Author Topic: Trumpism is an echo  (Read 1588 times)

90sRetroFan

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Re: Trumpism is an echo
« Reply #30 on: December 12, 2022, 06:18:03 pm »
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adolfoflores/racist-lawmakers-immigrantion-laws-attorneys-tactic

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Inside the courthouse where Hartzler worked as an attorney with the Federal Defenders of San Diego, hundreds of distraught parents faced criminal charges of entering the US without authorization, which former president Donald Trump used to separate them from their children.
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If defense attorneys could prove that it was unconstitutional and inherently racist, a judge would strike the entire thing, potentially affecting hundreds of cases.

Their research into the law's formation bolstered their case. It showed how congressional lawmakers in the early 1900s invoked overt racism to justify the legislation at the time, discussing how the “mixture blood” of white, Native Americans, and Black people would inflict “great penalty” on the US. They also said Mexicans were “illiterate, unclean, peonized masses” who were “poisoning the American citizen.”

The federal defender’s investigation into the laws relied heavily on research already done by UCLA history professor Kelly Lytle Hernández, who discovered and documented how eugenicists shaped these laws.
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When the laws that form the basis of the modern immigration system were passed in the 1920s, some members of Congress openly embraced eugenics, supported segregation, and used racist language.

When Congress passed the National Origins Act of 1924, which restricted how many immigrants could enter the US, particularly non-Europeans, it exempted people from the Western Hemisphere, including Mexicans. This upset lawmakers who wanted to restrict all immigration from Mexico, but those efforts failed under pressure from employers, particularly those in agriculture.

During attempts to restrict immigration from non-European countries, US lawmakers heard testimony from a eugenicist who said that controlling which immigrants were allowed in was the best way to promote “race conservation,” and compared drafters of deportation laws to “successful breeders of thoroughbred horses.”

Sen. Coleman Livingston Blease, a Democrat from South Carolina who defended lynching and supported segregation, proposed a solution regarding Mexican immigrants that would appease nativists and employers: make crossing the border without authorization a crime. It would force Mexican workers to enter only through a port of entry, allowing the US to control how many entered while ensuring that employers had enough of the laborers they depended on. The law making it a crime to enter the US without authorization was approved in 1929.

For employers, undocumented workers became an easily exploitable group who could be threatened with deportation and jail time.

Decades later, the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act upheld the system established by the 1924 law, though it granted immigration quotas to mostly Western and Northern European countries. The law also reenacted illegal entry and reentry.

In a court filing for one of Hartzler’s cases, she pointed to a 925-page report that served as the basis for the 1952 statute that repeatedly uses the term “wetback” to prove Congress sought to discriminate against Latinos. Sen. Pat McCarran, a Democrat from Nevada and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, used “wetback” — a racist term originally referring to Latinos who swam across the Rio Grande — to refer to both authorized and unauthorized immigrants.

“There is a flood of people who come across the boundary. They are called wet-backs, and they come across legally or illegally during the various harvest seasons,” court records quote McCarran as saying during a hearing.

The report would go on to state that the purpose of the US immigration system was to “maintain the balance of the various elements in our white population.”
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These laws were also the beginning of the association in the US between undocumented immigrants and criminality, which hit a peak during the Trump administration, Gonzalez O'Brien said.