November 6, 2025
Center for Community Engagement: Professor Georgina Guzman; Pilar Pacheco, Interim Director of Strategic Engagement and Mission Based Initiatives; and Jennifer Raymond, Community Partner
How Did We Get Here? Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Naive Nativists
Opening Story: Living The Dream--Once Upon a Time circa 1988 a MA student
When I reflect upon the question of immigration, and such policies of restriction and deportation, I think of my community of Oxnard, my friends, my family, and CSU Channel Islands students, immigrants, and the sons, daughters, theys, and mixed-family progeny of immigrants: grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren.
I am the proud son of an immigrant mother and immigrant and migrant grandparents from the states of Chihuahua and Michoacan in Mexico, and South Texas. Before my cultural deracination by California’s school system, Spanish was my childhood first language. But with every elementary grade, English by-and-by became my dominant verbal way to communicate. My parents addressed me in Spanish, and, over time, I responded, more and more, in English. I remember speaking with my grandparents in Spanish. But as I got older, the conversations with my maternal Abuelita, Doña Rita, particularly, became progressively brief to the point of my only deferential greetings, short pleasantries, and warm farewells. As a young adult, when I did attempt to converse at length with my Abuelita, who always referred to me as mi rey (that always boosted my self-esteem), she often looked at me with a countenance of bewilderment that I interpreted as “What in the world is he trying to say.”
By the way, only a few years ago, I learned, disappointedly, from a rival prima that my Abuelita referred to all my cousins, the US-born and immigrant alike, some documented and others undocumented, I suspect, as mi rey and mi reina. So much for my being the one and only king. No matter, her endearing reverence instilled in me an internalized sense of worth.
Then there were my neighborhood friends and classmates, many immigrants, all of the working class, some I would learn later, whose parents and grandparents were immigrants from Armenia, China, Japan, the Philippines, Iran, the former Soviet Union, and Taiwan. This was particularly the case in college. At CSU Fresno, several of my favorite professors were immigrant refugees from Nazi Germany, China/Taiwan, Hungary, and fascist Spain. As educators, they shared unique, fascinating, perspectives and personal stories from those of my US-born professors.
Professor John W. Bohnstedt and his dislike of communists.
This is all to say that I harbor a profound affinity for immigrants and immigrant cultures. Consequently, our current white-supremacist, terrorist policies toward immigrants, all immigrants, not just the undocumented, are a personal attack on my family and community of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, now, more than ever, considered a suspect class during this time of mass incarceration and deportation.
But as a historian, I understand US immigration history as being grounded in a White-supremacist racial capitalism as posited by Cedric Robinson, author of the authoritative book on race, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, published in 1983. Interestingly, a racial capitalism in which Western Europeans, racialized colonized Europeans such as the Irish and Eastern European Slavic peoples, with the decline of feudalism, as they oppressively seized and occupied their lands. A settler colonial system adopted by the US in which, in the view of Mahmood Mamdani (the father of New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani), in Neither Settler nor Native (2020), “states have often treated settlers as citizens, and natives as aliens.” We see this in the Israeli occupation of Palestine and here in the US, as Indigenous people, such as the Chumash, are often mistaken for Mexican immigrants.
As fearfully anticipated by historically minded people, the current Trump administration has now expanded the discussion from the mass deportation of the undocumented to the revocation of the legal residency and naturalization of documented immigrants. Just last week, Vice President J.D. Vance reiterated the Trump administration’s position to vastly curtail the entrance of immigrants as a whole “to build a sense of common identity.” This racist dog whistle, more a dog howl, of the ethnic cleansing of non-white immigrants is historical. Historian Ronald Takaki, in his important book Strangers From a Different Shore (1989), documented such racist promulgations of our nation’s founders: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and others. In 1923, the US Supreme Court noted such American values when it opined in US. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, “The children of English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and other European parentage, quickly merge into the mass of our population and lose the distinctive hallmarks of their European origin.” But not non-White immigrants.
For example, with the US’ insatiable demand for immigrant labor, both voluntary, that consisted, largely, of Europe’s unwanted poor, and those who entered the British North American colonies and the new nation without consent or contract, (i.e., enslaved Black people,), the federal government quickly codified racial capitalism in the National Origins Act of 1790 that circumscribed naturalized citizenship, less than one year after the US Constitution ratification in 1789, to white men who met a residency requirement of just two years. Indigenous, enslaved Blacks, and white women could not become citizens with the constitutional protections and privileges that came with US citizenship. This made immigrants of color, especially, political targets as they could never enjoy the scepter of the franchise in elections defend themselves from racist demagogues. This permitted amoral politicians such as President Trump to boorishly scapegoat immigrants with impunity.
Since the mid-19th century onward, the preferred immigrant was of Old Stock origins: Northern and Western European, English or Germanic speaking, and Protestant. Or vernacularly, WASPs: White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants. President Donald Trump echoed this preference in January of 2018 and in mid-October of this year in relation to white English-speaking refugees, particularly from South Africa. Notions of Race Suicide, The Great Replacement Theory, favoring WASP immigration, currently, as in the past, is based in a demographic shift that has been occurring steadily since the Immigration and Nationality (Hart-Celler Act) of 1965 that repealed racist national origins quotas that favored northern and western European immigration, dramatically lowered the proportion of immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and virtually excluded completely the entrance of Asians. Consequently, when nativists such as Vance and Charlie Kirk point to a traditional “white America,” they are referencing, knowingly and naively, a settler-colonial US history of extermination against Indigenous-Native peoples, and the almost complete exclusion of people from all of Asia: China, India, Korea, and the Philippines.
Furthermore, when the question arises of refugees from Chile, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, and other parts of the developing world, or in the words of Trump, “shit-hole countries,” both craven Democratic and Republican politicians ignore the factor of causation. Or, address the vital question, “Why do immigrant refugees (economic, political, and war) come to the US in the first place?” What is so direly powerful happening in the homeland of refugees to leave their countries with almost nothing materially to travel dangerous journeys to the US? Politicians who commit billions upon billions of dollars to immigration enforcement conveniently omit how presidential administration after presidential administration, both Democrat and Republican, green-lighted the Central Intelligence Agency’s overthrow of governments, democratic and revolutionary, with mirror ideal of our Declaration of Independence, to maintain and install ruthless, bloody dictatorship that advance US corporate interests in oil, rare earth resources for our smart phones and computers, and agricultural products such as sugar, coffee, and bananas. CIA-sponsored dictatorial coups then caused refugee streams to the US. As a Union Del Barrio leader commented to me recently, colonized people ultimately migrate to the center of empires. I first learned of this pattern of CIA-advised upheavals when I read as a graduate student the works of historian William Appleman Williams and Walter LeFeber’s classic Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Latin America (1983). These authors turned on the light bulb, exposing the deception of US foreign policy’s mission to expand democracy globally when in fact the goal is to expand US corporate interests from sea to shining sea. As a Marine Corps veteran, I am reminded of US Marine Corps Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler declaration at an American Legion conference in 1931:
I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service, and during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen 16 Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
Indeed, immigration, past and present, is closely tied to an interventionist, capitalist US foreign policy. This is particularly true with the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994, which devastated and displaced two million Mexican small farmers who became economic refugees to the US. Then there are the US-sponsored wars of the same era in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The blatant plan to overthrow the Venezuelan presidency of Nicolas Maduro with the not-so-covert operations of the CIA and severe economic sanctions is the latest case in point. But this did not start with the Trump administration; the presidencies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden considered, if not actively pursued, regime-change in Venezuela in one manner or another. Materially, consider that Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in Latin America. And US oil companies can’t wait to get their hands on this prize.
Immigration policy, particularly of the early twentieth century, is also closely aligned to the eugenics movement of that time that sought to racially engineer the make-up and character of a White America. But the goal to make whites racially great demographically commenced soon after the US instigated war against Mexico in 1846, which conquered over half of Mexico's northern territories with the Spanish-Mexican labels such as Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, Nuevo Mexico, y Tejas. And let us not forget the cities and towns named Camarillo, Calabasas, Hueneme, Saticoy, Malibu, Ojai, Santa Paula, and Simi. The names of these communities and by-and-by states are a reminder that we, ethnic Mexicans and the Chumash in the US, did not cross the border; the border crossed us. Carey McWilliams, the doyenne of California studies, pointed this out in his 1948 germinal book, which served as the foundational text of Chicana/o Studies up to 1972, North From Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States.
One last point on the US attack on Mexico. US expansionists, such as President James K. Polk, contemplated the conquest of all of Mexico, but racists of the ilk of Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina feared for the nation’s racial and demographic supremacy with the inclusion into the union of a largely Mexican indigenous-mestizo population.
US policies of exclusion launched, by-and-by, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 that ended the US attack on Mexico, with California’s Foreign Miners Tax of 1850 that sought to discourage and expel immigrant miners from China and Latin America, even Mexicans who were not foreign to California, during the Gold Rush. After the completion of the western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, the US Paige Act of 1875 prohibited the immigration of Chinese women. Complemented with anti-miscegenation laws, this law precluded the natural population growth of Chinese Americans. Seven years later, the US passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which excluded Chinese immigrant laborers even though this group made up less than one percent of the total US population. Chinese immigrants became the indispensable enemy, to use the title of Alexander Saxton's groundbreaking book on immigration, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California, published in 1975. Despite the real and proportionally slight number of Chinese immigrants in the country, craven state and national political candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties bent over backwards and forward to anti-Chinese each other in calling for ever more draconian laws of Chinese exclusion permanently extended in 1902.
Similar to the Chinese population in the US in the latter half of the 19th century, today, undocumented immigrants make up less than three percent, or eleven to fourteen million people, of a total US population of 340 million. So, undocumented immigrants are the “indispensable enemy” of the twenty-first century. Without the undocumented to dogpile with social culpabilities, the political dictatorship of the Democratic and Republican parties could no longer effectively deflect the public’s attention from the failings of our capitalist system.
New immigration and a series of laws of restrictions based on a logic of eugenics culminated in the Reed-Johnson Act of 1924, which again, favored northern and western European immigration, severely restricted immigration from southern and Eastern Europe, and essentially excluded people from Asia. At the behest of the agricultural commercial lobby, Congress exempted people of the Western Hemisphere, Canada, and Mexico to access a fluid supply of farm workers essential to the economy.
The Reed-Johnson Act also reified a geographically nebulous US-Mexico border and with this the idea of the illegal immigrant from Mexico and Latin America. As detailed in the prize-winning book by Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (2018), named by The Guardian one of the Five Best Books on White Supremacy, the establishment of the Border Patrol that same year enlisted racist agents, many who former Texas Rangers, an organization infamous for its settler colonial terrorism against ethnic Mexicans.
Before Reed-Johnson, the US negotiated with the Meiji government of Japan a ban on immigration from this Asian nation. As opposed to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the US did not unilaterally exclude Japanese immigrants as Japan was an imperial power, itself, that had defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Hence, Japan could not be disrespected with impunity as was Manchu China. So, President Theodore Roosevelt, an ardent promoter of Anglo-Saxonism, US imperialism, and the idea of Race Suicide, negotiated the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement to nearly ban Japanese immigration. Japanese men already in the US were able to replicate themselves demographically, unlike the Chinese, by a family reunification system of fictive Picture Brides.
White growers of California particularly loathed Japanese immigrants as they challenged their supremacy as capitalist agricultural producers. To eliminate the competition of Japanese farmers, a white grower dictatorship lobbied the California legislature to establish the Alien Land Laws of 1913 and 1920 that prohibited land ownership by Japanese. Apparently, the Jeffersonian myth of the yeoman farmer did not apply to non-whites. Although the acts did not explicitly name the Japanese, the legislation targeted them as “Aliens ineligible for citizenship,” unentitled to owning land and holding long-term leases. Language pulled directly from the National Origins Act of 1790. Consequently, Theft, terrorism, legal extortion, and Alien Land Laws are major reasons why California agriculture, and that of the Southwest and nation, is dominated by a dictatorship of a white commercial grower class.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, massive deportation and repatriation campaigns occurred in many parts of the United States. Historians Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez estimate that on million ethnic Mexicans were forced to leave the US, sixty percent US citizens. Then during World War II, the US reinvited Mexican workers to work in the orchards, fields, and railroads of the country under the Bracero Program under the pretense of a labor shortage, disputed by historian Gilbert G. Gonzalez, from 1942 to 1964, when the exploitive, inhuman project became an embarrassment. But soon after its deauthorization in it was repackaged as an H-2A Visa program. In between, the US government instituted another deportation campaign in 1953 labeled Operation Wetback. The takeaway, the US loves Mexican workers and Mexican food, but not the people of Mexico.
Racist acts of exclusion and restriction lived on into my lifetime up to the Immigration and Nationality (Hart-Celler) Act of 1965. As one reform of the civil rights movement, the act eliminated the national origins quota system and exclusions. Consequently, immigration increased from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This law is the basis for the national demographic shift we have seen happening over the last fifty years. Currently, the US consists of some 59% White non-Hispanic, Hispanic (the majority ethnic Mexican) 19%, 12% Black, Asian 7%, Indigenous 3%. By 2045, the US Census Bureau estimates that the white population will be a minority. Based on a sense of demographic, social, and political supremacy lost, tethered to the decline of the material well-being of the middle class leading to a general status anxiety, first coined by the eminent historian Richard Hofstadter in the 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Age of Reform, the Trump Administrations has politically capitalized on angst to make white supreme again.
But I refuse to be silent. Speaking up by way of these messages and attending protests is my way to live with myself as I think of Reverend Martin Niemöller’s trenchant poem, First They Came:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.
C/S
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