by Adam Serwer
The public-charge rule, as passed in 1882, was vague and easily met by Wolf-Leib’s possession of eight dollars and being able-bodied when he stepped off the boat on Ellis Island in 1903. He was not Chinese and therefore not barred by the Chinese Exclusion Act. By 1917, immigrants were required to be literate—in their own languages. There was no large, armed, internal immigration-enforcement apparatus in existence to deport those who did somehow enter the country illegally.
The nation’s borders were “soft” and largely “unguarded,” Ngai writes. “Inspection at arrival sought to identify excludable persons and to deny them admission, but little could be done if they evaded detection and entered the country.” Congress did not appropriate funds for enforcing deportation laws until 1924; today the Department of Homeland Security has a budget of more than fifty billion dollars. All in all, of the more than 20 million European immigrants who arrived between 1890 and the beginning of World War I—those fleeing the Irish potato famine, Italian poverty, or persecution in the Pale of Settlement—only about 2 percent were ultimately barred from entering. The ancestors of most of America’s “white ethnics” suffered hardship, oppression, and deprivation—but they never faced the barriers to entry today’s huddled masses do.
Being barred from entry and being subject to removal by well-funded government machinery are two distinct things. The massive state bureaucracy to track, detain, and remove undocumented immigrants that exists today under the umbrella of DHS was not present in the era of mass European immigration to the United States at the turn of the century, and to the extent it did exist, its effectiveness against those immigrants was limited by the discretion of its administrators. It is not only that the entry requirements at the height of European immigration were more forgiving; the deportation apparatus was too.
Through the 1920s, the federal government steadily increased its efforts to remove people in the country illegally. But for European immigrants targeted by quotas, there were still options. They could sneak in through the southern border—in the 1920s, “The most heavily traveled route for illegal European immigration was through Mexico,” Ngai writes. They could go to Canada, then come to the United States legally after living in Canada for five years. After that, they could send for their relatives, who were not subject to the quotas.
“Even those who sneaked in…once people reach their destination—Chicago or Pittsburgh or whatever—the chances of them being apprehended by immigration is practically nil if they’re European,” Ngai told me.
An irony of American immigration policy is that Western Hemisphere countries were not subject to the entry restrictions—the eugenicists who crafted American immigration policy in the 1920s did see Mexicans as inferior, but they were overruled by diplomatic concerns, including but not limited to retaliation against American business interests across the border. Nevertheless, as Ngai writes, “During the 1920s, immigration policy rearticulated the U.S.-Mexico border as a cultural and racial boundary, as a creator of illegal immigration.” For all the hatred historically directed at European immigrants, it was the fear of Latin American immigration that built the American deportation machine we know today.
Backlash from white Americans to zealous border-patrol officers resulted in training that forced them to “act with civility, courtesy, and formality when dealing with Anglo citizens, ranch owners, immigrants arriving from Europe, and ‘high class people com[ing] in as tourists’ from Canada.” Mexican immigrants, on the other hand, were treated with the “quasi- and extra-legal practices associated with rancher vigilantism.” Such practices included lynchings, beatings, and “posse shootings,” as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández describes in Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. In one stark example, a future Border Patrol agent named Harlon Carter joined the service after serving a brief prison term—later overturned by a judge—for hunting down and executing a Mexican American teenager, Ramón Casiano, with a shotgun. The teenager had “upset” Carter’s mother by “loitering” near her home.
Meanwhile, as the Great Depression loomed and “economic insecurities among Euro-Americans inflamed racial hostility toward Mexicans, efforts to deport and repatriate the latter to Mexico grew,” Ngai writes. “The movement did not distinguish between legal immigrants, illegal immigrants, and American citizens.” As a result, “nearly 20 percent of the Mexican population in the United States returned to Mexico during the early years of the Depression. The repatriation of Mexicans was a racial expulsion program exceeded in scale only by the Native American Indian removals of the nineteenth century.”
Much of the United States had been ceded from Mexico after its defeat in the Mexican–American War; this meant that some of the up-to-a-million people expelled were removed from land they had lived in for generations, despite the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo’s guarantee of full citizenship. Mass deportations of Mexican Americans, from Mexican Repatriation in the 1920s and 1930s to Operation Wetback in the 1950s, are part of America’s long exploitative relationship with Mexican labor. Trump famously praised the latter as a model of “humane deportation.”
Attempts to execute the mass deportation of European immigrants, however, met with severe backlash. The Hoover-era Wickersham Commission report on deportation reflected on the expansive powers of immigration enforcement in language that resembles that of today’s immigrants’ rights activists.
“It is an insufferable reflection upon our humanity that our laws can give such despotic power in deportation and yet provide so little opportunity for even administrative mercy,” the report reads. “The absence of discretionary power, both in the deportation of aliens and the readmission of aliens who have been heretofore deported, has had results which should not be tolerated in a civilized country.”
The prospect of family separation was at the root of the backlash against deportation—at least as far as European immigrants were concerned. “No matter how long the alien may have resided in this country before his deportation, no matter how technical may have been the nature of the violation of our laws, no matter whether he has an American family in this country whom he can not take with him, his banishment is perpetual.”
The report was influential—in the late 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, government policy was changed to be more merciful toward undocumented immigrants. But those discretionary policies were almost entirely applied to European immigrants, whose humanity and struggles government officials found easier to empathize with. Relief policies were designed to exclude Mexican and Caribbean immigrants, reserving mercy for European immigrants targeted by entry restrictions.
“Thus it became possible to unmake the illegality of Italian, Polish, and other European illegal immigrants through the power of administrative discretion,” Ngai writes. The annihilation of European American families through deportation created the political will for a more forgiving immigration policy—for immigrants considered to be white, or something close to it.
Decades later, under the auspices of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller—both descendants of poor and rural immigrants—the annihilation of Central American families became a policy goal.
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Jeff Sessions, then–attorney general of the United States, told prosecutors in May of 2018 to go after the children.
“We need to take away children,” Sessions said, according to notes of a meeting obtained by The New York Times. “If [you] care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.”
The policy provoked a colossal public backlash, doing immense damage to the perception of the federal deportation machine, a bipartisan edifice erected by immigration hawks from both parties. Another irony of American immigration policy is that Barack Obama, a living symbol of American multiculturalism, presided over a much more active removal apparatus than did Donald Trump.
The Obama administration erroneously believed that harsh immigratio
n enforcement would bring Republicans to the table on immigration.
Under continuous pressure from immigrants’ rights activists, the administration adopted a more lenient approach toward the conclusion of his first term in 2012. Nevertheless, year by year, Obama deported hundreds of thousands more undocumented immigrants in his first four years as president than Trump did, despite Trump’s open contempt for nonwhite immigrants. It is a reminder that politicians wearing the smiling face of liberalism can provide a more effective façade for cruelty than those who make cruelty their public purpose. Trump did not invent the American deportation machine; he simply took advantage of its powers in ways recent presidents had not contemplated.
Among the results of the backlash against the family-separation policy was the decision by David Glosser to speak out against his nephew Stephen Miller, sharing the history of his family’s difficult journey to the United States in order to disprove the premises of the White House’s approach to immigration. In 2018, he wrote in Politico about having “watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.”
“I had a unique platform from which to speak,” Glosser told me. “I had no choice other than to reveal the truth to the background of our family and how it relates to the background of the architect of this catastrophe.” Miller, for his part, sees his family’s ancestral home of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, as having been harmed by “globalists” and the “owners of capital.”
Glosser is retired, but his family legacy looms large over his life. He continues to volunteer with HIAS, the organization that helped bring his family to the United States, doing psychological and cognitive evaluations of refugees and those seeking asylum in America, a process Miller has sought to destroy. A few years ago, while going through his grandfather’s personal items, Glosser discovered that HIAS was the first beneficiary of his grandfather’s will.
Glosser’s Politico piece detailing his family’s immigration history was written in the midst of the 2018 midterms, during which Trump was hoping to preserve his party’s control of the House of Representatives by focusing his campaign on a caravan of Central American migrants seeking to enter the United States. Trump called the caravan “an invasion of our country” and warned of “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners” hidden in their midst. The people in the caravan were coming to the United States for the same reasons that Trump’s and Miller’s ancestors did, with the distinction that, in some cases, migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala were fleeing circumstances partially shaped by American foreign policy.
Just two months after Glosser’s piece was published, a gunman angry about the migrant caravan forced his way into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, which Glosser’s brother’s family attended. The gunman killed eleven worshippers, motivated in part by his hatred for HIAS, which he blamed for bringing in “hostile invaders to dwell among us.” It was the kind of violence Wolf-Leib Glosser had fled a century ago.
8
THE CRUELTY OF
CONSPIRACY
The Macedonian king Lysimachus saw the Jews as having “good intentions toward no man.” The apostle Paul warned that the Jews were “the enemies of the whole human race.” The conservative icon Edmund Burke complained that the French Revolution was unlike others because it had been led by “Jew brokers contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils.” Karl Marx, in envisioning the emancipation of the working class, determined that “money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist.”
From antiquity to the modern era, Jews have proven tremendously useful as an external enemy, or as a scapegoat for society’s ills. In each time period, anti-Jewish thought has been at the service of contemporary politics, from early Christians seeking to discredit their Jewish forebearers, to Protestant Reformers seeking to deny the divinity of the Catholic Church, to Karl Marx attacking capitalism. As the historian David Nirenberg writes, this is something of a historical accident. The centrality of Christianity to the West, and Christians’ imperative to defend their faith as a supersession of the Jews’ divine covenant, led Western thought to be constructed around reductive binaries that defined Jews as everything Christians were not supposed to be: materialist, divorced from spirituality, severed from the divine due to their own arrogance, and traitors to heaven in their rejection of the true messiah.
Centuries of anti-Jewish thought had conditioned a continent to think of Jewish people not as human beings but as abstract symbols for material greed, spiritual weakness, and moral wickedness. Those beliefs have traveled along with Western thought the same way a plague finds its way around the globe. Long predating the relatively modern political conceptions of liberal and conservative, and even the invention of race, anti-Jewish thought has an ideological flexibility that can find a home anywhere on the political spectrum. In the Trump era, left and right have traded accusations of anti-Semitism. But neither is immune to one of history’s oldest and deadliest hatreds, not even those who define themselves by their fight against bigotry and prejudice.
With the rise of communism in the twentieth century, the anti-Jewish philosophical tradition took on a new cast, influenced by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a czarist hoax presented as a conspiracy “to destroy the white Gentile race, that the Jews may seize the power during the resulting chaos and rule with their claimed superior intelligence over the remaining races of the world, as kings over slaves.”
As the historian Paul Hanebrink documents, Winston Churchill saw the Russian Revolution as a Jewish conspiracy that held “the Russian people by the hair of their heads.” Polish Catholic leaders warned that “the race that has led Bolshevism has already made the world subject to gold and banks, and today, driven by the eternal imperialist desire that flows in its veins, turns to the last campaign of conquest.” And ultimately Adolf Hitler declared that “if, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.”
Presenting Nazi Germany as a bulwark against “Judeo-Bolshevism,” Hitler had a tremendous amount of success uniting Europe’s nationalist right. Not that Hitler blaming communism on the Jews prevented him from also blaming capitalism on the Jews. The führer was just as insistent that “the slave’s yoke of international capital” belonged to “its masters, the Jews.”
Nazi ideology represented the collision of a long tradition of anti-Jewish thought with the invention of race and racism. Whereas in prior eras Jews might have escaped persecution and destruction through conversion, when Jews became a “race” in the minds of Europe’s intellectuals, their religious traits became ingrained biological ones.
Perhaps you’re wondering what this has to do with Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam and the subject of the following essay. The answer is that, although it may seem peculiar, Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism is more or less the same old anti-Jewish arguments and conspiracies, repurposed as a way to blame Jews as the architects of white supremacy. This may seem like a remarkable feat of rhetorical alchemy, but it isn’t: It is mostly ideological plagiarism, repackaged for an audience that happens not to be European. The politics of Farrakhanism are really no different than they were in early, mid-, or late twentieth-century Europe: They are a way for a nationalist demagogue to rally a community against a foreign threat. Even today, Jews remain an easy target for amoral opportunists.
Echoing the Nazis’ concern that “cultural Bolshevism” was degrading authentic German culture, Farrakhan has said, “Jews were responsible for all of this filth and degenerate beha
vior that Hollywood is putting out: turning men into women, and women into men.” Farrakhan believes that “Jews control the media. They said it themselves! Jews and some gentiles control the banking industry, international banks. They do!” Farrakhan even draws on themes from antiquity, quoting the apostle Paul in Romans that “the Jew is not the Jew outwardly by the circumcision of the flesh. The Jew is the Jew inwardly by the circumcision of the heart,” and condemning Jews as “the synagogue of Satan.” Louis plays all the hits.
There are anti-Jewish tropes in Islam—Muslim extremists frequently invoke the Battle of Khaybar, which led to the expulsion of Jews from the Arabian Peninsula—but Farrakhan rarely if ever makes use of them. Instead, his arguments are borrowed from the long and well-documented history of Western anti-Semitism: The Jews have all the financial power, the Jews are degrading our glorious traditional culture, the Jews control the government, the Jews have been forsaken by the divine for their rejection of Jesus, a great spiritual and political renewal awaits when the Jews are defeated. Ideologically, Farrakhan talks like a far-right European nationalist. He is just also black.
There is a certain irony in the leader of the Nation of Islam drawing on a millennium of white, Christian, anti-Jewish themes to make his argument—but black Americans are part of the West, and, regrettably, such themes are part of the West’s intellectual inheritance. Farrakhan’s main innovation is that he has baselessly deployed such themes to explain white supremacy as a Jewish invention, arguing that Jews are “the master of segregation…You brought that to South Africa, you brought it to America.” Similarly, Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam has published literature accusing Jews of controlling the international slave trade.