DOMESTIC IMMIGRATION POLITICS has always depended on the conflicts and accords of American empire. In the early 20th century, the US opted not to formally restrict Japanese immigration — as they had Chinese immigration in 1882 — for fear of provoking a rising imperial power. (This “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” in which Japan informally pledged to stop laborers from emigrating, lasted until the 1920s, when their nationals, too, were formally banned.) The Philippines won independence from the United States in 1946 in part because congressional nativists wanted an end to the migration rights Filipinos had enjoyed as US nationals. The 1965 repeal of explicitly racist immigration quotas in place since the 1920s was spurred in part by cold war rivalry. After the end of the Vietnam War, in 1975, more than one million refugees and immigrants from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia came to the United States as Southeast Asia was wrecked by imperial violence. Reagan welcomed refugees fleeing Khomeini’s Iran and socialist Nicaragua and persecuted those fleeing US-backed right-wing death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala. Most recently, the US took in more than five hundred thousand Ukrainians in two years. (In contrast to the uproar over Latin American migrants, no one really noticed.)
That colonial and neocolonial subjects of Western liberal empires often end up as citizens in the metropole is an ironic contradiction. (Thus, for example, the Biden campaign’s incomprehension that there are enough Arabs in Michigan furious enough about Gaza that they might have cost him the election.) Everywhere this postcolonial boomerang leads to fantastic flights of projection: the specter of a Mexican “Reconquista” of the American Southwest, or a France menaced by a “great replacement” at the hands of Muslims. It’s revealing that anti-migrant rhetoric so often portrays migrants as colonialists, which of course has everything backward: Trump’s infamous call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on” was a calculated way to mystify what the hell was actually going on. In the US today, nativism is inseparable from this deeper dread over decaying imperial power and white Western decline. Trump, as usual, makes this tendency explicit, constantly invoking both the United States’ place in the world and its demographic makeup. “On January 6, we had a great border, nobody coming through, very few,” Trump said during the presidential debate. “On January 6, we were respected all over the world. All over the world, we were respected. And then he comes in and we’re now laughed at.”