America’s love-hate stance on immigration

WASHINGTON: America’s distinction as a nation of immigrants-that bedrock of its national identity-has helped fuel the outpouring of outrage over President Donald Trump’s travel ban. But it’s hardly the first time that its borders have slammed shut. A look back in time reveals that the history of immigration in America has been far from clear-cut, with many swings and contradictory messages.

“On the one hand, taking pride of being a nation of immigrants,” says July Greene of the University of Maryland. “But at the same time, a long and complex history of trying to figure out whom to allow in and whom to exclude.” It story begins nearly 150 years ago, long before Trump unleashed the current storm by closing America’s borders to refugees and travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act marked a radical shift for a young nation that had until then largely opened its arms to “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” in the words of the poet Emma Lazarus about the Statue of Liberty beckoning from New York Harbor. “There was really no policy, anybody could come, you just had to show up,” says Columbia University’s Mae Ngai. The first federal law excluding a specific group, the measure barred entry to all Chinese workers following racist incidents on the West Coast. It remained in place for decades until 1943. That was the product of the so-called manifest destiny philosophy,” Ngai says, “according to which Americans claimed that the whole continent should belong to the Anglo-Saxons.”—AFP