IN THE SHADOW OF LIBERTY

A strong indictment of long-standing anti-immigrant practices in the U.S.

“Since its inception, immigrant detention has been an affront to basic ideals of justice and compassion,” writes Stanford historian Minian, author of Undocumented Lives. Even if the numbers of detained didn’t change much from Obama to Trump to Biden, the practice of separating families and detaining children apart from their parents was employed more vigorously in that middle term than on either side. The author chronicles how draconian measures such as imprisonment without due process and even torture have been in place since the 1980s, used as an instrument of policy “by design” to deter immigration with the promise that only trouble awaits. Minian examines immigrants from the 19th century to the present to note that, of course, this determent doesn’t really apply to white Europeans: The exclusions were intended for Chinese and other Asians, then Latinx people, then Jews, and so on. In one case study, the author writes about two Chinese deportees who saved American lives at danger to their own during the Boxer Rebellion, a story similar to that of recent Afghan military interpreters denied admission. In addition, countless Mexican farm workers kept the American agricultural economy afloat during the labor shortages of World War II, only to be deported or jailed afterward. “Before 1954, the government did not even consider that there were options other than detention for dealing with arriving migrants,” writes Minian. However, apart from a period where parole was an option, the government has ended up back where it started: jailing or interning people arriving from Cuba and Vietnam, building ever higher walls, militarizing the border, and reinforcing the fact that “if the United States is a nation of immigrants, then it is also a nation of prisoners.”

A grimly persuasive history, of broad interest to immigration rights activists and reformers.