Immigration history is on my mind this summer. This fall I’m teaching a new course, The Historian’s Craft, in which I’ll endeavor to introduce second-year history majors to the skills and habits that the discipline requires. I’m using immigration history from 1882 to 1965 as the topic. So, one of my main projects this summer is to create the course.
In conjunction with creating the new course I’m giving a talk this Sunday to a community group in which I am historicizing the contemporary immigration debate. I’m titling it “Border Control and Cages: The 1880s Origins of the Contemporary Immigration Debate.”
The central idea of the talk is that the 1880s was a crucial decade for U.S. immigration policy. It was the decade that the country began a hard pivot to become a gatekeeping nation. From that point onward, the government emphasized border control, official checkpoints, documentation, and an increasingly complicated apparatus to manage it all.
But, the gatekeeping nation was about more than creating inspection stations like Ellis Island and Angel Island. It was also an exercise in determining who could be an American and who couldn’t. Immigration policy became a process of sorting the desirable from the undesirable and determining who deserved empathy and who didn’t.
The immigration debate has twisted and turned since the 1880s, but it has remained fairly consistent in these processes of sorting and judging.
Take President Biden’s recent executive actions, for example. On June 4, 2024, the president issued an order effectively banning asylum seekers in a move that has drawn comparisons to President Trump’s Muslim ban. The ACLU promised a lawsuit. Restricting asylum “was unlawful under Trump and is no less illegal now,” said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer at the ACLU, to the New York Times. Regardless of the legality of Biden’s action, the president was acting as Gatekeeper-in-Chief and saying to asylum seekers that America is closed to them, that they did not deserve America’s empathy.
Then just two weeks later, on June 18, the president found a group that was worthy–undocumented spouses of American citizens. Biden announced a policy that harkened back to President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), to remove the risk of deportation and provide a pathway to permanent residency, work permits, and citizenship. An estimated 500,000 people will likely meet the eligibility requirements of having lived in the United States for ten years and being married to an American citizen as of June 17. The measure also applies to 50,000 undocumented stepchildren of American citizens. Once the program gets going more than a million people can breathe a little easier and not fear that every knock on the door will be the equivalent of a deportation notice. Here again we see Biden as the Gatekeeper-in-Chief, but this time he used his executive power to open pathways rather than block them. He sorted this group into the worthy category.
My point is much less about President Biden (and even farther removed from election-year politicking). Rather, what is instructive here is the history that has shaped the choices available to him. Since the 1880s, presidents, legislators, and the American people have been wrestling with gatekeeping ideology and determining who could pass under liberty’s lamp and through the golden door and who remained wretched refuse. President Biden is performing according to a script written by the past but informed by the present.
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