There is absolutely nothing original about Donald Trump. The xenophobia with which he began his presidential bid (dating back to his obsession with the “true” birthplace of the country’s first black president) is surprisingly unremarkable within the context of American history. So, too, is his call for limiting legal immigration by shutting down the diversity visa program in the wake of Tuesday’s attack in New York.
Of course, his blaming of Democrats (and in particular, Chuck Schumer) for the program is not based in fact. But facts have never stopped The Donald from giving piss-poor reasoning for doing something ethnocentric, racist, and hateful in the name of making the country great. What he gets wrong, however, is that the entire premise of the diversity visa program and similar ones have always been created with the desire and intention to protect two things: whiteness and America’s labor interests.
The lottery dates to the mid-1980s, when the United States had an Irish problem.
Hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants were flocking to the United States, fleeing an economic crisis back home. They arrived too late to qualify for amnesty. Few had the family ties or job experience to qualify for green cards. And many of them were undocumented, coming as tourists and overstaying their visas.
Irish American members of Congress came up with a solution.
A green-card lottery.
If nothing, America is incredibly consistent when it comes to the idea that “if you’re white, you’re alright.” Since the 1790 Naturalization Act, which gave citizenship to free white people, lawmakers have been trying to bestow the privilege of citizenship to people of European descent. Now, of course, who was considered white and worthy of citizenship has also changed over time. For example, people of Italian, Irish, Polish, and Jewish (though we often forget that Jews can also be people of colo ) descent were all at some point in history considered non-white. But our immigration laws have always intentionally restricted citizenship among specific groups of people of color. This set the model for other countries to follow.
Between 1790 and 1952, legislators restricted naturalization – the process by which immigrants become citizens – to particular racial and ethnic groups, with a consistent preference for whites from northwestern Europe. Laws restricted black immigration beginning in 1803, and a series of subsequent measures banned most Asians and limited access by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The U.S. example proved contagious, as our research shows, because every country in the Western Hemisphere followed the U.S. practice of discriminating against certain immigrants by race and ethnicity.
One of the more suspect and complicated aspects of our immigration system is that it has always been tied to labor. There is a tumultuous and disingenuous relationship Americans have between who we need to work and are willing to allow into the country but who we want to actually give citizenship to. In this way, Republicans (when they talk about wanting skilled immigrant workers) are doing the same thing their forbearers did. We’ve had numerous laws over the course of time that were specifically geared to bring in workers—though those workers weren’t doctors or engineers. They were actually manual laborers. For almost 20 years (from 1942 to 1964) the Bracero Program (bracero literally means one who works with their arms) brought in workers from Mexico (and also smaller numbers from Jamaica and Barbados) to work on short-term agricultural contracts. It was created as a response to labor shortages created during World War II.
Likewise, calls for deportations are not new. Even back in the 1930s and 1940s, Americans were complaining about Mexican immigrants taking their jobs.
During the 1930s and into the 1940s, up to 2 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were deported or expelled from cities and towns across the U.S. and shipped to Mexico. According to some estimates, more than half of these people were U.S. citizens, born in the United States. [...]
"There was a perception in the United States that Mexicans are Mexicans," [Francisco Balderrama, a historian] said. "Whether they were American citizens, or whether they were Mexican nationals, in the American mind — that is, in the mind of government officials, in the mind of industry leaders — they're all Mexicans. So ship them home."
It was the Great Depression, when up to a quarter of Americans were unemployed and many believed that Mexicans were taking scarce jobs. In response, federal, state and local officials launched so-called "repatriation" campaigns. They held raids in workplaces and in public places, rounded up Mexicans and Mexican-Americans alike, and deported them.
America has had several waves of mass deportation. Post 1930s and 1940s, more than 1 million Mexicans were deported under Operation Wetback in 1954. And they aren’t the only ones. The very Chinese workers who built the transcontinental railroads in the 1890s were subject to deportation—and in a cruel twist of irony, on the very same train system they helped to build. There is also much to be said about how Native Americans have been forced migrants off their ancestral lands, Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II and how, at one point, there was a ban on people who are LGBT from immigrating, or even visiting, the U.S. which wasn’t lifted until 1990. But there’s not enough room to discuss the shameful way racism feeds the country’s immigration policies.
All of this points to the same thing: America, for all its talk about diversity and immigrant identity, wants certain groups of people (usually the ones who are considered non-white) to know that they don’t belong.
This takes us back to the diversity visa.
More than 30 years later, what was once openly pitched as a way to aid the Irish has now evolved into a global operation that each year brings up to 50,000 people to the United States, most of them from Africa or Eastern Europe.
Now that it doesn’t benefit “white” people in the same ways it was intended to, Trump and conservatives are calling for it to end in place of a “merit-based system.” Sure, it fits their narrative of saving us all from terrorism. But it also demonstrates their incredible hypocrisy. In order to qualify for this program, one must have a high school education or two years of qualifying work experience. For the qualifying work experience, it must be “in an occupation which, by U.S. Department of Labor definitions, requires at least two years of training or experience that is designated as Job Zone 4 or 5, classified in a Specific Vocational Preparation (SVP) rating of 7.0 or higher.”
In Job Zone 4 (which is listed as considerable preparation needed), job categories are: accountants, aerospace engineers, chemists, emergency management directors, teachers, and soil and water conservationists. Among Job Zone 5 (listed as extensive preparation needed), job categories are: anesthesiologists, economists, geneticists, surgeons, and urban planners. This literally is the definition of a merit-based system which is bringing in workers who are similarly educated to Americans (especially because only about 33 percent of the U.S. adult population has a college degree) and/or who are highly-skilled. And since there is almost zero history of terrorist incidents among diversity visa recipients, the math here simply doesn’t add up. Except for the fact that once we’ve used up our supply of (mainly brown) people’s labor, we suddenly decide visas are too plentiful and need to be restricted. This is more history repeating itself.
But the ultimate irony here is the fact that the first lady herself could have possibly been a diversity visa recipient. Slovenia, the very country where Melania Trump is from, is on the list of countries eligible for this visa program. In fact, in 2012, there were 16 diversity visa winners from Slovenia. Now, since no one has been forthcoming about how Melania got here or when (other than some vague claims about modeling) and how she was eligible to stay lawfully, we don’t know if if she is a diversity visa recipient or not. But it’s certainly fodder for conversation. Likewise, Czech Republic and Slovakia are also on the list, with 104 and 80 winners respectively in 2012. The Czech Republic and Slovakia are the two countries which made up the former Czechoslovakia, the birth country of Ivana Trump. Not only is it ridiculous, racist, and hypocritical to end this program, it’s also deeply telling that Donald Trump wants to end a program that includes bringing immigrants from the countries that have supplied him wives.
If this program ends, where’s the future Mrs. Trump (aka wife No. 4) going to come from?