Legacies of Exclusion: How The Immigration Legal System Is Used to Maintain The Ethno-Racial Hierarchy and Status Quo in The United States.

Immigrant communities in the United States have experienced increasing criminalization at all levels of government over the past two decades. This criminalization has been partly powered by the increasing politicization of the subject, which is providing the groundwork necessary for the emergence of a harsher immigration legal system. For example, earlier this month, following a long history of anti-immigrant animus, former President Trump shared a video suggesting that the United States is under an invasion by violent immigrants, further fueling and wrongly validating anti-immigrant sentiment across the country.

It is vital to take note of the rhetoric deployed in political settings because it sheds light on the rationalization of animosity into policy and legal principles that then guide changes to the legal landscape. These legal changes help us understand how the legal system continues to serve as a tool to enforce a stratified social and racial hierarchy in this country. For instance, the analysis of immigration policy focuses on factors such as increased deportation, decreased access to visas, and reduced entry of immigrants. Although it's necessary to pay attention to these impacts, it is equally important to examine the more obscure impact that comes with legal changes, as they often have long-lasting impacts on communities, including those who are not the "main" targets of these policies. From its conception, American society has been composed of large waves of immigrants. However, the social contexts receiving newly arriving immigrants have by no means been uniform. Instead, these contexts have been shaped by their time's social, political, cultural, and economic environments, which directly reflected the interests of those in power. As such, these immigrants have experienced the legal system differently and, as a result, have incorporated or assimilated into American society differently and achieved different social outcomes. For instance, in an article for the Immigration Policy Center, Walter A. Ewing explains that waves of white European immigrants coming to the United States following the ratification of the United States Constitution faced high levels of discrimination. Native immigrants – who were predominantly protestant and who arrived on the American continent before the Revolutionary War – feared that these "new" immigrants would disrupt the racial structure that they had established following the eradication of native populations and the enslavement of African people. For example, Ewing notes that Benjamin Franklin expressed worry that Pennsylvania was becoming a German-speaking colony due to the number of newly arriving German immigrants.

Despite the prejudice experienced by these new immigrants, the exclusion of European immigrants remained relatively low. Instead, immigration laws in place continued to be receptive to the arrival of immigrants, a clear reflection of how the state utilized the legal system to secure the interest of those in power. This time, these interests materialized in the form of territorial expansion across the American continent at the expense of the eradication of indigenous people. Starting in 1803, the United States began a period of extreme territorial expansion, first through the Louisiana Purchase, then through the acquisition of Florida from Spain and the annexation of Texas, and subsequently through the annexation of the rest of the states that today make the United States following the Mexican American war. Eager to meet the new labor demands that came with this expansion and, more importantly, to populate the new territory, the United States turned to immigration to achieve these goals. In turn, immigrants at the time enjoyed a more remarkable ability to incorporate into American society due to access to land through programs such as the Homestead Act.

However, the United States began to change its position on immigration as the number of non-white immigrants arriving increased. In 1882, the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in response to the high levels of immigration from China, placing a complete ban on Chinese immigrants from entering the country, increasing deportations, and preventing them from naturalizing. Almost 100 years later, due to the large number of immigrants from Latin America arriving in the country, anti-immigrant movements first witnessed during the exclusion of Chinese nationals re-emerged. However, Latin American immigrants were now the targets of these exclusionary views. For instance, just this year, Florida and Texas passed two of the harshest immigrant-immigrant bills, which effectively criminalize people for moving family undocumented family members across state borders and deputize state officials to prosecute individuals for illegal entries into the country.

Although it is evident that the politically powerful continue to use the immigration system to exclude and remove those who threaten America's ethno-racial hierarchy, the impact of these policies extends far beyond. As their parents continue to be targeted and criminalized and denied opportunities for social mobility, US-born Latino children are directly funneled into the lowest classes of American society and forced to experience the American system from within the lowest classes. The social, economic, and cultural handicaps that come from this form of highly stratified assimilation and socialization then ultimately force the children to experience greater alienation from American institutions. This is because Latinos, once in this lower class, not only lack access to social and educational opportunities that teach them how to engage with American intuitions but are also more exposed to the criminal legal system, which directly pushes them away from them.

In conclusion, legal changes must be considered in light of their political context, as this often demonstrates how those in power use all legal systems to maintain the status quo. In the case of the immigration legal system, it has been and continues to be used to protect the interests of those in power, either by allowing them to weaponize the issue for political gain or by directly allowing them to use immigration to satisfy a social, political, or economic need. As students continue to protest across American colleges, it is essential to keep this history in mind as more and more politicians will turn to the immigration legal system to exclude and remove them as they are threatening to disrupt the American social hierarchy and status quo.

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