Fluke of Luck
An interview with historian Mae Ngai on the blurred lines between those we see as "illegal" and "legal."
This interview with Mae Ngai, American historian and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University, was conducted and condensed by Noelle Forougi for franknews.
My name is Mae Ngai. I'm a professor of history and Asian American Studies at Columbia University. My writing and research is mostly on immigration, questions of the nation, how the nation is created, and how citizenship is legally and socially defined. My interest in immigration really dates to the years before I became an academic, when I was a community and labor organizer in New York.
And how did that get you into the work?
Well, Chinatown is a working-class community of immigrants. The garment workers and the restaurant workers were actually very active in organizing for better pay and working conditions, which goes against a lot of stereotypes about Chinese workers and immigrant workers as being passive. When I worked for a labor union, I worked in the education department and got to know a lot of the people in the Garment Workers Union who took classes and I had a lot of respect for them. When I went back to graduate school, I was interested in labor history and immigration history. So that's what set me on this particular path.
Why does immigration policy remain such a contentious topic, especially during election cycles and how do you see that intertwining with how a nation uses immigration to define itself?
The coincidence of nativist politics and election cycles is actually not always happening. It's not always the case. In many previous elections in the late 20th century, politicians tried to make immigration an election issue, but actually, it ranks very low on polling and polling in both parties. People almost always put the economy first.— national security and crime are also big. Immigration usually falls very low.
As a general trend, there is always an anti-immigration part of our public discourse and the electorate, but polling has shown over the years, especially since the mid-20th century, that most Americans don't think immigration is a bad thing. And even in the 21st century, polling has continued to show that most Americans and majority of Americans think immigration to the United States is a net positive. A majority of Americans think that people who are here without documents should be legalized. Now, you know, that breaks down further, right? Some would impose more conditions than others — some would say they have to wait a long time — but most do not support mass deportations.
Most Americans don't think immigration is a crisis, but the media creates crisis discourses. And then politicians use this idea of crisis, that we are being invaded, that all immigrants are criminals, et cetera, in order to get people to think that there's a national security crisis.
I think this election cycle is different because, we have a political ecosphere, so to speak, where what used to be kind of fringy, right-wing politics has moved more towards the center. It's taken over the Republican party. We don't even really have a discourse anymore. We have people screaming, who are unmoored from facts and reality. They don't represent a majority of the American people — far from it, but they have seized the attention of the media. And because the electoral system is tilted, I would even say rigged, from the electoral college to more recent gerrymandering, to favor people who hold views that are deeply unpopular by the majority of Americans. Actually, in my view, the short answer to why we have this march to authoritarianism is because you have people who know that their views are deeply unpopular, that the only way they can have power is through anti-democratic means.
The right-wing has bullied Biden into taking an anti-immigration position. I say shame on him, but I also understand it politically. I think he feels he has nowhere to go. He should have held his guns, but, you know, politicians are always shortsighted.
But when he was elected, what did he do on day one of his presidency? On day one, he repealed every one of Trump's executive orders on immigration, and he put forward an immigration bill, which unfortunately went nowhere, but it was a really progressive bill. He would've cleared all the backlogs, you know, which have 2 million people waiting for green cards. He actually said, if Trump deported you, you can apply to come back. You don't have to wait 10 years, which is what you'd have to wait for under the law. He increased the number of visas available for people from high-end countries. It was a really progressive bill. But anyway, that went nowhere.
And now he's been pushed into this corner and we have this “crisis” at the border and in our cities. And it actually doesn't have to be this way.
In reading your work, I find it interesting how you highlight the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 as the foundation of our immigration policy, particularly in its framing of immigration policy as restrictive. How do you see the ongoing influence of quotas and ceilings in today's context?
I think the numerical ceilings imposed by the 1924 Act are the most enduring legacy of that bill. The idea that we have to limit the number of people who come into the country is normative today. Nobody questions it; nobody even thinks it should be raised. A numerical ceiling is a given.
The 1924 law distributed the immigration limit in ways that were grossly discriminatory with national origin quotas. It excluded all Asians and imposed quotas on European countries to favor immigrants from northern and western Europe. In 1965, they repealed the national origin quotas but kept the numerical ceiling. The ceiling imposed in 1924 was 150,000, which was 15% of the average number of people who came to the United States every year before World War I. In 1965, they raised the numerical ceiling to 290,000. Now, how did they get that number? They worked backward. They figured out that in 1924, 150,000 was some percentage of the total population, so in 1965, they used the same percentage, which increased the number because the population had grown, and they got to 290,000. So, if what was imposed in 1924 was restrictive, in 1965, it was not only just as restrictive, it was more restrictive because they applied it to the entire globe. In 1924, it only applied to Europeans, now it applied to the entire globe.
So, 1965 was in the midst of the civil rights revolution; the Civil Rights Act had passed in 1964, and the Immigration Act passed the same year as the Voting Rights Act. There was very much an ethos of civil rights in Congress. If in civil rights we treat every individual equally, they said, well, we'll treat every country equally, but there's a slippage there because countries are not individuals, right? The migrant is the individual, not the country. So, when you divide up the total, they said no country can have more than 20,000 new immigrants per year. So, that applied to Mexico and New Zealand, India, and Belgium. You can see where this goes, right? You have a severe limit on large population countries and very little pressure on countries that aren't actually sending people to this country.
If you are somebody from New Zealand and you want to come to the United States, there is no wait. But if you are coming from China or Mexico, there's a tremendous wait. So, this is a huge imbalance in the system, which creates long waits for visas and hence incentivizes undocumented migration because people aren't going to wait for 20 years. Your readers can see for themselves by going to the State Department's visa bulletin, which is issued every month, and it tells you what the waiting time is for visas. And there are always four countries that are on that list of long waits: Mexico, India, China, and the Philippines. In 1965, the limit was 20,000 per country, and now they have raised it to 26,500. Okay. That's not much of an increase if you're talking about India, right? Or China or Mexico. So, people still have these very long waiting lists. I think this is interesting historically because it's under this rubric of equality and fairness that we have a very, very unequal and unfair system.
And what did migration look like before 1924 if you said one million people were migrating and only 2% of people were being turned away?
Before 1924, most Asians were excluded, and for everybody else, the exclusions were not based on national origin or country of origin. They were based on personal characteristics. Of the 2% who were excluded, 1% was for likely to become a public charge, meaning they were deemed to be not able-bodied or not employable and 1% was for people who failed the mental test. That's really what they cared about: Could you work?
Right, I guess I am curious what a modern-day system that is not based on the idea of a numerical ceiling would look like.
First, I think it would take a long time to wean the American people from the idea that there has to be some limit. I mean, I actually take a libertarian view on this, although I'm not a libertarian, which is, I think the labor market would figure it out. People would go where there's work, and if there was no work, they wouldn't go. We have this idea that if there were no restrictions, the wretched and poor of the earth would be flooding our doorsteps. That actually isn't the case.
In the United States, we actually have a million new permanent residents per year only. Fewer than 30,000 come in under the quota system. Many individuals enter through non-quota avenues, such as bringing a spouse, minor child, or parent, or adjusting their status, for instance, if they were here as a student and then secured a job with employer sponsorship. So, the total number is a million, but that's not a bigger number than we had in 1914 or 1915, despite the country's larger size. As a proportion of the population, the foreign-born now constitute around 14% of the total U.S. population, compared to 15% in the 1910s.
We also have to take into account that the United States is a big country and we need workers. It's not a densely populated country like some others where you literally have to wonder, "Where are all of these people going to go?" However, this country, although it's wealthy, is very unequal in the distribution of wealth. We have extreme wealth from a very tiny percentage of the population, our so-called 1%, and then we have a large majority of Americans who are not wealthy or who struggle with economic precarity, unemployment, and all kinds of suboptimal social conditions, including housing and food insecurity. So those people, I think, are not unjustified to think about, well, if all these new people come, where are they going to live? What are they going to do?
Part of thinking about global migration is thinking about inequality. Migration itself is a product of the unequal distribution of wealth. Generally speaking, people move from poorer regions to less poor regions to wealthier regions. That's true within countries, and it's true in terms of global migration. So if we think about migration on a global scale, I think we need to think about it as a kind of human rights and social justice issue.
And I say human rights because no individual controls the conditions of their birth, right? You and I have privilege because we were born in the United States. Nobody determines the circumstances of their own birth. And so some people, by the fluke of luck, have more privileges than others. And that's true domestically, and it's also true globally. So we really believe that every individual on this planet is of the same worth as other humans. Then the right to migrate should be considered a human right.
Nowadays, it's even more complicated because there are climate refugees. So-called climate refugees face an increase in violence and civil disorder in many parts of the world, leading to more instability and dislocation. Immigration restriction, I believe, is primarily a prerogative of the global North and wealthier countries that don't feel compelled to share. That's a hard sell to Americans who might not feel they have much to share due to financial constraints. This whole question of inequality, both domestically and globally, must be addressed seriously if we want to consider migration. But suppose nothing changes, and we decide to open the borders. I think people who come want to work rather than rely on welfare. That's historically undeniable.
This might seem like a naive question, but I've always said, well, there are all these people at the border seeking asylum. Why don't you just do a quick training and have more asylum officers and deploy a thousand asylum officers to the border, right? Go to Georgetown where they all want be in the foreign service, and hire asylum officers. And then get rid of some of the stupid rules, like you can’t work for the first six months.
Solutions like that seem pretty obvious, to me at least. It’s hard for me to not feel cynical about the amount of will. You create the image of migration as this destitute person if you deprive them of the opportunity to work.
I mean right, and we have empty office buildings that could house more people. The people who own all these big-build office buildings get tax breaks even if they're empty. So why don't you give them a tax break if they convert offices into, you know, apartments? We should also think about temporary work visas. We assume that everybody wants to come here and partake of the American dream and live here and have their children here, et cetera, et cetera. But actually even at the high point of immigration from Europe at the turn of the 20th century, half of the people who came went home, they did not come to stay. And so this idea of circular migration or transnational movements that support families in more than one place is not new, but we kind of created a system that assumed people would stay permanently.
The limited solutions we have are due to political choices and interests. To me, it doesn't take a tremendous amount of imagination to see how you could handle this.