Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century

By A. Naomi Paik

Days after taking the White House, Donald Trump signed three executive orders—these authorized the Muslim Ban, the border wall, and ICE raids. These orders would define his administration’s approach toward noncitizens. An essential primer on how we got here, Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary shows that such barriers to immigration are embedded in the very foundation of the United States. A. Naomi Paik reveals that the forty-fifth president’s xenophobic, racist, ableist, patriarchal ascendancy is no aberration, but the consequence of two centuries of U.S. political, economic, and social culture. She deftly demonstrates that attacks against migrants are tightly bound to assaults against women, people of color, workers, ill and disabled people, and queer and gender nonconforming people. Against this history of barriers and assaults, Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary mounts a rallying cry for a broad-based, abolitionist sanctuary movement for all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: May 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9780520973268

A. Naomi Paik

A. Naomi Paik is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at University of Illinois and the author of Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II.

Book preview

Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Peter Booth Wiley Endowment Fund in History.

AMERICAN STUDIES NOW: CRITICAL HISTORIES OF THE PRESENT

Edited by Lisa Duggan and Curtis Marez

Much of the most exciting contemporary work in American Studies refuses the distinction between politics and culture, focusing on historical cultures of power and protest on the one hand, or the political meanings and consequences of cultural practices, on the other. American Studies Now offers concise, accessible, authoritative, e-first books on significant political debates, personalities, and popular cultural phenomena quickly, while such teachable moments are at the forefront of public consciousness.

Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary

Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century

A. Naomi Paik

UC Logo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2020 by A. Naomi Paik

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Paik, A. Naomi, author.

Title: Bans, walls, raids, sanctuary : understanding U.S. immigration in the twenty-first century / A. Naomi Paik.

Other titles: American studies now ; 12.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] | Series: American studies now; critical histories of the present 12 | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019045345 (print) | LCCN 2019045346 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520305113 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520305120 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520973268 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Sanctuary movement—United States—21st century. | Illegal aliens—Government policy—United States—21st century. | United States—Emigration and immigration—Government policy—21st century. | United States—Politics and government—2017–

Classification: LCC JV6483 .P35 2020 (print) | LCC JV6483 (ebook) | DDC 325.73—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045345

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045346

Manufactured in the United States of America

28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21  20

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

CONTENTS

Overview

Preface

Introduction

1. Bans

2. Walls

3. Raids

4. Sanctuary

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Glossary

Further Resources

OVERVIEW

INTRODUCTION

Donald Trump’s January 2017 executive orders authorizing the Muslim Ban, a border wall, and immigration raids have deep roots in U.S. history—in its settler colonial origins, in the nineteenth-century beginnings of immigration restrictions, and in the era of neoliberalism. To oppose bans, walls, and raids, we must grapple with these deep roots.

Settler Colonialism • Neoliberalism • Criminalization

CHAPTER 1. BANS

The Muslim Ban emerged from the long history of immigration restrictions, especially since the Chinese exclusion era, and the legacy of anti-Muslim racism that has targeted Middle Eastern, Arab, and Muslim peoples. The Supreme Court’s decision to authorize the policy will have more enduring and dangerous effects than the ban itself.

Muslim Ban • Chinese Exclusion Era • Johnson-Reed Act (1924) • Anti-Muslim Racism • Plenary Power

CHAPTER 2. WALLS

This chapter recounts how U.S. borders transformed from unregulated spaces of fluidity to sites of extreme policing that now spreads throughout U.S. territory. This spread to the interior portends anti-democratic dangers to all.

Borders • Border Patrol • Walls

CHAPTER 3. RAIDS

The history of deportations reveals how the United States has dealt with the illegal immigrant who remains in the country despite being banned from it. Raids represent the escalation of deportations against undocumented persons and documented immigrants who have committed a deportable offense.

Deportation • Removal • Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA, 1996) • Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

CHAPTER 4. SANCTUARY

A genealogy of sanctuary movements can guide immigrant justice organizing today. An abolitionist approach to sanctuary organizing is necessary to combat bans, walls, raids, and other intersecting forms of domination.

Sanctuary • Abolition • Non-reformist Reform • Restorative Justice • Organizing

EPILOGUE

An abolitionist sanctuary fundamentally contests U.S. sovereign power and its assumed right to determine who gets to be here or not. Indigenous resistance and critique inspires the widest possible notion of an abolitionist sanctuary, based on reciprocal relationships.

Resistance • Indigenous Critique • Sovereignty

PREFACE: HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

I spent the night of the 2016 U.S. presidential election like many others—overwhelmed by dread, as it became clear who would take the White House. The following day, I had to teach. Students in my prisons studies course were devastated. I emailed them saying that I didn’t want to get out of bed, but I wanted to see them. Everyone showed up. We made tea and talked and cried. During our conversation, the students began organizing themselves, making connections among their groups. We collectively decided to respond to the election with a group project documenting reactions to the event. My colleagues and I also got to work, pushing our institution to declare itself a sanctuary campus. It refused, but we continue to bring community members together to address immigration issues.

This book is inspired by these people and by the relentless work of organizers mobilizing to defend multiple communities under duress, while seeking to create a different world altogether. I hope this book amplifies those organizers and informs the work ahead—for those already deeply involved and for those recently awoken to social justice movements—whether students, people of faith, parents, teachers, or others who want to create a just future.

This book is brief by design, so it cannot provide a comprehensive account of immigration history. Instead, it marshals historical knowledge to argue that what we face today is not new. I hope it can combat the historical amnesia that drives persistent recurring calls for bans, walls, and raids.

Each chapter begins from the present moment and reaches back to the founding of the United States and to the nineteenth-century origins of federal immigration regulations. The chapters then shift focus to the past fifty years, a neoliberal era when the targeting of noncitizens has accelerated rapidly.

You can read the book as speaking to the Trump administration, its rhetoric, and its policy. But I hope you will also read it as a systemic analysis of the problems we face. The book further speaks to counternarratives of resistance that have combatted unjust government actions against immigrants and other marginalized people. These histories of struggle give us reason not to despair and shed light on the interlinked movements we need for the work ahead. The book ends with a call for an abolitionist sanctuary movement that not only defends targeted communities, but also works to build the world of justice we deserve.

Introduction

On January 27, 2017, seven days after being sworn in as president, Donald Trump signed a brief executive order: Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. Almost immediately, it became known as the Muslim Ban, a reference to one of Trump’s signature campaign promises. It barred the entry of all Syrian refugees and all travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. The ban extended even to green-card-holding permanent residents from these blacklisted countries.

The Muslim Ban followed two other executive orders targeting noncitizens, both signed just two days prior. One focused on border security, ordering the construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and the deportation of migrants who tried to enter the country without inspection. The other order ramped up immigration enforcement within U.S. territory, giving Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) a broad mandate to remove all unauthorized immigrants through raids on homes and businesses, among other tactics. The president justified these measures as defending the very existence of the United States. Otherwise, he claimed, we don’t have a country.¹ Together, these three executive orders—which came without consulting Congress or seeking permission from the courts—set the tone for the president’s approach towards the broad swath of humanity he deemed didn’t belong here. Ever since, his policies, personnel, and potentially unlawful, even treasonous, conflicts of interest have led to an erratic administration. But his approach towards noncitizens has remained consistent. It is justified by demonizing them as threats that must be expelled for our safety. It is defined by bans, walls, and raids.

But this is not the whole story.

On January 28, 2017, within hours of learning that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was detaining people targeted by the Muslim Ban, thousands of ordinary people gathered at airports nationwide to stand up for their banned neighbors. People scribbled protest signs with markers. They chanted no ban, no wall, sanctuary for all! They refused to allow these racist expulsions to go unnoticed. They protested this policy in particular and the new executive branch in general. Immigration lawyers showed up to file petitions for individual clients; the New York Taxi Workers Alliance mobilized its drivers to stop pick-ups at John F. Kennedy airport; more than a thousand bodegas, the corner stores so integral to the urban fabric of New York City, closed shop in solidarity.

This book examines our current precarious moment. It unearths the deep histories that have led to the emphatic embrace of xenophobia, white supremacy, and patriarchy. It also examines the movements that are gaining strength amidst the hate, that seek to dismantle these intersecting bigotries and build the just world that so many hunger for. Its analysis begins with the executive orders authorizing the ban, wall, and raids, because they clearly articulate the administration’s assaults on foreign-born people. These assaults have become a central part of the administration’s efforts to make America great again, supported by Trump’s enablers in Congress, business and community leaders, and even from fervent supporters who suffer under these policies. From this starting point, I examine each executive order historically to understand its deep roots. We must not mistake the Trump administration for a novelty. Rather, this historical analysis demands that we grapple with how the United States has been defined by exclusion and exploitation based, among other things, on race, gender, citizenship status, and labor. Bans, walls, and raids stand in for the vast, long-developing panoply of attacks on foreign-born people, and the deep antipathy that has driven them. Together, they enact an escalation of state power. The ban declares a threat: you will be excluded and kicked out if you try to enter. The wall backs up this threat with its physical barriers and accompanying border guards. The raid reinforces the threat with the physical action of forced removal. These attacks have always been connected to the targeting of others. Indeed, bans, walls, and raids represent the instinct to exclude and remove people who are deemed outside the United States’ desired, idealized society.

Even as Trump seeks to fulfill his promises to crack down on the foreign-born, his anti-immigrant measures do not stand alone. The same week that the White House authorized these three executive orders, it issued a host of others targeting a range of people and the planet, while promoting corporate capital, military investment, and policing powers. These orders sought to dismantle the Affordable Care Act; defund global health programs that offer access to safe abortions; support the Keystone and Dakota Access Pipelines that threaten Indigenous communities and the environment; strengthen policing and multiply what counts as criminal activity; reinforce military capacities, including nuclear armaments; and slash federal regulations on everything from the environment to infrastructure to worker safety. The administration further scorns democratic institutions and principles designed to check executive power, including the Constitution, the judiciary, and the news media (see the endless allegations of fake news and embrace of alternative facts), as well as dissenting publics. Since seizing office, the administration has taken aim at seemingly everyone except for white, cis-gendered, heterosexual men of the 1%, all while condoning the lethal violence of neo-Nazis as committed by very fine people.

How did we get here?

These attacks—as far-ranging as they are vicious—can feel overwhelming. It is easy to feel incapacitated by anguish. But we must keep clear heads. We must understand, first, that these anti-immigrant attacks are not just about foreign-born people and, second, that they did not come out of nowhere. This administration’s punishing approach to the foreign-born is inextricably linked to its broader assaults: against women, people of color, workers, ill and disabled people, queer and gender non-conforming people, and more. These attacks emerge from a shared foundation, one that is integral to the United States. To understand how we got here, we need to grapple with the fact that these attacks on our neighbors and democracy are neither un-American nor unique. This particular presidency has dismissed even a façade of commitment to liberal democratic principles, like equality or fundamental rights. And yet, its actions are nothing new.

While the historical threads leading to this predicament reach back to the very origins of the United States, I focus on the past fifty years, what many scholars have called the era of neoliberalism. As I explain below, neoliberal policies have contributed to far-reaching structural shifts that have dislocated people around the world, forcing them to migrate across borders. They have simultaneously criminalized more and more already-marginalized people, leading to an increase in policing (from neighborhood streets to globe-trotting armies) and to wall-building (from national borders to prisons to detention centers).

These same structural shifts have incited resistance. U.S. sanctuary movements for migrants emerged in response to their escalating criminalization in the period of neoliberalism. Prison abolition movements have also gained ground in their mission to tear down the conditions that foster mass incarceration and to build a just, equitable world where prisons are neither necessary nor tolerated.

This book argues for the convergence of such struggles in what I call an abolitionist approach to sanctuary. An abolitionist sanctuary understands both the interlocking forces that criminalize differently marginalized people (via citizenship status, race, gender, etc.) and the interlocking need for a broad-based movement that empowers all targeted people. It seeks to amplify and merge such organizing efforts already in motion. The movements it draws on provide a wealth of resources for the struggles we face, from the sanctuary movement’s millennia-long philosophical traditions, to