Do a Twitter keyword search on "illegal immigrant" and you will find it almost impossible to avoid seeing hateful, racist comments. Check the online comments section of any straightforward, non-partisan news article about immigration and you will see shocking extremes of malicious (and often misguided, misinformed, and misspelled) comments about "illegals and "illegal immigrants and how they are ruining this country. Anonymous Internet hate exists in almost every political or social discussion presented online, but the emotions triggered by concept of "illegal immigrants are remarkable.
In order to better understand where this fear, distrust, and hate originates, it helps to understand how the concept of illegal immigration came about in the first place.
The Beginning of Illegal Immigration: A Nation of Undocumented Immigrants
A true nation of immigrants, the United States had no federal laws restricting immigration until the late 1800s. In its first century of existence, the U.S. grew from a steady stream of western European immigrants as well as Africans who were forced to come as slaves. It was universally acknowledged that immigrants were good for business: the United States was growing rapidly and there was an endless demand for laborers. Unless the government could prove you were a serious criminal, you were essentially free to immigrate to the U.S. with no inquiry or intervention from authorities.
The first organized movements to push for serious immigration restrictions coincided with the Irish and German immigrant influx of the mid-1800s. Citizens felt threatened by their strange religious practices (Roman Catholicism), attachment to their native language, and their lack of education and economic status (many were farmers whose crops had failed.) In 1882, the first federal law to restrict immigration based on country of origin was passed: The Chinese Exclusion Act. The act marked the first time the U.S. government intervened in immigration policy, and it opened the floodgates for the passage of many more immigration restrictions that targeted specific groups. It is no coincidence that the Chinese were one of the first non-European groups to immigrate willingly en masse to the U.S., and they were also the first immigrant group to experience federally sanctioned racism and hostility. The demand for Chinese labor did not dissipate with the passage of this law, and the Chinese continued to immigrate (albeit in reduced numbers) creating a new "underclass of immigrants that had to hide from the law. Despite all of the hysteria about the Chinese, it is interesting to note that before the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, they made up only 3% of annual immigrants to the U.S. The act was not repealed until 1943.
20th Century: Quotas and Deportations
At the beginning of the 20th century, immigration restrictions began to focus on the Japanese as well. In the 1910s the Quota Act was passed to restrict immigration more specifically by country. Despite all of this, immigrants were arriving on U.S. shores in full force from all over the world, and by 1920 nearly 13% of the United States population was foreign-born.
From the 1920s until today, Mexican immigrants have been the backbone of the U.S. agriculture industry. In 1942 the Bracero Program was introduced to bring in millions of Mexican farmworkers while the U.S. was short on farm laborers during World War II. The program was a huge boost to U.S. agriculture profits, but that didn't stop INS from deporting and abusing millions of documented and undocumented Mexican immigrants from 1954-1964 in an INS program called Operation Wetback (yes, that's its real name.)
The next big piece of immigration legislation didn't arrive until the Immigrant and Nationality Act of 1965, which repealed country of origin restrictions in the Quota Act and turned the immigration focus on job skills and family reunification. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) passed in 1986 to allow the 4 million or so undocumented immigrants in the U.S. a path the legal status and citizenship.
21st Century: The Choice to Move Backward or Forward
As it has been throughout history, many recent U.S. immigration laws still tend to be reactionary to current events and xenophobic fears. Concerns about rising unemployment and terrorism have been at the forefront of the new immigration debate. What logically works best for the U.S. economy, innovation, and overall growth has sometimes been sacrificed in order to appeal to certain voters' most basic fears and lack of understanding about immigration. The state of Arizona, a part of Mexico until 1848, is famous for recently passing a law that targets Mexicans and other Latinos, requiring legal immigrants to have their papers on them at all times and allowing police to question anyone who looks "reasonably suspect of being undocumented.
Hopefully 2013 will be a banner year in U.S. immigration history with the expected passage of a large-scale immigration reform bill that will bring about a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Current opponents of immigration reform vehemently insist that race and country of origin have nothing to do with their anti-immigrant stance, but U.S. history tells us something different. The names and faces may have changed, but the story remains the same. The issue is not the people breaking the law, but the laws themselves. Anti-immigrant advocates like to reassure themselves that undocumented immigrants are lawbreakers of the worst kind and thus deserve no rights, but what if the laws were racist and possibly unfair in the first place? The best solution would be to move forward in time, not backward by changing the law to create a more robust, accepting, and economically stable nation.