Surprise, Trump’s Immigration Ban has Nothing to do with Coronavirus
On Monday night, after facing months of criticism for his mismanagement of the COVID-19 outbreak, President Trump finally took a page out of his old playbook with a single late-night tweet that could reshape our country’s immigration landscape for the indefinite future:
It’s no accident that his syntactical use of the term “Invisible Enemy” in this instance gestures to both COVID-19 AND immigration, a conflation in line with previous xenophobic scapegoating and jingoistic posturing. If anything, this was a tactic many expected the president to take much earlier on in response to a virus first observed in a non-white country. After all, his vaunted border wall and Muslim Ban had been major pillars of his presidential campaign. Subsequent reprisals of these policies have followed suit: brutal, widespread ICE raids; expanded travel bans; as well as administrative attacks on the legal immigration system under Stephen Miller. Not coincidentally, the announcement of these policies has often occurred in times when Trump has faced criticism in other areas (which is most of the time).
If this ban remains in place (and upheld by the Supreme Court), the hardest-hit communities will be Asians and Latinxs, the two fastest-growing racial groups in the country, whose immigration to the United States since the 1970s has been the main driver of growth in the American foreign-born population.
But of course, it’s not about the virus.
In fact, it isn’t even about jobs or the struggling economy, as much as he would like us to think it is. It’s about putting another nail in the coffin of our country’s family-based immigration system in order to distract Americans from focusing on his failings as president during an election year.
Few details are available about the Executive Order, but we know that certain guest workers, for instance H2-A visa recipients or farm workers, may still be allowed, a carveout insisted upon by business leaders. But the issuing of green cards will be suspended for 60 days, which means that immigrants being sponsored by relatives in the United States will have to wait.
Two-thirds of legal immigration to the United States occurs through family ties. According to the Migration Policy Institute, 1 million immigrants are given legal permanent residency (LPR) status—otherwise known as a “green card”—by the U.S. each year. The majority of those who obtain green cards through the family-based system are spouses, parents, and children of U.S. citizens. It is a form of family separation, not implemented through physical force but through institutionalizing exclusion.
If this ban remains in place (and is upheld by the Supreme Court), the hardest-hit communities will be Asians and Latinxs, the two fastest-growing major racial groups in the country, whose immigration to the United States since the 1970s has been the main driver of growth in the foreign-born population. In 2017, 38% of green card recipients were from Asia or the Pacific Islands, and from 2013-2017, 8 of the top 10 countries of birth for green card recipients were in either Latin America or Asia.
Like many previous immigration policies under Trump, the impact is exacerbated, if not driven by, the fear that it engenders in immigrant communities. The reality is that a de facto ban on immigration is already in place: travel from China and Europe has been restricted; migrants are already being turned away at the Mexican and Canadian borders, and refugee admissions have been halted. As always, Trump is using racism and xenophobia to deflect responsibility and criticism. For Asians in particular, there is a fear that his doing so could further fan the flames of anti-Asian racism and violence, which Trump and other Republicans have nudged on with their intentional use of the term “Chinese coronavirus”, “Wuhan flu”, and other variants.
Even still, the immigration ban also reveals the ways in which our country has historically solicited immigrant labor to meet its economic needs, while denying those same individuals the right and ability to bring spouses, children, and parents to the US to contribute to and share in the relative prosperity they’ve helped to create.
A comparison of immigration policies between Hawaii and the mainland in the late 1800s is instructive in demonstrating this point. In 1865, the Hawaiian Board of Immigration recruited five hundred Chinese laborers to work in the sugar fields, setting a quota that 25% of these should be married Chinese women. This was a response to planters’ and missionaries’ concerns that hoards of single Chinese male laborers, deprived of female company, would quickly become unhappy and resort to rebellion and vice. By allowing them to immigrate to Hawaii with their wives, they believed that the Chinese workers would be happier and less likely to cause disruption. This policy, while ultimately for the self-interest of the landowning class, nevertheless made for an environment more suitable for immigrants to carve out a future in the islands and create an infrastructure for collective political resistance.
The immigration ban also reveals the ways in which our country has historically solicited immigrant labor to meet its economic needs, while denying those same individuals the right and ability to bring spouses, children, and parents to the US to contribute to and share in the relative prosperity they’ve helped to create.
By contrast, California (which was 99% white in the mid-to-late 1800s) explicitly prohibited Chinese women from entering because they wanted to stop the Chinese labor population from settling and competing for white Americans’ jobs. Chinese workers were expected to be temporary and itinerant: families were not encouraged, while anti-miscegenation laws forbade Asian men from marrying white women. Californian politicians would later capitalize on this anti-Asian sentiment, paving the way for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first federal immigration policy to exclude a population based on race, and which laid the foundations for the inequities still present in our current immigration system and the nativist myth of immigrant job theft.
A blanket Asian exclusion policy would be difficult to implement today. This country relies more heavily than ever on Asian immigrant labor, especially in the midst of this global pandemic: the restaurant and food services industry has the largest number of foreign-born Asian American workers, with over 600,000 strong, comprising well over two thirds of the Asian American workforce in that industry. Hospitals have the second-largest number of Asian American foreign-born workers at 496,000. Another 160,000 work in grocery stores; 97,000 in physician’s offices; and 95,000 in skilled nursing facilities. In fact, Asian Americans are overrepresented among physicians and nurses.
Our country is also similarly reliant on Latinx workers in many of the same industries: 43% of agricultural and fishing industry workers, 1 in 4 food service workers, and 16% of healthcare workers are Latinx. Construction is the most common job for Latino men, while restaurant work is most common for Latina women. Many of these workers have not only been working longer hours so that others can stay home; they’ve also suffered from layoffs, increased exposure to infection, a lack of healthcare access, and the bleeding out of family-run small businesses.
Yet, these are not the “great American citizens” Trump is claiming to protect. Instead, he continues to put forth the narrative that immigrants are coming here to steal jobs from Americans, when in reality the jobs he refers to are either no longer safe or desirable by current standards, or may have simply ceased to exist. And to drive home the point that the Trump administration doesn’t see immigrants as full human beings, many immigrants who lack a social security number — AND their U.S. Citizen spouses — will not be receiving a stimulus check granted to most other low- to middle-income adults, which could put the welfare of U.S. citizen children of mixed-status families at risk.
To be sure, these are policies that the Trump administration would most likely have pursued, even without the pandemic serving as a thinly-veiled pretense. But in the age of COVID-19, social distancing directives have only done so much to protect low-income immigrant workers, who may not have the luxury of complying with these orders. At the same time, they remind us of the universal human reliance on family and social connections for our health and quality of life. This country is all too willing to enlist immigrant labor to satisfy du jour capitalist demands, stoking prejudice to solidify class control, all while denying immigrants the basic comforts that make the performance of their work, and therefore life in the United States, sustainable. The stress and loneliness of these times, and the inescapable truth of our utter reliance on immigrant workers in good times and bad, should be all the more reason to stop family-based immigration from being deinstitutionalized, AND to fight for policies like worker protections, paid sick leave, universal healthcare, and a federal minimum wage.
The president cares about nothing and no one but himself. If he can’t even be bothered to protect his own citizens’ lives, what makes us think he cares about our jobs, or our families? This immigration ban is not about the virus. It’s about minimizing the contributions of immigrant workers at a time when their importance to our collective survival is more obvious than ever. It’s about co-opting a moment of inflection when our country may be on the brink of a systemic transformation to a more just and equitable society for working people and the poor.
We must never forget the American lives that have been jeopardized due to Trump’s self-centeredness and incompetence, and we must never forget that amidst the bleakness of the present moment, immigrants are holding this country together in one piece, as they have done so many times before.
