Op-Ed: Despite Dark History of Exclusion, Laws Demand U.S. Accepts Refugees
Op-Ed: Despite Dark History of Exclusion, Laws Demand U.S. Accepts Refugees
The turmoil in Syria has exacerbated a "fear of otherness" held by many Americans.
Christian Sundquist, The National Law Journal
November 30, 2015
Our country has a long and proud history of welcoming immigrants, and in particular refugees. And yet we have a nearly equally long practice of excluding immigrants on national security grounds based on xenophobic fears of racial, religious and cultural differences.
America adopted a largely unregulated "open borders" approach to immigration for much of our early history, in an effort to encourage labor migration to supplement our nefarious institution of slavery. The federal government did not attempt to comprehensively regulate immigration until the late 1800s, when racial and religious xenophobia in the states led Congress to pass a federal law excluding all persons of Chinese descent from resettling in America. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1889 upheld this law in Chae Chan Ping v. United States, falling prey to the reactionary politics of the time in holding that the government has the power to exclude particular racial or religious minorities in the interest of national security.
