THE CONSEQUENCES
Summer, 2011
It was in the Detroit Metro Airport, coming home from a trip to the U.K. to visit family, that I think I truly came to terms with my status as an immigrant. I was 14, blindly moving through the airport, and through life, when my family and I were prohibited from entering the country.
I didn’t understand why at the time. I know now it was because our green card applications were processing, our visas were about to expire, and we were officially listed as AOS, in an “adjustment of status.” Even though this was a legal and necessary step in applying for our green cards, something looked off to border officials that day.
So, we were escorted through the airport by armed police officers. My naïve yet angry teenage self was bewildered.
Could we not just tell them that this is where we live? That this is our home?
After several hours of sitting in silence, someone asked us a few questions and then sent us on our way. But I left confused and slightly shaken, having never fully realized the fragility of my status in America.
The U.S. media's flawed portrayal of immigration is often exacerbated by the tweets and comments of high ranking officials.
President Trump has been very clear that he hopes to reduce immigration to the United States and has focused his attention on the southern border.
However, as mentioned previously, it is hard to tell how many people have crossed the border illegally and are now living in the United States.
However, conclusions about it can be drawn from the number of immigrants who were apprehended while crossing the border – a number that peaked to over 1 million in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
But in 2018, there were only 396,579 apprehensions.
To draw a comparison, in 2016 787,000 people legally immigrated to the United States.
If Trump really wants to reduce immigration, he is focusing his energy on the wrong population.
Each year, more people enter the U.S. through the legal immigration process than those who enter, or attempt to enter, illegally. Further, out of the people who do enter illegally, the overwhelming majority overstay their visa; they never illegally cross the southern border.
This is not to say I want the government to start reducing legal immigration, but it points out an extreme flaw in his immigration policy and begs an important question; why does he focus so strongly on the southern border?
I think the answer is clear – Trump's immigration policy is racially and culturally l discriminatory.
In America, this may seem reprehensible - and it is. Unfortunately, however, it is no different than how any other immigration policy or sentiment has been in the past.
The History Channel does a good job of describing how Irish immigrants were viewed in American society in the late 1800s.
“The refugees seeking haven in America were poor and disease-ridden. They threatened to take jobs away from Americans and strain welfare budgets. They practiced an alien religion and pledged allegiance to a foreign leader. They were bringing with them crime. They were accused of being rapists. And, worst of all, these undesirables were Irish.”
- History Channel
The sentiments described above do not ring untrue to sentiments that have been used by the President of the United States to describe 21st-century immigrants from Mexico.
At 1:20: "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best...They're sending people that have lots of problems and they're bringing those problems (to) us. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime. They're rapists."
- Donald Trump, President
of the United States
Neither sentiments accurately portray what immigrants were and are like, but it does give an incredible insight into how Americans feel about immigration.
In each case, natural-born Americans simply feared a change in their way of life. In 1845, that fear was the introduction of a new religion, Catholicism, in the U.S.
Today, however, about 1 in 5 people identify as Catholic.
As immigrants arrive from Mexico, as well as the Middle East and other countries, different fears cause America’s distrust of immigration. Fears of illegal and dangerous drugs and terrorism.
The United States has gone as far as asking every non-US resident who enters the country, “Are you a terrorist?” on their immigration forms.
These examples are obvious ways that U.S immigration policy and American ideology is discriminatory towards certain groups of people.
However, inherently, there are more discrete ways of promoting these racist tendencies in the United States.
While looking at immigration statistics online, more often than not, statistics about immigrants from Europe and Canada are grouped together. For example, in the chart below "Foreign born, by region of birth: 2016," Europe and Canada are listed together as one "region."
There are not many explanations I can think of to explain why these two countries have been grouped together, other than the fact that the racial makeup of each region contains a majority of white citizens.
Canada produces a relatively small number of immigrants in the United States, and most likely would not have been included in this chart had it not been grouped together with Europe.
A more understandable comparison to Canada would be the only other country bordering the United States; Mexico. Or perhaps one with a similar immigration rate; the United Kingdom. Not only are the location and population statistics of Europe and Canada different, but Canada is only a country, Europe is an entire continent.
What does this prove? There have been many reports of racist immigration policies being mandated by the U.S. government. While this doesn’t directly demonstrate that any policies have been maliciously created to be racist, it does show that underlying tendencies in dialogues about immigration, specifically in the media, feature unequivocal racial discrimination.