A new draft executive order is floating around Washington. On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration may be considering a measure that would “deny admission to any alien who is likely to become a public charge,” meaning they would need benefits like food stamps, housing assistance, or Medicaid. Current law already allows immigration officers to deny people admission if they may become dependent on these programs, but in 1999, the government issued a guidance narrowing the scope and applicability of this clause. In recent years, Republican politicians have frequently accused the Obama administration of not enforcing the measure at all.
The United States has a long history of denying public support to immigrants. Some policies were put into place not too long ago—Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare-reform legislation severely restricted immigrants’ access to benefits, as the Post points out. The country also has a long history of denying entry to immigrants who come from poverty, as the historian Hidetaka Hirota writes in his new book, Expelling the Poor. The language of the Trump administration’s alleged new proposal is not a departure from past policies, but a continuation. And as in the past, the new policy may lead to discrimination, whether implicit or overt.
I talked with Hirota, a visiting assistant professor at the City College of New York, about the way poverty has shaped government policies on immigration. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Emma Green: What’s the historical connection between poverty and immigration restrictions in the United States?
Hidetaka Hirota: Immigration restriction in the United States was rooted in poverty. The British colonists introduced a law which regulated the movement of the poor, including the expulsion of poor people from their territory. That model developed into passenger laws for prohibiting the landing of poor people. The critical turning point came in the 1840s and ’50s, when a large number of impoverished Irish immigrants arrived in the United States. New York and Massachusetts were two major receiving states. They responded by enhancing and strengthening their laws to more effectively restrict the immigration of poor Irish people.
This really laid a framework for immigration control in the United States. In the 1870s, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared some of the state passenger laws unconstitutional, these two states started a campaign to transform their state laws into federal laws. The result was America’s first national immigration laws.
Green: How do you tease apart Americans’ economic reasons for wanting to keep immigrants out versus cultural or religious prejudice?
Hirota: These laws were targeted against poor immigrants, rather than against all Irish immigrants. In that sense, the poverty of immigrants was at the core of state-level immigration policy.
But at the same time, such policy would not have developed if there was no strong cultural and religious prejudice, especially against Irish Catholics. Ethnic prejudice really facilitated the formation of state policies that targeted the destitute.
“Law enforcement was never equal. It was always shaped by the enforcing officers’ personal prejudices and racism.”