History: Immigration control

The Guardian -   The casting of non-white immigrants as threats is not itself new – it defines the nation’s immigration system from the first act in 1790, which limited naturalization to “free white persons”, to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to the whites-only racial quotas for migration that came soon after.

In the wake of the civil rights movement and the abolition of racial quotas with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the United States went from 86% white to just under 60%. And, while immigration law was race-neutral, its policies turned to criminalize increasingly Black and brown immigrants.

In 1986, Ronald Reagan coupled the country’s only amnesty program with a seven-fold increase in border enforcement – beginning an arms race that would shape border violence for decades.

But it was Bill Clinton’s 1996 signing of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) set the stage for our current mass deportation system, by making deportation easier, and making more people deportable, even for nonviolent crimes. IIRIRA stripped many immigrants of the ability to argue their cases in front of a judge and closed pathways by which undocumented people could become documented.