Our House Is on Fire: Social Work and the Crisis of Immigration

Abstract

Each day seems to bring news announcing the cementing of yet another brick in the wall that blocks the entry of precisely the type of immigrants that the Statue of Liberty calls to our shores: the tired, the poor, the homeless, and the masses seeking refuge from fear and danger, all those considered expendable and undesirable by other nations. "Inertia was on the side of the restrictionists" (p. 181) concluded Breitman and Kraut (2015) in their analysis of the United States' failure to provide refuge for European Jews attempting to flee Nazism in the decade preceding World War II. The same appears to be true today. We who care about immigrants and oppose the rise of the wall sit numbed by outrage fatigue and immobilized by our sense of impotence to counter the onslaught of appalling changes. All the while, a brutal immigration regime is being built brick by brick, before our eyes, accomplished almost entirely through shifts in administrative practices backed by extremist interpretation of existing policies, moves that require no actual change in law or even the formulation of executive orders. From my perspective as a student of immigration history, one of the most frightening aspects of the current resurgence of punitive restrictionism is its utter lack of originality. The pitiless measures the federal government is enacting today are modernized reiterations of the bigoted practices of past centuries. The nation has failed to move far from the days of Operation Wetback, the military-style police actions to round up and deport massive numbers of Mexican temporary workers and immigrants in the 1950s (Astor, 2009; Buff, 2008; Ngai, 2004), or the wholesale race-based exclusion of Asians which began with the Page Act of 1875 (8 Stat. 477; Pub. L. 43-141)-the first federal immigration law restricting entry-enacted to "end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women" (Peffer, 1986, p. 28). The fact is that the tempest-tost huddled masses (social work clients, in my view) were precisely the type of people that U.S. laws were enacted to keep out, deport away, and render peripheral within our society, especially if they were racialized. The peopling of our nation has always been a deliberately managed process of selection and restriction, exclusion, and preference, guided by the ingrained prejudices of the times. The alarming ease and stunning impunity with which the bigoted practices of the past centuries have been resurrected by the current government tells me that while the particular bodies targeted as unacceptable may have shifted somewhat during the past decades, the fear and loathing of the racialized Other undergirding xenophobia, nationalism, and nativism remain deeply embedded in the nation's psyche and the structure of its immigration policies. The current U.S. President's January 2018 denigration of migrants from "shithole countries" such as Haiti and El Salvador punctuating his declaration that "we should have more people from Norway" should remind us that in 1920 and 1924, Congress passed two...