Political geographer Reece Jones (University of Hawaii), author of “White Borders,” writes that from its inception “the United States was built on the dual foundation of open immigration for whites from Northern Europe and racial subordination and exclusion of enslaved people from Africa, Native Americans and, eventually, immigrants from other parts of the world.”

Racial exclusion was first codified, Jones notes, in the Naturalization Act of 1790 which restricted citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person.” This meant that only white, male property holders could naturalize and become U.S. citizens. Women, non-whites and indentured servants could not.

In 1830 the Congress passed, and President Andrew Jackson signed into law, the Indian Removal Act. Over the next 20 years, approximately 100,000 Native Americans in the Southeast (primarily Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Creek) were forcibly relocated to Indian Territory (now the state of Oklahoma), a roughly 1,000-mile journey. President Jackson’s Secretary of War, Lewis Cass, stated: “The Indians are entitled to the enjoyment of all rights that do not interfere with the obvious design of Providence.”

The Indian Removal Act was a significant victory for white Southerners. Approximately 25 million acres of Native American land were now available to settlers and plantation owners. Chattel slavery expanded significantly as a consequence of this monumental land theft.

In the early 1850s, a California man was convicted of killing a Chinese miner. On appeal, the California Supreme Court (1854) nullified the conviction because a key prosecution witness was Chinese. The court stated that “no Black or mulatto person, or Indian, shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of, or against a white man.” Chief Justice Charles Murray wrote the Chinese are “a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior …”

In the 1857 Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court ruled the Constitution did not extend citizenship to “Negroes” and never would. Whether free or enslaved, Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote, black people “have no rights that any white man is bound to respect.”

In 1922, the Mississippi state Senate voted to ask the federal government to exchange some World War I debts owed by European countries for land in colonial Africa. Mississippi could then ship its Black residents to Africa and create “a final home from the land of their birth.” The Senate’s reasoning was straightforward: with chattel slavery dead who needs Black people?

With the passage of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, Congress created the first immigration quota system based on country of origin. This legislation favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe while significantly limiting people from the “inferior races” of Eastern and Southern Europe. This legislation completely excluded Asian immigrants.

The Johnson-Reed Act was passed in the heyday of the eugenics movement (1907-1939) — the scientifically erroneous theory of controlled breeding to improve society, with white people the standard of human achievement. In 1925, approximately 30,000 white-clad KKK members brazenly marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.

In 1935, Congress passed two laws protecting American workers, but not all of them. The Social Security Act exempted agricultural workers and domestic servants — labor performed primarily by Blacks, Mexicans and Asians — from receiving old-age pensions benefits. The Wagner Act did not prohibit labor unions from discriminating against non-whites. These acts legally excluded minorities form higher paying union jobs that often came with benefits including health insurance.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the federal government created programs subsidizing low-cost home loans, making it easier for millions of Americans to move from renters to home owners. “Redlining” was a common real estate practice wherein red lines were drawn around minority neighborhoods designating the inhabitants as “high-risk” and ineligible for home loans.

This practice trapped minorities in urban neighborhoods and facilitated the growth of all White suburbs. Real estate attorney Rajeh Sandeh states that “redlining shut generations of Black and Brown homebuyers out of the market.” Redlining was a major factor in the significant Black-White wealth gap that still exists.

In his 2012 book, Le Grand Replacement (“The Great Replacement”), French writer Renaud Camus claims that Black and Brown immigrants are currently reverse-colonizing native “white” Europeans. By 2022, former Fox News superstar Tucker Carlson had mentioned this theory more than 400 times on his show. Replacement theory has become the centerpiece of the MAGA (formerly Republican) Party strategy to gain control of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government.

Former evangelical Christian Brad Onishi, author of “Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism,” reports this religious perspective is a blending of white grievance politics (including replacement) and evangelicalism. This “politics of resentment,” Onishi states, fueled extremist strains of white Christian America that led to the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

Anti-immigration has been Trump’s foremost political message since the 2016 presidential campaign. He would build a border wall and make “Mexico pay for that wall.” Once elected his anti-immigrant spiel became increasingly vitriolic. In January 2018, he asked: “Why do we have more Haitians? Take them out. … Why are we having all these people from shithole countries here? Why do we have all these people from Africa here?”

In May, Trump stated that if he’s elected “we will begin the largest deportation [of illegal immigrants] in American history.” These people were arriving by the millions from “insane asylums” leading to the “plunder, rape, slaughter and the destruction of American suburbs, cities and towns.” All lies. The evidence indicates immigrants (legal or illegal) tend to be more law-abiding than native-born citizen.

Nevertheless, I have no doubt that a national ballot measure calling for the forced relocation of American citizens whose families came to this country from Asia, Africa, Mexico, Central and South America to “the land or their origin” would receive millions of votes.

Trump didn’t create this latest round of virulent racism. Rather, he unleashed and legitimated it, made race hatred patriotic. Political geographer Reece Jones writes that while anti-immigrant language makes “some Americans uncomfortable, this is exactly how America has treated nonwhite immigrants throughout history. It is who we are. The question is whether it’s who we want to be in the future.”

(George J. Bryjak lives in Bloomingdale and is retired after 24 years of teaching sociology at the University of San Diego. A list of sources accompanies this commentary online.)

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Sources

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Black, E. (2012) War against the weak: eugenics and America’s campaign to create a master race, Dialog Press: Bethesda, Maryland

Benton, J. (2022) “A century ago, Mississippi’s Senate voted to send all the state’s Black people to Africa,” February 10, The Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com

DeWitt., L (2010) “The Decision to Exclude Agricultural and Domestic Workers from the 1935 Social Security Act,” Social Security Office of Retirement and Disability Policy, www.ssa.gov

“Dred Scottt v. Sanford – 1857” (accessed 2024) The National Archives, www.archives.gov

Dunbar, R. (2022) Not A Nation of immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion, Beacon Press: Boston

Gabbat, A. (2022) “Fox News suddenly goes quiet on ‘great replacement’ theory after Buffalo shooing,” May 17, The Guardian, www.theguardian.com

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Harvey, J. (2022) “Tucker Carlson all out embraces ‘Great Replacement’ Theory,” July 19, The Huffington Post, www.huffingtonpost.com

Jones, R. (2021) “Facing up to the racist legacy of America’s immigration laws,” October 28, The New York Times, www.nytimes.com

Jones, R. (2022) White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall, Beacon Press: Boston

“Nationality Act of 1790” (accessed 2024) Immigration History, www.immigrationhistory.com

Onishi, B. (2023) Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism – and What Comes Next, Beacon Press: Boston

“President Andrew Jackson’s message to Congress ‘On Indian Removal'” (accessed 2024) National Archives, www.archives.gov

Saadeh, R. (2024) “What is redlining? The history of racism in U.S. real estate,” April 5, Bankrate, www.bankrate.com

“The Immigration Act of 1924 – The Johnson-Reed Act” (accessed 2024) Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov

“The Wagner Act is Signed” (accessed 2024) The African American Registry, www.aaregistry.org

“The Trail of Tears” (accessed 2024) National Parks Service, www.nps.gov

“1838: Cherokee die on Trail of Tears” (accessed 2024) National Library of Medicine, National Institute of Health, www.nlm.nih.gov