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Civil Rights and Immigration History Connected
NEW YORK
August 26, 2013 (AP)
By DEEPTI HAJELA Associated Press
When 250,000 marchers converged on Washington
in August 1963, the issues were jobs and freedom.
Now, as the crowds come together to mark the 50th anniversary of that
seminal event in the civil rights movement, those issues have been joined by
others, including one, immigration reform, that wasn't nearly on the political
radar then like it is today.
"They were fighting for equality, and that's exactly what we're
fighting for," said Mikhel Crichlow, 28, a native of Trinidad and Tobago now living in Brooklyn. Crichlow said he was going to Washington for the commemoration.
The push for comprehensive immigration reform was heard from the speakers'
podium on Saturday, when tens of thousands marched to the Martin Luther King
Jr. Memorial and down the National Mall.
"It doesn't make sense that millions of our people are living in the
shadows," said Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who was a speaker at the 1963
event. "Bring them out into the light and set them on the path to
citizenship."
Immigrant advocates came from near and far to be part of the commemoration.
They included Casa de Maryland, founded by Central American immigrants in the
D.C. area in 1985. The organization connected Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s
famous "I Have A Dream" speech to the dreams of immigrants in the United States
illegally who are looking for legal status.
"One of the big reasons immigrant groups wanted to participate was to
show the connection," said Shola Ajayi, the group's advocacy director, who
said Casa mobilized hundreds of people to attend.
The link between the civil rights activism and America's immigration reality
brings history full circle as the demographic change being seen across the
United States owes some of its existence to the decades-ago movement.
It was with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that the federal government
radically altered immigration policy, opening America's doors to the world after
decades of keeping them shut to entire geographic regions. That decision
planted the seeds for the demographics explosion the country is living in now,
a shift that historians say happened in part because of a hunger for change and
equality created by the civil rights movement.
The movement "broke through the whole aura of political stagnation that
was created by the McCarthy era and the Cold War, and allowed us to imagine
another" world, said Mark Naison, professor of African-American studies
and history at Fordham University in New
York. "It was the civil rights movement ... that
broke through the logjam and allowed people to talk about real issues in our
domestic lives."
Immigration activist Renata Teodoro, who came here from Brazil as a
child, studied the tactics of the civil rights movement and incorporated them
into her own activism. The Boston resident has
long been a proponent of granting legal status to immigrants who, like her,
were brought to the U.S.
as children.
The Civil Rights movement, she said, humanized the issues of the day, and by
doing so, "that changed the culture, that's what changed a lot of hearts
and minds."
While the United States
has its roots in being a welcoming place for immigrants, that hasn't always
been the case. It is true that a wave of new arrivals flooded U.S. shores in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but a movement to restrict who was
allowed into the country took hold as well.
In 1882, Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first major federal
law to put immigration limits in place and the only one in American history
aimed at a specific nationality. It came into being in response to fears,
primarily on the West Coast, that an influx of Chinese immigrants was weakening
economic conditions and lowering wages. It was extended in 1902.
Other laws followed, like the Immigration Act of 1917, which created an
"Asiatic Barred Zone" to restrict immigration from that part of the
world, and the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which limited the number of
immigrants from any country to 3 percent of those people from that country who
had been living in the United
States as of 1910.
The 1924 Immigration Act capped the number of immigrants from a particular
country at 2 percent of the population of that country already living in the United States
in 1890. That favored immigrants from northern and western European countries
like Great Britain over
immigrants from southern and eastern European countries like Italy.
It also prevented any immigrant ineligible for citizenship from coming to America. Since
laws already on the books prohibited people of any Asian origin from becoming
citizens, they were barred entry. The law was revised in 1952, but kept the
quota system based on country of origin in the U.S. population and only allowed
low quotas to Asian nations.
The American children of Italian and other European immigrants saw that law
"as a slur against their own status" and fought for the system to be
changed, said Mae Ngai, professor of history and Asian American studies at Columbia University. In fighting for change, they
looked to the civil rights movement.
The political leaders who agreed with them saw it in the same terms, as a
change needed for equality's sake, as well as to be responsive to shifting
relationships with nations around the world.
Speaking to the American Committee on Italian Migration in June 1963,
President John F. Kennedy cited the "nearly intolerable" plight of
those who had family members in other countries who wanted to come to the U.S. and could
be useful citizens, but were being blocked by "the inequity and
maldistribution of the quota numbers."
Two years later, in signing into law a replacement system that established a
uniform number of people allowed entry to the United States despite national
origin, President Lyndon B. Johnson said it would correct "a cruel and
enduring wrong in the conduct of the American nation."
Stephen Klineberg, sociology professor at Rice University in Houston, said
the civil rights movement "was the main force that made that viciously
racist law come to be perceived as intolerable," precisely because it
raised questions about fairness and equality.
