Who is allowed to become American, and who decides? This theme follows the machinery that answers that question: the border, the quota, the deportation, the oath, and the demand to assimilate. Its claim is that immigration law does not sort people who already have races. It makes the races it claims to sort. Whiteness expanded to absorb the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews, who arrived as despised races and were let in on terms. Asians and Latinos were fixed as permanently foreign, no matter how many generations deep, and Asians were promoted to “model minority” precisely as a weapon against Black claims. The mechanism here is the border and naturalization law, and you can read it working in the statutes, out loud, on the record.
This theme is one of a pair. Its companion, Anti-Blackness and Racial Capitalism, follows the other mechanism: property and labor, a color line drawn to justify owning people and maintained through convict leasing, redlining, and the prison. The two are relational, not separate systems. The model minority was manufactured against Black claims. The racial scripts written for Black people were lifted and reapplied to everyone who came after. Cubans were pulled out of the water in the same years Haitians were sent back across it. Read either theme alone and you will get the mechanism right and the country wrong.
How to use this theme
This folder organizes resources by lens. See the Pedagogy document for what the lenses do and why they are structured this way.
- Experiential: What is your experience with this? What does the room already know?
- Historical: How did this come to be?
- Theoretical: How do we understand and analyze it?
- Practical: What is happening on the ground and what are people doing about it?
- Liberatory: What would it mean to overcome or transform this?
A session does not need to use all five lenses. This theme has an unusually good single-session opener: put the Angel Island poems beside the Ellis Island interviews and let the room work out why the same country did two different things in the same decades.
Anchor questions
These questions have proven useful for opening up this theme. They are starting points, not a script.
- Where did your people come from, and what does your family’s arrival story leave out?
- The Irish, Italians, and Jews arrived as despised races and are now simply white. Who let them in, and what did it cost, and who paid?
- Has anyone ever asked you where you are “really” from? How many generations does that question survive?
- Bracero imported workers while Operation Wetback deported them, in the same fields, in the same years. How is that one policy?
- Is the working class a national body with a border to defend, or an international one that borders exist to divide?
- Japanese American redress won an apology and a check. Why that one, and not others?
Recommended sequences
Suggested arcs for groups new to this theme. Adapt freely. Every session opens with a check-in and closes with reflection (see the pedagogy document).
Single-session entry point (2 hours). Open experiential: family arrival stories, and what they leave out. Then read a handful of the Angel Island poems aloud, and listen to one Ellis Island interview. Close on the question the room will already be forming: why did the same country do two different things? See the single-session template.
Six-week study circle. Week 1 experiential: the two islands, and our own family stories. Week 2 historical: read the statutes, from the Page Act through 1924, and ask what a law that says this out loud tells you. Week 3 historical: Bracero and Operation Wetback together, then 9066 and Korematsu. Week 4 theoretical: Kim’s racial triangulation and Molina’s racial scripts, which is where the theme’s argument actually lives. Week 5 liberatory: open borders against the labor-protectionist left, with Walia, Nagle, Sanders, and Chomsky, and no resolution offered. Week 6 liberatory and practical: the redress campaign that won, and the UFW’s wet line. See the six-week template.
Weekend intensive. Friday evening: the Angel Island and Ellis Island material, or a screening of The Chinese Exclusion Act. Saturday: the statutes and the theory. Sunday: the debates, and what the room would actually do. See the weekend-intensive template.
Related themes
- Anti-Blackness and Racial Capitalism is this theme’s other half. Its reparations debate (Coates against Reed) and this theme’s redress campaign that actually won should be read against each other, as should its prison-abolition argument and this theme’s abolish-ICE argument.
- Labor, Work, and Organizing carries the wage-depression argument that the open-borders debate turns on, and the union question that the UFW’s border patrol makes so uncomfortable.
- Imperialism and the Global System explains why people are moving in the first place, which the border debate almost always skips.
- How Capitalism Works supplies the analysis of labor markets that makes deportability legible as a discipline rather than a punishment.
Status
First pass across all five lenses, and it may be a while before there is a second. Two honest weaknesses are recorded in the lens Status notes: Lisa Lowe, a canonical theoretical text, has no free copy anywhere; and the strongest written statement of the left-restrictionist position may simply not exist, which is why the Sanders interview rather than Nagle’s essay anchors that pole. Contributions welcome, especially Filipino racialization, the 1930s expulsion of Mexican Americans, and detention testimony in detainees’ own voices. If you have run a session on this theme, consider contributing back what you used and what you learned.