(#13/52) This is America
“We like to think this is not an American thing to do.” — The Chinese Exclusion Act
This week, my co-director and I presented a short clip of a film we are working on, Santuario, ahead of the screening of an excerpt from the upcoming PBS documentary The Chinese Exclusion Act. The film is by Ric Burns and Li-Shin Yu and produced by Steeplechase Films and The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM). The doc looks at the 1882 law which excluded the entire Chinese race and nationality, the only federal immigration legislation to ever do so, for 60 years. 60 years! That’s a generation.
For 60 years, this US Immigration Policy was racially exclusive, and made a point to bar immigration, close doors to women and children entering the country specifically, and limit nationalization even for Chinese already living in the United States. The efforts surrounding this policy are vast — public shaming, racist propaganda, forced registration, detention, deportation, and in some cases “driving out” through mob attacks.
The implications of this stain on US history in relationship to Chinese Americans are painfully relevant in 2018. White laborers grew angry and hostile at the perceived threat of cheap Chinese labor; however, “economic” insecurity was not as covertly sheilding the blatant racism that drove the culture and policy at the time.
Recognition in this country of this awful policy and its effects has yet to become more relevant in the public consciousness. But clearly, the parallels between modern policy, rhetoric, and bars to migration exist between the Chinese Exclusion Act and our modern mess of tangles known only as “the Immigration System.”
With me on the panel at the event to talk through these parallels were Dr. Li-Chen Chin, Assistant Vice President of Intercultural Programs at Duke University and Kate Woomer-Deters, an immigration lawyer at the North Carolina Justice Center. Both Dr. Chin and Woomer-Deters had a lot to add about ways that US immigration policies and rhetoric have always identified desirable and undesirable groups/nationalities, and then swung immigration policy to include some but exclude others.
We spoke about the ways that the current administration uses racist language like calling immigrants from Central America “animals” or saying that TPS holders come from “shithole” countries. Whereas racism was perhaps once much more overt through horrible images and slurs, today it is much more rhetoric-focused. But no less clear: some nationalities are barred from access to due process and immigration, and the result is the denigration of their personhood and rights in this country.
And most of these people, like the Chinese waves of migration in the late 19th century, are people of visibly non-Anglo characteristics, people who do not speak English as a primary language, coming from poor countries and in search of a new life in the United States, willing to work for less, to break laws in order to be here, and even to live apart from their families in order to make money to support them. Today, our bans harm people from Muslim countries, Latin America, Haiti, and African countries. Like the Chinese in the 19th century, these are people groups singled out by administrations as “non-assimilatory,” meaning they won’t be able to conform to US expectations, language, and cultural identity.
These parallels really hit me after spending so much time on this story of a family fighting to stay together under the current administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the US. One recent development is the “zero-tolerance” policy at the border, where prosecution and family separation has become the rule. Interrogating the US history of Chinese immigration through this film reminded me how important it is to look back at history to think about how this trend is currently being treated, and how waves of migration have always been categorized and targeted for exclusion from rights. One of the panelists also brought up how in different times, Southern European migrants were also looked down upon and discriminated against. It’s shocking today for anyone to think that Chinese Americans, Italian Americans, or Irish Americans, for example (all who claim US/American identity and have several generations here now) were at one time similarly viewed as unwelcome migrants.
In 2008, I was in college in a sociology seminar on global immigration trends with Rutgers’ Ph.D. students. Truth be told, I was a bit out of my league as a young undergraduate. But in that class a decade ago, we talked about the visible statistical trends that pointed towards a coming global refugee and migration crisis. I remember specifically the doctoral students showing on a map how, in the next decade, the most poverty and war-stricken countries, as well as countries with environmental crises (which in turn cause social crises), would start to cause one of the largest migration flows that the world had ever seen — mostly, from the south to the north; from the east to the west. It’s sobering to watch those predictions playing out today, especially when the reality is that the countries where refugees and migrants are headed are not prepared for them, have faulty infrastructure to maintain an influx of immigrants at the borders, and in the case of the US, an administration that was elected on the promise of ethnic bans and border closing.
Our moderator, filmmaker Saleem Reshamwala of Durham, asked us to close the event by listing some things that give us hope even in the face of what seems like a neverending and complex-beyond-solution issue. Thinking about these two films and their parallels, what does make me hopeful today is knowing that, even if it took 60, 70, 100 years, Chinese Americans have been able to gain footing and legitimacy in this country. And that’s been hard-earned of course. Through public education campaigns, civil rights movements, civil disobedience, claiming family and sanctuary, and wealth building. Being inside the moment, this blurry time in the early 21st century, where we see families being separated by ICE, children and other at-risk individuals being detained regularly and even lost in the system, and people being killed by law enforcers at the border, there are also movements for change like the sanctuary movement, undocumented student activism, and bold activism against the Muslim Ban and TPS protection removals. It’s possible to hope because with 20/20 hindsight, it is clear and obvious that the Chinese Exclusion Act was absolutely morally wrong and inhumane. One day, people will look back at this moment, under a president who uses racist language regularly to describe migrants, and also know that it was also wrong and inhumane.
As Rev. Randall Keeney, the priest at St Barnabas Episcopal Church where Juana Luz Tobar Ortega remains in sanctuary after 1 year this week, says in our film, “There comes a time when people of faith have to make a choice between serving the people God has called us to serve, and serving the government. Some laws are simply unjust.”
Big thanks to Ricky Leung for his organizing this event, co-sponsored by North Carolina Asian Americans Together (NCAAT), National Association of Asian American Professionals — RTP (NAAAP-RTP) and UNC-TV.
