Amanda Frost writes:

Sixty years ago, the United States abolished immigration restrictions based on nationality alone. By 1965, such discrimination had become an embarrassment. In an emotional ceremony by the Statue of Liberty, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that the legislation he was signing “corrects a cruel and enduring wrong” and makes Americans “truer to ourselves both as a country and as a people.”

Now the Trump administration is reviving nationality-based discrimination. After an Afghan refugee was arrested in the Nov. 26 shooting of two National Guard members, the Trump administration “indefinitely” stopped processing immigration-related applications for all Afghans — even those who have lived legally in the United States for years. The administration extended that suspension to immigrants from 18 other countries, including those on the verge of receiving green cards or citizenship. President Trump declared that Somalis are “garbage” on Tuesday, adding that they should “go back to where they came from,” and has threatened to denaturalize citizens. Meanwhile, his administration claims it can classify undocumented 14-year-old Venezuelans as “alien enemies” and deport them without judicial review.

Starting in 1875 and for most of the century that followed, country-specific immigration bans were the norm, not the exception. To be born in a disfavored country was considered to be inherently unfit to immigrate to the United States.

Nativism escalated gradually. In 1875, a law barred prostitutes from “China, Japan, or any Oriental country” from entering the United States. Although people from all backgrounds practiced the world’s oldest profession, Congress perceived women from these countries as a particular threat. “Virtue is an exception” among Chinese women, one lawmaker had claimed years earlier. Another had warned that these women “spread disease and moral death among our white population.” The law succeeded in shutting down immigration for almost all Asian women, prostitutes or not.

Seven years later, the Chinese Exclusion Act went further, barring all laborers from China. Once again, Congress relied on sweeping generalizations about the Chinese. “Alien in manners, servile in labor, pagan in religion, they are fundamentally un-American,” said one congressman, referring to hundreds of millions of people.

Once the nation started thinking this way, it was hard to stop. When a Jewish factory manager was accused of murder in 1913, his conviction fueled antisemitic xenophobia. Likewise, the 1921 murder conviction of two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, helped incite a Red Scare and the restrictive immigration laws that followed. At the heart of these crackdowns were not only assumptions of collective national guilt, but beliefs in a collective national character. [Continue reading…]

WGBH reports:

Becoming a U.S. citizen takes years and involves immigrants acquiring a green card, extensive interviews, background checks, classes and a citizenship test. The naturalization ceremony is the final step to the process, where the oath of allegiance and a citizenship certificate are granted.

Immigrants approved to be naturalized went to Faneuil Hall [Boston, MA] Thursday — known as the country’s cradle of liberty — for that long-awaited moment to pledge allegiance to the United States. But instead, as they lined up, some were told by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn’t proceed due to their countries of origin.

The same situation is playing out at naturalization events across the country as USCIS directed its employees to halt adjudicating all immigration pathways for people from 19 countries deemed to be “high risk”. [Continue reading…]