Our House Is on Fire: Social Work and the Crisis of Immigration

The Past Is Not Past

Each day seems to bring news announcing the cementing of yet another brick in the wall that blocks the entry of precisely the type of immigrants that the Statue of Liberty calls to our shores: the tired, the poor, the homeless, and the masses seeking refuge from fear and danger, all those considered expendable and undesirable by other nations. “Inertia was on the side of the restrictionists” (p. 181) concluded Breitman and Kraut (2015) in their analysis of the United States’ failure to provide refuge for European Jews attempting to flee Nazism in the decade preceding World War II. The same appears to be true today. We who care about immigrants and oppose the rise of the wall sit numbed by outrage fatigue and immobilized by our sense of impotence to counter the onslaught of appalling changes. All the while, a brutal immigration regime is being built brick by brick, before our eyes, accomplished almost entirely through shifts in administrative practices backed by extremist interpretation of existing policies, moves that require no actual change in law or even the formulation of executive orders.

From my perspective as a student of immigration history, one of the most frightening aspects of the current resurgence of punitive restrictionism is its utter lack of originality. The pitiless measures the federal government is enacting today are modernized reiterations of the bigoted practices of past centuries. The nation has failed to move far from the days of Operation Wetback, the military-style police actions to round up and deport massive numbers of Mexican temporary workers and immigrants in the 1950s (Astor, 2009; Buff, 2008; Ngai, 2004), or the wholesale race-based exclusion of Asians which began with the Page Act of 1875 (8 Stat. 477; Pub. L. 43-141)—the first federal immigration law restricting entry—enacted to “end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women” (Peffer, 1986, p. 28). The fact is that the tempest-tost huddled masses (social work clients, in my view) were precisely the type of people that U.S. laws were enacted to keep out, deport away, and render peripheral within our society, especially if they were racialized. The peopling of our nation has always been a deliberately managed process of selection and restriction, exclusion, and preference, guided by the ingrained prejudices of the times. The alarming ease and stunning impunity with which the bigoted practices of the past centuries have been resurrected by the current government tells me that while the particular bodies targeted as unacceptable may have shifted somewhat during the past decades, the fear and loathing of the racialized Other undergirding xenophobia, nationalism, and nativism remain deeply embedded in the nation’s psyche and the structure of its immigration policies.

The current U.S. President’s January 2018 denigration of migrants from “shithole countries” such as Haiti and El Salvador punctuating his declaration that “we should have more people from Norway” should remind us that in 1920 and 1924, Congress passed two laws that concretized the restrictionist notion that the nation suffered from an “alien indigestion” (Divine, 1957, p. 7) caused by the infusion of too many problematic stocks into the melting pot. The two quota acts, designed to drastically curtail Southern and Eastern European immigration, ratified the popular eugenics discourse valorizing Northern and Western Europeans as a superior Nordic “race” and vilified the “new immigrants” from eastern and southern Europe and Russia as “inferior races.” The restrictionists insisted that the admittance of these unassimilable undesirables “so different from our native population, in race, customs, habit of thought and way of living” (Speranza, 1910, p. 466) needed to be drastically curtailed in order that “the deterioration of the American stock be evaded and the wary Nordic be enticed to our shores” (“Selection that does not select,” 1923, p. 487). The Emergency Quota Act (42 Stat. 5; Pub. Law 67-6), also known as the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921, thus restricted the number of immigrants entering the United States from a particular nation to 3% of the foreign-born persons of that nationality tallied in the 1910 Census. Lest there was doubt that the quota system was anything other than the “absorption of the Nordic myth into the statute law” (“The Common Welfare,” 1924, p. 339), the second quota act, also known as the “National Origins Act” and the “Johnson-Reed Act of 1924” (43 Stat. 153; Pub. L. 68-139), adopted as the base for its calculations, the 1890 Census, because it tallied a higher number of foreign-born immigrants from Western and Northern Europe than did the 1910 Census used by the earlier Act. Edith Abbott (1922) observed at the 49th Conference of Social Work:

We must come finally to accept as an accomplished fact that immigration will never again be open in this country to those who can show only sane minds, stout hearts, and strong hands and that they must show also long skulls and blue eyes or some evidence of belonging to that much glorified Nordic race. (p. 466)

The “public charge” clause recently weaponized by the Trump administration first appeared in federal immigration policy in the 1882 Act to Regulate Immigration (22 Stat. 214; Pub. L. 47-376) as a prohibition against the entry of persons “unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” The 1891 Immigration Act (26 Stat. 1084a; Pub. L. 51-551) expanded the provision to exclude persons who not only were already in need but were deemed “likely to become” so. The Immigration Act of 1903 (32 Stat. 1213; Pub. Law 57-162) added a further provision authorizing the deportation of persons who became a public charge within a year of entry (expanded in later years to three, then five, and made unlimited in 1924) to the United States from causes that predated their entry, on the grounds that their subsequent need for aid rendered their original entry “unlawful” (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, 2019b). The Trump administration’s expanded definition of “public charge” makes many of the public benefits, which “have been available to legal immigrants without repercussion” (Hester et al., 2018, p. 1) for over century, a cause for deportation and exclusion from entry, permanent residency, and naturalization (see “Final Rule”—U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, 2019a).

We should not forget, moreover, that the LPC , “likely to become a public charge,” clause was, as were so many of the exclusion mechanisms throughout U.S. History, consistently wielded more severely against certain bodies (Luibheid, 2002, p. 9).

Immigration officials also suspected single, divorced, widowed, and pregnant women to be “likely to become a public charge,” even if they were self-supporting, possessed occupational skills, or presented affidavits of support from family relations in the U.S. This practice reflected traditional gender norms about female dependency, which denied that women could be independent economic actors. (Hester et al., 2018, p. 2)

Individuals with disabilities, considered mental and physical “defectives” in the parlance of the early 20th-century immigration law, were also routinely excluded even when they could prove they were skilled workers with a history of steady employment (Baynton, 2005). As was the case for women, “a long-standing cultural assumption that disability meant inability to work productively or to support oneself” (Baynton, 2006, p. 394) rendered them “likely to become a public charge” in the judgment of immigration inspectors. There is no reason to believe that such practices will not recur under this government.

The unconscionable toll of the LPC clause has never been greater than it was on European Jews in the years before the Second World War. In September 1930, at the onset of the Great Depression, the Hoover administration announced its intention to utilize a harsher interpretation of the provision. Empowered by the “Hoover barricade” (Breitman & Kraut, 2015, p. 181), consular officials began to require all applicants for immigration visas to show proof of substantial assets or an affidavit of support from a sponsor in the United States who could provide for them. In conjunction with the Reich Flight Tax, established in Germany in December 1931 and vigorously applied by the Nazi government to strip Jewish assets, the U.S. government’s “conscious decisions” (Breitman & Kraut, 2015, p. 182) against relaxing restrictions such as the LPC clause made escape impossible for even the small number who would have been allowed entry in the United States by quota restrictions. In 1933, the year Hitler came into full power, the United States granted only 1,241 visas to German nationals; most of the 82,787 waiting for a slot could not pass the LPC bar. The German annual quota of 25,957 (and the German/Austrian quota of 27,370 combined in 1938) was not filled until 1939, though by that time, the waiting list for visas had grown to nearly 250,000 (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2019). “Undoubtedly, if the United States had pursued a less stringent immigration policy in the middle and late 1930s, the history of Europe’s Jews from 1941 to 1945 would have been radically different” (Mitchell, 1992, p. 941).

Social work’s responses in such times of turmoil and persecution of immigrant populations have never been uncompromised. So many of the choices we have made—often to overlook or condone matters of grave injustice—as well as the interventions we have opted to champion do not stand the test of time. During the Great Depression when the “position of the foreign-born became peculiarly difficult” (Rich, 1936, p. 569), for example, Chicago’s Immigrants Protective League, which grew out of the hallowed halls of Hull House, arranged for the repatriation of hundreds of “new immigrants” in full knowledge that return to the United States would be impossible for them given quota restrictions and the LPC bar. The countries to which these immigrants were returned during the early 1930s included Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Poland. However, well-intended repatriation might have been as a measure to aid immigrants unable to find jobs or qualify for aid in this desperate period, the prudence of the scheme should be weighed in context of the ominous state of European politics in the era. Mussolini’s grip of Italy had been established since 1922; the Nazi party became an established power in Germany in 1932; Franco took control of Spain in 1934, 2 years prior to the outbreak of civil war. At the time of Adena Miller’s report in 1936, the Nazi takeover of Austria was a mere 2 years away, and its invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland and the start of the Second World War only 3 years hence (Park, 2003).

Repatriation was not a choice voluntarily made by all immigrants shipped back to their “homelands” by social workers, according to the sociologist Norman D. Humphrey, writing in 1941 about the trend among welfare departments in parts of the country with a significant population of Mexican immigrants to promote repatriation. Humphrey recounted that “some degree of coercion was exercised to effect many a family’s return” (p. 497) and “various pressures in sundry forms were exerted to attain the goal” (p. 505) of repatriation.

Stereotypes of the lazy, improvident, work-hating Mexican were built up, and rarely was there an attempt on the case worker’s part to understand the cultural compulsions in the form of traditional patterns and the disruptive forces making for disintegration of forms, operative on the Mexican, which found expression in the urban environment of Detroit. Even the families of naturalized citizens were urged to repatriate, and the rights of American-born children to citizenship in their native land were explicitly denied or not taken into account. The case workers themselves brought pressures to bear in the form of threats of deportation, stoppage of relief (wholly or in part, as, e.g. in the matter of rent), or by means of trampling on customary procedures. (p. 505)

While it was trumpeted as “the most appropriate method of handling the problems of Mexicans on relief” (p. 505), repatriation was, in actuality, a budgetary solution for fiscally strained welfare departments. Humphrey noted one such department’s “frankly stated” explanation:

With steady increases in the county relief lists, the problem of adequate care is becoming ever harder to solve, and it is obvious that any reduction in the relief load effective through repatriation service will be a significant factor toward the solution. (Michigan State Department of Welfare, cited in Humphrey, 1941, p. 498)

Mexican Americans constituted the largest numbers of repatriates in this era: “14,406 in 1931; 36,092 in 1932; 36,992 in 1933” (Rich, 1936, p. 572). How will our current actions, or inactions, be judged by future generations?

Marc Stein, writing about the 1967 case of Clive Michael Boutilier, a gay Canadian immigrant whose deportation on the grounds of “psychopathic inferiority” was upheld by the Supreme Court (Boutilier v. INS, 387 U.S. 118), surmised:

Boutilier was one of the Supreme Court’s first major gay rights rulings, yet it has largely been forgotten by gay studies scholars. The reason may be that, as a case about the rights of aliens, it has been perceived as marginal to the struggles of gay citizens. (Stein, 2010, p. 46)

There is no doubt that many other struggles justly occupy us. But we, social workers, remain at arm’s length from the xenophobic practices of our past and their frightening reiterations today, at our peril. The gender and migration scholar Eithne Luibheid’s (2002) reminder that “Immigration control was a key institution through which the negotiation of whiteness occurred” (p. 6) is true today as it was in the past. Immigration borders have always been the macrocosmic looking glass for the kinds of bodies and identities that we, as a polity, designate as desirable or undesirable, legitimate or illegitimate, and normative or deviant. The border-making enterprise matters, in other words, not only for those who wish to enter the nation, but those already in it. The historians writing in 2018 about the new LPC clause expansion to come averred that the new interpretation will not only “lead to a general erosion of benefits that legal immigrants may access” and “potentially expands grounds for removal of lawful permanent residents” (Hester et al., 2018, p. 8), but that it “carries high social costs for welfare and public health beyond the lines of citizenship” (Hester et al., 2018, p. 9). Even those of us who believe ourselves to be protected by the rights of citizenship and enough other privileges to be able to think of the current maelstrom in the United States as a worrisome but distant phenomena, should be far more alarmed than we appear to be. ¹

Given that the current administration’s threshold for callousness seems to fall ever lower and that its playbook for the present is the discriminatory practices of the past, we, both citizens and aliens, should be forewarned that the past is fertile ground from which to find numerous other ways to exclude and marginalize many other targets. The Immigration Act of February 5, 1917 (39 Stat. 874; Pub. Law 64-301), also known as the “Asiatic Barred Zone Act,” provided for the exclusion of those who “show a lifelong and constitutional tendency not to conform to the tendencies of the group” which included “persons with abnormal sexual instincts” (Luibheid, 2002, p. 15). The more recent language of “persons of psychopathic inferiority” was used to cull queer immigrants until 1990, nearly two decades after homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The Immigration Act of 1990 provided for the exclusion and deportation of individuals who

have had a physical or mental disorder and a history of behavior associated with the disorder, which behavior has posed a threat to the property, safety, or welfare of the alien or others and which behavior is likely to recur or to lead to other harmful behavior. (“Pub. L. 101-649, Immigration Act of 1990, 104 STAT. 4978,” 1990, p. 143)

The good moral character requirement for naturalization was established by the Naturalization Act of 1790 which also restricted the privilege to only “free white” persons. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration (2019c), the requirement today covers “(a)ny conduct or act that offends the accepted moral character standards of the community in which the applicant resides should be considered without regard to whether the applicant has been arrested or convicted of an offense.”

Our House is on Fire

In a January 2019 speech on the need for urgent action on the climate crisis given at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg remarked:

Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people, to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.

It does not seem that social work, as a profession, has yet come to terms with the fact that not only for immigrants under fire—barred, surveilled, threatened, hunted, and incarcerated—but for all who care about the issues of social justice, equity, and even simple human decency, the crisis is here; our house is on fire. Not the “Muslim Ban,” or the forced separation of children from their families, their detention in concentration camps lacking even the most basic of supplies, not the rescinding of the provision to delay the deportation of individuals undergoing life-saving medical treatment, nor so many other unconscionable federal actions seems to have moved the profession to think of the current state of immigration as a matter of urgency requiring it to question seriously its role within it.

Let us recall that social work equivocated also during the Second World War. While no social work organization wholly supported the forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in federal concentration camps, neither, on the whole, did they vociferously oppose it but worked instead as essential cogs of the government machinery that built and maintained the mass incarceration of a whole population (Park, 2008, 2013, 2019). Are we not doing the same today? All the while his own opposition to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans eroded under pressure, the U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle told the wartime nation in 1942:

Every man who cares about freedom, about a government by law—and all freedom is based on fair administration of the law—must fight for it for the other man with whom he disagrees, for the right of the minority, for the chance for the underprivileged with the same passion of insistence as he claims for his own rights. (U.S. Congress—House Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, 1942, p. 11044)

The National Association of Social Workers (NASW, 2018b) has denounced the administration’s immigration plans as “malicious and unconscionable” and has offered suggestions to social workers on ways they can “volunteer to help immigrant children separated from family” (NASW, 2018a). What neither the NASW nor any other social work organization has done, today or in the 1940s, is question whether social workers should be participating at all.

A recent Journal of the American Medical Association article citing the Hippocratic oath undertaken by physicians—“health and well-being of my patient will be my first consideration” and “I will not use my medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties, even under threat”—asked “Can a physician work in U.S. immigration detention facilities while upholding this pledge?” (Spiegel, Kass, & Rubenstein, 2019). Should we not at least ponder a similar question about our role? I do not know what the right answer is for social work. Social workers in the 1940s soothed their conscience by concluding that without the participation of social workers “experienced in dealing with human beings faced with problems,” Japanese Americans “might well have had far more serious consequences” (Day, 1942, p. 2). The same could, indeed, be said of our work in today’s sites of immigrant detention. What I do know is that we have not even begun talking about the fact that participation in injustice is prohibited by the profession’s ethics. The NASW code states that social workers,

should not practice, condone, facilitate, or collaborate with any form of discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, marital status, political belief, religion, immigration status, or mental or physical ability. (NASW, 2019)

Academic and professional conferences are hardly the center of radical visioning. They are, however, existing venues which bring together thousands of social workers year after year. Yet not one of the annual conferences organized by the major national professional bodies, the Council on Social Work Education, the Society for Social Work Research, the Association of Baccalaureate Social Work Program Directors, or the NASW, in the past 3 terrifying years of the Trump administration has focused on the topic of immigration and the plight of immigrants. Is it not time to do so? For so many of our immigrant clients, students, and colleagues, the crisis has long been a reality. Is it not well past time for the profession to acknowledge that our house is on fire?

Yoosun Park Editor in Chief School for Social Work, Smith College, Northampton, MA, USA