Border Report: Mapping Racism in U.S. Immigration Laws

Ninety-six percent of deportation orders went to people from nonwhite-majority countries from 1895 through 2022, according to researchers at University of California Los Angeles.

In a project called Mapping Deportations, released last week in a collaboration between the School of Law’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy and Million Dollar Hoods, the researchers found that the creation of U.S. immigration enforcement laws and policies has a deep history of racism that continues today.

“That number is far too high to be random,” said Mariah Tso, one of the researchers on the project. “And it’s not random. The numbers are a reflection of policies and racism.”

The researchers published an interactive map that shows where the people who received the deportation orders are from, along with an accompanying timeline of immigration law and policy.

Notably, the data set only includes official deportation orders, so it does not include mass removals of Mexican and Mexican American people in the 1930s, which were less formally carried out.

Kelly Lytle Hernández, a researcher on the project, said that the team saw five major eras of immigration law during the time studied. 

From 1790 to 1875 was the birth of the U.S. immigration system, Lytle Hernández said, and from the start, the laws that passed had the intention of making the United States a “white man’s republic.” 

From 1876 to 1929, she said, the nation federalized its immigration laws and built a “whites only” system. That meant, she said, using a metaphor of the Jim Crow era, that the front door to the system was reserved for white people but nonwhite people could come through back doors to work.

From 1930 to 1954, admission rules changed, Lytle Hernández said, and bans on immigration from Asian countries ended, but strict caps still restricted how many people could come from those countries. At the same time, the United States engaged in mass campaigns to remove people to Mexico.

“All of this was happening while legislators in Congress were talking about and passing legislation to ‘maintain the racial complexion of the population of the nation,’” Lytle Hernández said.

From 1955 to 1990, though laws changed to allow more immigration from countries that had previously been heavily restricted, Lytle Hernández said racism remained in the system. Though the visa allocation system was more open, rules for visa eligibility still restricted who had access to the United States in a way that disparately impacted nonwhite people, she said.

From 1991 to the present, she said, the United States has created the largest detention and deportation system with links to the mass incarceration system which has its own layers of structural racism.

“Authorities have crafted what we call a whites only immigration system that to date has been repeatedly amended, but it has never been abolished,” Lytle Hernández said.

Tso called the patterns in the data chilling. The project includes a timeline of quotes from people in power in the United States showing their racist intentions with the immigration system.

“Immigration laws were never about just managing borders, but about maintaining the racial hierarchy, and you can see that quite explicitly in the quotes,” Tso said.

Many of the quotes in the early years use hateful language to describe immigrants from Asian countries, particularly China.

“My objection to the immigration of Chinese into this country is not that they do not stay here, not that they do not become citizens of the United States, but it is based on an entirely different ground,” reads a quote from Sen. James Z. George (D-MS) in 1888. “They are an inferior race, unfit for citizenship in the United States and unfit to be competitors with the American laborers.”

The timeline of quotes includes John Tanton, a eugenicist who founded several immigration organizations that are influential in the current presidential administration.

“I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that,” reads a quote from Tanton from 1993.

Ahilan Arulanantham, another researcher on the project, said that it’s important to understand this historical context so that we don’t repeat it. He said it’s also important to note that there have been people resisting and pushing back on these racist rules throughout history.

Lytle Hernández said Congress made entering the United States without inspection a crime specifically to target Mexican people. It was difficult to get visas at the time outside of Europe. She noted that the fact that entry and reentry without inspection are crimes while overstaying a visa is not shows the different treatment for people from white-majority countries.

Arulanantham gave recent examples of similar disparate treatment based on race, including under the Biden administration. The way the Biden administration reacted to large numbers of Ukrainian asylum seekers showing up at the border was very different from the way it treated a large group of Haitian asylum seekers.

A lot of Ukrainians were able to come to the United States on visas to flee their country as well, he said.

“It’s amazing they got visas at all,” Arulanantham said. “People from other war torn parts of the world aren’t able to get visas.”

More Ukrainians were able to come through a parole program. Though there was also a parole program for people fleeing Afghanistan after U.S. troops left the country and the Taliban took over, the program for Ukrainians was far more generous, Arulanantham said.

“This is why history is important. It allows us to see what’s at work, what’s in operation, every day on the streets today,” Lytle Hernández said. “It’s important to find the pattern across all the individual cases.”

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In Other News

Help for immigrant children: The County Board of Supervisors voted to approve a proposal that would expand eligibility for a county immigration legal defense program to include unaccompanied children, Alexandra Mendoza wrote for The San Diego Union-Tribune. I covered the proposal in the last Border Report for Voice of San Diego.

Terrified students: Sofía Mejías-Pascoe and Andrea Figueroa Briseño of inewsource reported on the fears and traumas that students are facing about Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. The reporters also looked at ways that schools are responding.

Extorting deportees: According to Salvador Rivera of The Border Report, Tijuana police are extorting money from deported people. That’s been happening at the same time as an increase in deportees arriving at local shelters, he reported.

Sanctioned mayor: Alexandra Mendoza of The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned a former mayor of Playas de Rosarito and current member of Mexico’s congress over allegations that she is linked to a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel.

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