In June of 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (Plyler v. Doe) that no state can prevent the children of undocumented immigrants from attending public school without demonstrating a substantial state interest in doing so. Despite no such interest existing, recent executive orders entertaining ICE raids in U.S schools have resulted in notable decreases in school attendance within immigrant-dominated communities. Countless students have walked out to protest mass deportations as parents feel forced to choose between prioritizing their children’s education or safety.
Of the 50-plus executive orders signed off by Trump since his inauguration, a significant number include conservative changes to immigration policy, inciting mass deportations of undocumented immigrants under the facade of maintaining national security. Such policies unjustly target Latin American immigrants by blaming them for American socio-economic issues and discounting the importance of immigrants for the U.S. economy. These policies subsequently harm Asian American immigrants by reinforcing the model-minority myth that divides Asian Americans and other communities of color.
Executive Order: Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship
Executive Order: Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, signed by Trump on Jan. 20, re-interprets the 14th Amendment of the U.S Constitution and birthright citizenship. The 14th amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 as a reconstruction amendment: an attempt to reform the socio-economic structure of the American South after the abolition of slavery. The intended impact of the fourteenth amendment was to grant “citizenship to all persons ‘born or naturalized in the United States,’ including formerly enslaved people, and providing all citizens with equal protection under the laws.” There’s a bitter irony to Trump conservatively modifying the definition of birthright citizenship despite its initial purpose to grant citizenship to descendants of slaves who couldn’t inherit it from their ancestors — slaves that were brought to America against their will.
Despite United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) ensuring “the citizenship of children born in the United States to non-citizens,” the Executive order establishes that a person is ineligible for birthright citizenship if (a) their mother was unlawfully present in the US and their father was not a US citizen or permanent resident at the time of their birth, or if (b) their mother’s presence was lawful but temporary and their father was not a citizen or lawful permanent resident. To determine whether a person falls under the jurisdiction of the United States based on their parent’s immigration statuses (including those whose parents aren’t directly employed under a foreign government) entirely dismisses the precedent set for U.S. jus soli without reasonable justification.
Rescinding ICE Guidelines
Former guidelines preventing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection enforcement from conducting raids in “sensitive spaces,” including schools, churches and hospitals, have been rescinded in order to empower “the brave men and women in CBP and ICE to enforce our immigration laws and catch criminal aliens — including murders and rapists — who have illegally come into our country.” Contrary to conservatives’ favorite phrase — “Facts Over Feelings!” — the equation of undocumented immigrants to “murderers and rapists” is upheld by factually-hollow racist rhetoric. A New York Times analysis that evaluated the relationship between increasing immigration rates and violent crime rate from 1980 to 2016 “suggests either that immigration has the effect of reducing average crime, or that there is simply no relationship between the two” as a “consistent pattern” existed “in each decade from 1980 to 2016, with immigrant populations and crime failing to grow together.” More recently, a working paper published by economic professors at Stanford and Princeton documented that “immigrant men have had a lower incarceration rate than U.S.-born men for the last 150 years of American history.” Trump’s policy changes being to “ensure American safety” is entirely nonsensical when the correlation between increasing immigration rates and crime is not empirically supported.
“Expanding Law Enforcement and Ending the Abuse of Humanitarian Parole”
BBC reports, “In an executive order, Trump suspended the entry of all undocumented migrants to the US, and border patrol agents have been instructed to turn people away without granting asylum hearings.” Throughout the last century, the U.S. has prided itself on promoting democracy globally, largely through economic and humanitarian intervention. For example, in the Truman Doctrine of 1947, the U.S. promised “political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces.” America has built its identity upon using its position as a superpower to promote peace and human development around the world; former President Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted the United Nations to “maintain international peace and security and to achieve cooperation among nations on economic, social and humanitarian problems.” Despite all of this, the Trump administration pulled the U.S. out of the UN Human Rights Council and enacted measures to prevent asylum access to humanitarian parole seekers fleeing war and chaos in their home countries.
The UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention “asserts that a refugee should not be returned to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom.” While Trump may believe the U.S. benefits from indiscriminately deterring immigration, preventing asylum access jeopardizes the credibility of the U.S.’s commitment to the UN, and thereby, its reputation as a democratic superpower — a dangerous loss of diplomatic influence especially as global conflicts like the Russo-Ukrainian war persist.
“They’re Taking Our Jobs!”
A main proponent of Trump’s anti-immigration policies are Americans who fear job insecurity from increased immigration. This fear stems from the “lump of labor” fallacy: the idea that “there is a fixed amount of work to be done in the world, so any increase in the amount each worker can produce reduces the number of available jobs.” The insistence that immigration is economically costly to the US isn’t even logical. Senior Policy Analyst Valerie Lacarte reported, “Because immigrants are themselves consumers, they increase the demand for goods and services, thereby creating job opportunities for native and foreign workers alike.” So, immigrants boost economic growth by increasing consumer spending and expanding the labor force. The fear of immigrants invading the American workforce is directly oppositional to what is evidently true about the positive relationship between immigration and the U.S. economy.
Concerns over the equitable allocation of public resources result from a misconception that undocumented immigrants reap the benefits of public resources without contributing their fair share through tax-paying. “Even unauthorized immigrants who lack work authorization pay these taxes: on top of sales and property taxes, many work on the books using a fake Social Security number or one belonging to another worker, and as a result pay payroll taxes,” Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the Migration Policy Institute, said. Essentially, major economic fears fueling the support of anti-immigration policies are not empirically supported.
While the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies largely threaten the safety of the Latine American community, Asian Americans should not mistake the reinforcement of the Model Minority dynamic for positive promotion in Western society.
A History of Immigration
But Trump’s racist anti-immigration policies aren’t anything new. The U.S. has a long history of conveniently shifting its framing of immigration depending on its needs.
The Bracero Program, established in a 1942 executive order called the Mexican Farm Labor Program, “permitted millions of Mexican men to work legally in the United States on short-term labor contracts.” While America demanded its citizens to fight in WWII, the national agricultural labor shortage grew — and promoting Latin American immigration became a convenient move. The program resulted in an “influx of undocumented and documented laborers,” a result entirely produced by American political choices. Similarly, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (resulting from rising anti-Chinese sentiment as the number of Chinese laborers in the West increased during the California Gold Rush) was repealed in 1943, based on U.S. political concerns “as Japanese propaganda made repeated reference to Chinese exclusion from the United States in order to weaken the ties between the United States and its ally, the Republic of China.” Similarly, American attitudes towards Japanese immigration steeply declined during WWII, inciting the mass internment of Japanese Americans as the public feared “foreign invasion” at home. Yet today, “47% of U.S. adults say the impact of Asian immigrants on American society has been mostly positive” while 37% of U.S adults say the impact of Latin American immigrants on U.S. society is mostly negative.
A noticeable pattern within these changing attitudes is their inverse relationships with each other — as anti-Japanese rhetoric rose during WWII, pro-Mexican immigration sentiments rose, too. Now that America is predominantly concerned by Latin American immigration, approval for Asian immigration is at a high. U.S. attitudes towards immigration operate cyclically because they shift based on U.S. convenience. This context significantly revokes the credibility of modern discontentment with Latin American immigration since it can be better understood as the result of a predictable social pattern rather than a reasonable response to anomalous immigration trends.
The Model Minority Myth
These shifting immigration sentiments have created long-lasting divisions between Asian Americans and other immigrants, further exacerbated by Trump’s policies. The Model Minority myth, which designates Asian Americans as the “successful minority group,” has negatively reputed the racial advocacy of non-Asian minorities while entirely erasing Asian American advocacy.
The Model Minority stereotype emerged alongside the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s. A 1966 New York Times article published by William Peterson titled, “Success Story, Japanese-American Style,” perfectly exemplifies the Model Minority phenomenon. “The history of Japanese Americans challenges every such generalization about ethnic minorities … this is a minority that has risen above even prejudiced criticism,” Peterson said. It seemed convenient to cast Asian Americans as a “model” in order to justify labelling black and brown minorities fighting for their civil rights as “problem minorities.” “The Japanese were exceptionally law-abiding alien residents [as they] undertook menial tasks with such perseverance that they achieved a modest success,” Peterson said.
However, Asian American passivism is a myth itself. After the African American community catalyzed the Civil Rights movement through their advocacy for racial justice and equality, Asian American activists followed suit — eventually achieving a significant role in the movement. The AAPA (Asian American Political Alliance), formed by Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee at UC Berkeley in 1968, was one of six organizations to participate in The Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) in San Francisco, demanding “equal educational opportunities and ethnic studies programs.” In 1957, the founders of the AAFE (Asian Americans for Equality) “led the first protest over discriminatory labor practices” in Chinatown and achieved success, allowing the inclusion of Chinese American workers in the construction of the Confucius plaza. Yet, the Model Minority Myth which “nearly two-thirds of Asian adults have experienced stereotypes associated with” casts Asians as submissive and obedient. Despite the existence of a strong advocatory history within the Asian American community, stereotypes about Asian passivism seem to maintain their influence in popular culture. During the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian hate crimes rose tremendously in frequency, often encouraged by the illusion of Asian passivism. “People don’t think Asians will fight back so it’s easy to target people who you don’t think you’ll have consequences for targeting,” said Executive Director Cayden Mak of 18 Million Rising, an Asian American organizing group after an Atlanta shooting that resulted in the death of six Asian women.
Because the Model Minority Stereotype relies on vilifying non-Asian minorities to contrast the “model behavior” of Asian immigrants, Trump’s deportation policies — which demonize the immigration and humanity of Latin American immigrants — fuels the Model Minority Stereotype and the resulting divide between non-Asian and Asian immigrants. While the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies largely threaten the safety of the Latine American community, Asian Americans should not mistake the reinforcement of the Model Minority dynamic for positive promotion in Western society. Rather, Asian Americans should recognize and oppose all forms of cyclical, systemic injustice.
Visual Credit: Michael Vadon
