Our immigration conversation is broken -- here's how to have a better one

This essay tells the story of Americans' charged arguments about immigration, stretching back to the nation's founding. Where pro-immigrant activists often condemn anti-immigrant, nativist politics by saying this vision is "not who we are," the historical realities are more complicated. Some have sought to shut the nation's doors against "undesirable" outsiders, some have wanted to admit immigrants who served the nation's power, and still others have urged the United States to serve as an "asylum for the oppressed of all mankind." In crucial ways, Americans's ideas of who they were — and weren't — were forged in these struggles.

This editorial comment, revised from a version published in the New York Times, reflects on the public outrage that followed Donald Trump's disparaging of some non-white immigrants' home countries. It argues that condemning this and other, similar statements is essential, but that opponents of nativism should not fall into the trap of vindicating immigrants in the face of racial abuse by insisting, for example, that immigrants are in fact hard-working, law-abiding and eager to assimilate. Instead of giving nativist charges credence by answering them, immigrants' advocates need to raise new, better questions: about migrant workers' rights, about the Global North's role in the forces that displace migrants and about global inequality.

In the Supreme Court's deliberations over the Trump administration's travel ban, which predominantly targets majority-Muslim countries, justices who supported the policy and those who opposed it distinguished between racially discriminatory intent (as illegitimate) and "national security" goals (as legitimate). In fact, definitions of US national security — of who represent a threat to the nation — have long been infused with racial meanings at their core, even as racially discriminatory laws, including immigration laws, have been defended in the name of national security. A Supreme Court justice who defended the incarceration of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II, for example, invoked a similar contrast, claiming that, despite its exclusive application to people of Japanese descent, the policy was not racial, but justified by the demands of "national security."

While current US policies aggressively and deliberately separate migrant families at the US-Mexico border, family reunification has — in complex ways, and not always for good reasons — played an important role in US immigration policy over the past century. Remarkably, policymakers who were divided on many other issues — liberals and conservatives, immigrant advocates and nativists — often agreed that US policy should seek to keep families together, or to reunite those that had been separated. To be sure, official definitions of a legitimate family (male-dominated and straight) remained extremely narrow, and split many families in practice; rationales for family reunification (that men shouldn't be denied their wives' labor, for example) were hierarchical. But as the principle of family reunification is put under siege, its centrality to US immigration policy should not be forgotten.

This article discusses the Statue of Liberty's shifting, elusive and contested meanings when it comes to immigrants, and how those meanings clashed during the Statue's centennial celebration in 1986. The conventional account — that the Statue has stood for immigrant welcome since Emma Lazarus penned her famous poem — doesn't tell the whole story. In fact, some early nativists saw in the Statue a warrior goddess guarding the nation's gates against incoming "undesirables." Over the decades, it was newly arriving immigrants themselves who reinvented the Statue as their beacon and icon. But as became clear during the centennial festivities, the Statue's ties to immigrants could also be mobilized in the service of American exceptionalism, and for self-congratulatory nationalist and imperial purposes.

This interview with National Public Radio's On the Media tells the story of the Statue of Liberty's changing immigrant meanings (also explored in the article above). Rather than possessing a single, stable and agreed-upon interpretation, there have been at least three different, rival Statues when it comes to immigration: the Guardian statue, a nativist icon whose task is to preserve the nation’s racial and cultural "purity"; the Exile statue, which welcomes the world's "huddled masses"; and the Imperial statue, which exaggerates and trumpets the nation's openness to immigrants in defense of US political and economic institutions and the nation's exercise of power in the world.

This public talk explores the Statue of Liberty's contested history, using its appearances in public debate — especially in political cartoons — to track the strange career of an ever-present symbol that is easy to take for granted, but whose very ambiguity and openness to interpretation has drawn it into the immigration debate, again and again.