By Lori Lee
NDG Contributing Writer
Seeking the origins of racism in the U.S., scholars from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Immigration Law and Policy, working with the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, have achieved the first map to track government expulsions and policies surrounding them.
After five years of gathering and analyzing data and tracing government regulations back to 1895, the researchers produced a website they affectionately call the Million Dollar Hoods Project. The project tracks the millions perhaps trillions spent to remove people of select races from marginalized communities, the majority being nonwhite, explained Kelly Hernandez of the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy at a September American Community Media briefing.
As the Lead Cartographer on the project, Mariah Tso from the Ralph J. Bunche Center explained, the maps on their website combine to illustrate meanings within the data surrounding immigration laws and policies.
The chronology, organized into five eras, takes users through a timeline simulating the world when the data was shaped, including laws and enforcement priorities in effect and details of communities being targeted. The map tells the story with contextual details, said Tso, inviting users to zoom in on certain periods and explore specific communities.
Their map called “The Invasion of America” shows the first forced migration, when Native Americans were removed through battles and treaties through the 19th century, explained Hernández. The story is told through an animated map which helps users see the removal of indigenous people as U.S. territory expands.
The period from 1790 to 1875 traces the second forced migration when over 12 million Africans were taken from their homes and forced to come to America to be sold as slaves. It was during the Antebellum period, said Hernandez, the era of slavery leading up to the Civil War, and this when immigration control began.
Documentation surrounding the data reveals laws passed by Congress starting in 1803 were created to establish the U.S. as a White man’s republic. It was during the Haitian Revolution when “free persons of color” were targeted for exclusion. As Haitians approached Southern states, slave owners feared a similar rebellion would erupt, and this led Congress to create new laws, said Hernandez.
During the era from 1876 to 1929, the federal government took over the immigration system, she added.
“The idea that the blood of our country will be poisoned by morally contagious and deficient people, riff-raff and scum from other countries, is an idea that is all over the 1920s in immigration policy,” explained professor Ahilan Arulanantham of UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy.
White nationalists were pushing Congress to punish and deport as many non-white immigrants as possible, Hernandez explained, by 1929, barring many Black migrants, almost all Asian immigrants, and even criminalizing many Mexican immigrants.
Amid the dread of Jim Crow, “whites-only” signs marked restaurant windows, doors, and entries to some neighborhoods, but backdoors and side gates were always open to non-white workers, said Hernandez, this indicating Jim Crow laws were about establishing subordination and a new federal power applied to immigrants.
In the third era, Congress amends but does not end the whites-only system, explained Hernandez. The story is told in the maps. “Amend and Enforce,” covering 1955 to 1990 includes the Civil Rights Movement and the 1975 Supreme Court decision Brignoni-Ponce, legitimizing racism in enforcement.
The Supreme Court upheld this ruling just last month, when it allowed ICE, Customs, and Border Patrol to continue using race as a factor in Los Angeles enforcement operations and other parts of the Ninth Circuit.
“Deportation Nation,” brings users to era five and the present. What the United States has now, said Hernandez, is the largest immigrant detention and deportation system in the world, a system built with walls of racism dating back to its origins, subsequently reinvented in 1965, according to Hernandez.
Users can click on dots within the different periods to bring up quotes from government leaders, illustrating the sentiment in which the system was created. Perhaps most stunning, the maps demonstrate the growth of racial disparities over time, added Tso.
“You can get a look at particular events and incidents that happened, court decisions, new laws, major policies that have an effect on driving what we see in the maps,” said Tso.
And a key part of the map is a compass that shows users how to navigate, she said, with questions like “How does America First create a distorted view of the world ? Who is racialized and how? Who is criminalized? Who is banned, barred, and capped?” These are the guiding critical questions to navigate not just this particular map, but the website as a whole, she said.
The maps fail to account for the ways the law itself has made it much easier for some people to come to this country and for some to remain, added Arulanantham. The registry is a perfect example of this. A provision still in effect today, the law, introduced in 1929, provides amnesty to those who’ve remained in this country unlawfully going back to a specified date and who aren’t otherwise inadmissible due to committing a crime or other action. The law was enacted when a huge wave of white supremacist ideology was driving immigration policy, said Arulanantham, leading to virtually all immigration from Asia and Africa being banned.
How couid this seemingly progressive immigration law be enacted at the same time that white supremacist ideology was driving immigration policy? It’s because the law overwhelmingly benefited Europeans and Canadians, said Arulanantham, who made up 80% of the people who qualified during the first decade.
They stopped updating the qualifying years in 1972, pointed out Arulanantham. If the government were to update it now, millions of people from Mexico and Central America would be able to change their status.
What was easy for Europeans has been more difficult for others, those from Mexico and Central America barred under Title 42 during the pandemic, as Ukrainians were allowed to enter. As the Biden Administration allowed in thousands of Ukrainians, many on the parole program, comparable programs for other many other countries, including Afghans and Haitians, remained incredibly harsh.
