The History Of The USA's Immigration Policies

The history of immigration policy in the US has always been fraught. Whatever policies get implemented stem from white supremacy. Dan Melo comes on to discuss the history of immigration policy in America.

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Sam: Let's just start sort of with the history and the development of our immigration policies sort of broadly speaking. And what they're designed to do from the perspective of I guess like our capitalist economy.

Dan Melo: Sure so as briefly as I can right because this history actually goes all the way back to you know pre-independence times where you had the first migrants which weren't actually called migrants at that point but indentured servants being brought over from Europe from Australia and actually being sold you know more or less not on the same level obviously as slavery but being sold into indentured servitude here in the U.S.. so it was literally like early migration was around labor primarily and the control between early colonies and then eventually between the states and the federal government we had this grappling back and forth about that about who was going to have the say over who came into the country and how. And eventually you know this ends up getting sort of resolved as just this kind of greater incident to sovereign power or state power from the federal level. But at all points throughout that history right we're looking at things through this lens of ultimately as a question of control right? Controlling labor flows or controlling power. some of the earliest laws around immigration were to protect the sort of hold that the original founding group of folks had over the country keeping things like anarchists or even just poor Irish people from coming over and potentially usurping some of the early capitalist kind of dominance of the country. Even the abolition of the international slave trade right actually wasn't because the congress at the time was interested in that humanity as a humanitarian aim but actually was afraid that the recent Haitian revolution might get transplanted to the southern states and get kicked off there. And so whether you're talking about strictly labor concerns or more broadly preservation of power issues that has always been the case moving throughout our history.

Sam: Let's move up into the sort of I guess the more modern era of immigration which I don't know if you would argue but you definitely said the Coleman Blease is that am I pronouncing his name correctly?

Melo: Right I think that's right Coleman Blease yeah which was the first white supremacist from South Carolina. Passes the first criminalization. so the actual excuse yeah senator from South Carolina. Passes the first criminalization actual like legal criminalization of migration. Which is in its own shape and form still present today right? And so there's a little-known piece of immigration largely the ones that we know about right? The context that we're familiar with is that civil peace where people are just trying to stay here in the country. But there's actually a criminal statute for unlawful entries or re-entries where people are charged with an actual crime end up going to prison and eventually kicked outright? And so during that same period that gets used right to criminalize migrants to the CPB would the then CPB the border patrol would actually like take them at times to work on farms they would donate basically their labor and then once the agriculturalists were done with them then they would get removed or thrown out of the country right? So whether we're talking about the civil level or say with Goldman police and the criminalization of migrants we're still looking at that ability to control migration very tightly.

Sam: That happened in 1929 and there are two you know the sort of like I guess sort of things happening in 1929. One we're sort of like in the wake of a re-emergence of the KKK and a reassertion of a reassertion of a reassertion of white supremacy. I guess you could say.