In the middle of Cassandra Medley’s wonderful play Cell, a young African American woman named Gwen, working as a janitor in an immigration detention center, is overcome by a feeling of instinctive wrongness. She is troubled by the harsh treatment meted out to undocumented immigrants and the limited options available to families facing deportation and separation. As she puts it, “seem like it oughta be more for them to choose than this…” But as her supervisor (who is also black) tells Gwen, those who work at these facilities are simply “doing what the government of our country orders us to do.” In fact, for the supervisor, not only is there nothing wrong with detention practices, the very fact that African Americans are participating in their enforcement should be read as a victory—proof that blacks have finally become “American”, included fully and even able to police who stays. In describing how his seniority at the center underscores the shifts in black opportunity, he reminds her, “Generations of our people had to live stuck on the bottom rung of life. . . . Now you been born into a new time, a new day of possibilities.” Gwen, however, is not convinced; she remains particularly unsettled by the idea of black men and women playing the role of prison guards to other people of color: “We brown, and blacks locking up browns, and blacks, that I DO see. . . .” It is a powerful moment of recognition, with Gwen intuitively viewing black Americans and nonwhite immigrants—no matter what her supervisor says—as jointly consigned to the margins of American life.
These exchanges in Cell bring into stark relief two sides of an ongoing popular debate about the relationship between the civil rights movement and today’s immigration politics. For some African Americans, the idea of immigration as the new frontier of the civil rights movement is deeply problematic and ignores the extent to which immigrants may threaten the well-being of established black communities. If anything, restrictive immigration practices go hand in hand with ensuring that “new day of possibilities” proclaimed by Gwen’s supervisor. As former mayor of New Orleans Ray Nagin infamously told one business group, protecting black jobs and resources meant stopping “New Orleans from being overrun by Mexican workers.” Yet, for others, like Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, Nagin’s comments play into conservative efforts to use anti-immigrant rhetoric in order to “manufacture tension between African-Americans and immigrant communities” and to reduce immigration to an “us versus them” issue. According to Cleaver, accentuating division does nothing more than polarize nonwhite constituencies; it undermines the ability of both blacks and immigrants to appreciate their shared interests in racial equality and economic justice.
The Contested Meaning of Civil Rights
In many ways, Medley’s play and these competing African American voices speak to the contested contemporary meaning of the civil rights movement. Today, a common depiction of the civil rights struggle focuses overwhelmingly on efforts to end formal discrimination and to provide the black community with an equal opportunity to achieve professional and middle-class respectability. Such a vision emphasizes black social mobility as well as elite inclusion into arenas of corporate and political power. According to this image of the civil rights movement, the basic goal of black equality has been to ensure that African Americans, too, become social insiders, enjoying leadership roles and participating—not unlike the supervisor in Cell—in making key decisions about who gets to count as a citizen. Indeed, so long as immigration restrictions are not explicitly pegged to racial categories, closing the door to new migrants or deporting undocumented workers has no meaningful connection to longstanding civil rights commitments. If anything, since black and immigrant experiences are fundamentally distinct, such restrictions may well even enhance black prosperity.
Yet for some of the most important figures in twentieth century African American history, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King, Jr., freedom entailed far more than incorporating successful blacks into the status quo. It meant creating a truly equal society—one that eliminated all existing economic and political hierarchies, including those that bound immigrants to low-income wages and the persistent threat of deportation. According to Du Bois, the mainstream civil rights approach was unable to grasp this linkage between black freedom and the status of immigrants because it failed fundamentally either to connect racial and class dynamics or to appreciate how issues of color were truly global in nature. Speaking of 1920s immigration quotas, Du Bois wrote that “despite the inhumanity of [these laws], American Negroes are silently elated at this policy.” In the short-term, fewer immigrants meant more potential low-skill jobs for African Americans, who in Du Bois’s words were now “the best source of cheap labor for the industries of the white land.” But Du Bois warned fellow African Americans to be wary of making common cause with “white capitalists and ‘Nordic’ fanatics,” because aggressive immigration policies did not serve their long-term interests. For Du Bois, the black experience in America constituted part of a larger predicament confronting nonwhite peoples throughout the world, one in which Western corporations and political elites deployed state coercion to maintain classes of dependent labor at both the domestic and international levels. In the United States, restrictive migration policies, Jim Crow laws, and prison structures—alongside a wide array of labor practices—were each interlocking pieces of this larger puzzle. Far from being separate matters, immigrant control and black subordination served common purposes; they sustained economic and racial hierarchies that privileged only the very few.
Forty years later, Martin Luther King, Jr., also reached similar conclusions, arguing that the prevailing civil rights language of liberal inclusion ignored the economic structures facing both blacks and immigrants, structures that produced a nonwhite reality of “poverty amid plenty.” This reality reduced the black condition, shared by migrants from Asia, Africa, and the Americas, to one of “educational castration and economic exploitation.” Thus, for King, overcoming racism also required “a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society.” This was why at the end of his life King called for a Poor People’s Campaign that combined blacks and immigrants. Since each group found itself denied real economic and political power, “only through their combined strength” would it be possible “to overcome the fierce opposition we must realistically anticipate.” Black and immigrant solidarity was therefore more than just useful rhetoric; it underscored how each community was linked through common experiences of subordination, experiences that could only be overcome through joint political action.
Race in Immigration History
Recovering such arguments by Du Bois and King not only reminds us of the more expansive ambition of black freedom activists, it also speaks to significant limitations in our current immigration debates. These debates largely overlook the profound ways in which, throughout American history, immigration policies have sustained both racial and economic inequalities. From the earliest stages of English colonization, settlers recognized that they would need new migrants for territorial and economic growth. As a result, they created remarkably open immigration policies for Europeans, who were viewed as culturally similar and thus capable of participating in an American project of expansion. This open European immigration included practices that would startle us today, such as the prevalence of noncitizen voting and noncitizen access to federal land out west. In fact, in the years after the Civil War, more than a dozen states enacted laws that allowed immigrants to vote before naturalization. In doing so, they followed the basic congressional approach to frontier territories, as well as early measures in Vermont, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Oregon, Michigan, and elsewhere. The result was an extraordinary state of affairs, in which the American shore was more a port of entry than a closed border for Europeans coming from abroad.
But open immigration for Europeans came at a key and defining cost. Settlers believed that economic and territorial growth required claiming land from native communities and conscripting outsiders to engage in socially necessary but menial forms of work. Thus, although new Europeans (eventually including Catholics) often were immediately incorporated as political and economic equals, marginalized groups benefited from no similar privileges. Indians, blacks, Mexicans, and later Chinese were overwhelmingly denied the very same voting rights or access to property that recently arrived noncitizen whites enjoyed. Indian tribes, such as the Cherokee during the Trail of Tears, faced wholesale removal and expulsion. Fugitive slave laws, passed by Congress in 1793 and again in 1850, created administrative proceedings (with minimal judicial oversight) to forcibly return slaves to their owners. Nonslave blacks, despite being formal citizens, faced extensive restrictions on their movement as well. Slave states generally barred the admission of free blacks who were not already residents; out west, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Oregon prohibited altogether the entrance of the black population into their territory. The treatment of Mexicans after the Mexican-American War also powerfully illustrated the racialized nature of rights provisions and migration policy. California’s very first state constitution denied voting rights for most Mexicans, stipulating that only white Mexicans were entitled to suffrage. In addition, congressional law forced Mexicans to prove their land title in court. Since many had no formal titles or did not have the financial means for long-term litigation, they were either stripped of their property or forced to sell. The result was the nullification of most Mexican landholding and the transfer of property to white settlers, both immigrant and native-born.
The Periphery Returns to the Center
What does such long-forgotten history tell us about contemporary immigration or its connections to black freedom? Above all, comparison with the present highlights how despite real differences—the closing of the open door even for Europeans and the shift in the ethnic identity of most migrants—current immigration policy continues to generate racialized categories of exclusion and dependent labor. Today, the striking majority of immigrant communities are originally from regions in the global south (parts of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas). To begin with, these are precisely those areas that face the brunt of vast disparities in international wealth and practical power. This suggests that migration to the United States must not be viewed as simply an arbitrary occurrence; it is a product of both international structures of inequality and the US’s preeminent place within the global order. But more centrally, the demographics highlight a remarkable fact about immigration: the manner in which it reverses the classic nineteenth century paradigm. Recall that during much of American history, European immigrants were by and large viewed as co-participants in a racially defined project of expansion, one that secured for white settlers economic prosperity and political self-government. Now, in place of European co-ethnics, immigrants to the United States are overwhelmingly nonwhite, the very individuals that settlers once deemed “unfit” for full membership. And instead of extending settler projects into the frontier or “periphery” as nineteenth-century immigrants did, today’s new arrivals in essence represent the movement of this periphery into the very center of American power.
To a large extent, this movement was made possible by the elimination of national origins quotas in 1965, during the height of the civil rights movement. But while such policy shifts challenged the country’s racial identity, present-day immigrants have not enjoyed anything approaching the swift and full inclusion of their predecessors. As the cheap labor at the bottom rung of the American economy, immigration perpetuates new stratifications that distinguish between those engaged in high-status work and those confined to low-skill jobs. Indeed, those from the global south, particularly the 11 million undocumented immigrants, often provide the labor that settlers long viewed as inconsistent with freedom or independence—from women engaged in domestic service for professional elites, to unskilled factory employees in what remains of the manufacturing sector. Alongside poor white and minority citizens, immigrant non-nationals play a buffer role in the division of labor between high- and low-status work. Thus, although explicitly race-based frameworks may have receded, old structures of economic hierarchy continue in mutated form, with insider privilege sustaining outsider exclusion. Moreover, confronted by extensive social disabilities and facing the constant possibility of detention and forced removal, these immigrants’ marginal status replicates not only the economic function but also the very political dependence that historically bound excluded communities—such as blacks—to the dominant society.
Coming to Grips with Conflicting Interests
Such facts emphasize the deeply troubling nature of persistent arguments that immigrants take jobs from minority constituencies, or that immigrants compromise black interests more broadly. These arguments focus on immediate conflicts in ways that, as Du Bois warned nearly a century ago, promote false alliances between poor constituencies and privileged elites. They also ignore how racial hierarchies in the United States are themselves intertwined with a truly the global economic predicament facing nonwhite peoples.
In recent years, economists have presented competing studies on the relationship between immigration and black economic standing. Using Census Bureau data, anti-immigration scholars have contended that at the micro-level an increased supply of immigrant workers in a particular job sector negatively affects black wages and employment, with the poor especially hard hit. Yet, at the same time, more recent studies like the 2009 report issued by the Immigration Policy Center argue that in actuality very little correlation at the macro level exists between immigration and black unemployment, or, for that matter, unemployment numbers among other US-born ethnic groups. In fact, the very same Census Bureau data reveal that in “the ten states with the highest shares of recent immigrants in the labor force, the average unemployment rate for native-born blacks is about 4 percentage points less than in the ten states with the lowest shares.”
But even if it is the case that at the margins new immigrants compete economically with poorer constituencies, immigration is certainly not the cause of broader unemployment trends. These trends are the product of fundamental failures of the economy to widely distribute access to education, resources, and secure positions. In other words, both African Americans and immigrants are disproportionately consigned to the same poor-paying work that marks today’s stratified division of labor and that is historically connected to old practices of subordination. Indeed, the fact that there are short-term conflicts of interest within various poor communities—who are left to fight over the least skilled and stable jobs—underscores how the American economy is structured neither to provide basic economic security nor to ensure that workers enjoy anything that approaches economic independence or practical control in the workplace.
For activists and reformers committed to building coalitions among blacks and immigrants, the tensions that do exist cannot simply be ignored—they speak to real constraints that check efforts at collective action. And they also reinforce a key fact about any project of black and immigrant solidarity: the importance of avoiding what Jared Sexton has called a “people-of-colorblindness,” in which the desire to assert a single nonwhite and global political identity entails the refusal to recognize specific histories of subordination and thus meaningful differences in self-understanding and immediate objectives. Still, the focus on conflicts between marginalized communities (either over employment or municipal resources in cash-strapped urban centers), especially as stressed by anti-immigrant forces, produces just the type of false political friends that so worried earlier generations of black activists. It obscures the broader realities of shared disempowerment and elite privilege that frames these very tensions. In a sense, given the basic features of the American economy, it is hardly surprising that the primary direct beneficiaries of immigrant labor are often footloose businesses and employers, since (almost regardless of issue area) the economy is itself shaped to benefit such groups and, in the process, to reproduce the problem of “poverty amid plenty.”
Freedom for Immigrants Means Freedom for All
Today, reflecting seriously on the legacy of the civil rights movement, native-born Americans and immigrant activists have an important collective choice to make. This choice concerns deciding which legacy of black freedom to promote: the ideal simply of professional advancement for a select few, or the more systematic effort to overcome once and for all the global problem of the color line and to finally abandon our own racialized immigration history. At present, American citizens remain far removed from the goals of Du Bois and King, and thus, not surprisingly, also from a broader commitment to immigrant freedom.
But this choice is equally one for immigrant activists and their supporters. For years now, immigrants have themselves been mobilizing for their own legal and political rights. But their efforts have also wavered between simply checking the most egregious elements of the current immigration system and using immigration as a wedge for transformative racial and economic change. If the civil rights legacy requires citizens (black and white) to champion immigrant freedom, immigrant activists—to meaningfully invoke that legacy—must also do more than call for partial amnesty for DREAMers or merely repeat the narrative of immigrants as engines of economic growth. Both citizens and noncitizens have to embrace the deeper aspirations of the black freedom struggle. There are clear signs of possibility; recent years have seen a growing grassroots practice, one that invokes these deeper aspirations, whether it is through the May Day marches in 2006, or linkages between black and Latino workers in community organizing, anti-foreclosure work, and labor activism more generally. Such action highlights the unfinished project of what has been called the long civil rights movement. Just as in the past, this project today requires not only altering the composition of privileged groups—to make more room at the top—but also challenging the continuing persistence of privilege itself.
Aziz Rana teaches law at Cornell University and is the author of The Two Faces of American Freedom, recently published by Harvard University Press.