Contextualizing (Children's) Immigration in Law, History, Theory and Politics

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Contextualizing (Children's) Immigration in Law, History, Theory and Politics

Abstract

Few topics currently inspire more acrimony and reveal more division than what is often termed “the immigration debate.” Indeed, under the Trump Administration, the country has endured the longest government shutdown in American history largely owing to the inability of Congress to pass comprehensive and effective immigration reform.

The problem is, in part, a result of how immigration has been framed by the Trump Administration. In a break from the recent past when Presidents since Kennedy characterized immigration as a net positive for the economy and an integral part of the nation’s heritage, and immigrants themselves as actual people deserving of a chance to realize the American Dream, President Trump has framed immigration as a major threat to our shared national interests and identity, and immigrants as something other than human. He infamously launched his presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants, rapists and criminals, and repeatedly promised a “big, beautiful” wall along the southern border. President Trump also continuously linked immigration to terrorism and called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

While political correctness has, to some extent, obscured discriminatory and oftentimes racially-charged immigration policies in recent years, Trump’s election as President—a success due in part to his nativist and xenophobic rhetoric demonizing immigrants— serves as a crude reminder of the anti-immigrant sentiment still ingrained in American society today, and calls into question the very nature of our national identity: Are we a nation of immigrants founded upon the principles of freedom and liberty for all regardless of ethnicity or national origin? Or are we instead a gatekeeping nation predicated upon the existence and enforcement of discriminatory and exclusionary laws and policies that treat immigrants as “other” than human?

This Article suggests that, while a series of more recent presidents have characterized immigration differently, “othering” immigrants—identifying them as fundamentally different from and subordinate to the majority culture—has been a part of restrictive immigration policy since America’s inception, and continues to inform immigration policy today. In this sense, President Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric represents the reemergence of a strong historical trend in the American attitude toward immigration and immigrants. Therefore, we should not assume that the end of President Trump’s time in office will necessarily herald a return to a more immigrant friendly agenda. Indeed, we might ask to what extent politics matters when there is such as powerful undercurrent of hostility and suspicion toward immigrants that has informed American legislation and policy for at least the past century and a half.

First Page

187

Last Page

261

Publication Date

2022

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