a new coalition government has catapulted the anti-immigrant Lega (League) party into the heart of political power. The appointment of Matteo Salvini, the Lega’s leader, as Interior Minister means that a far-right politician is now in charge of Italy’s border control, its policing, and its immigration policy. This has rightly caused alarm: during the recent election campaign, Salvini pledged to deport hundreds of thousands of “illegal” migrants should his party win, and this rhetoric has continued following the Lega’s positive election results. Just weeks after coming into office, the newly appointed minister left 629 migrants stranded when he refused to allow a rescue ship to dock in Italy.

Politicians such as Salvini and Trump revel in whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment with a dramatic focus on the supposed threats to nation-states’ borders, but as my book Rules, Paper, Status shows, they consistently overlook a crucial part of the immigration picture: “illegal” immigration is actually produced inside borders through the implementation of harsh and exclusionary policies that create the very categories which parties like the Lega then rail against. As migration scholars have consistently pointed out, “illegal” immigrants are not merely comprised of those who arrive on the rickety boats that cross the Mediterranean. In fact, the number of migrants who attempt to arrive in Europe “clandestinely” makes up only a tiny fraction of the continent’s migrant population. Many more arrive “legally” on some kind of visa for tourism, work, study, or family purposes.