Taking a Machete to the Wedge
By now you’ve likely sensed that I have a favorite soapbox: finding ways to further the notion that U.S. immigration law and policy and U.S. anti-Blackness are and have always been inextricable. There is a durable symbiotic relationship between the two. Although I hope many people will glean some understanding from this piece, I want to directly address Black Americans in this moment.
Among the flurry of 47’s executive orders in the first days of his presidency, one executive order in particular stood out to more people than I expected: an attempt to undo the longstanding precedent of birthright citizenship in the United States, as enshrined in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Generally, birthright citizenship—known in Latin as jus soli—means that anyone born in the United States is entitled to U.S. citizenship. I refer to the relevant executive order here as the “birthright citizenship EO.”
I wrote about the 14th Amendment and reframing Black citizenship almost 10 years ago:
As you can see, until the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment, Black people in America, whether they were captured and transported there or born into enslavement, were not U.S. citizens. So what did that make them? To me, that blatant denial of citizenship made enslaved Black people one of America’s first, centuries-old, exploited, undocumented labor forces. Black U.S. citizenship was an American afterthought. Again, I remind us that the nation had to amend its founding document to include Black people in its bounty, to guarantee Black people could reap the benefits of its promises. The nation had to edit its charter to include Black people in the concept of its citizenry. Black people in America have not always been U.S. citizens. U.S. citizenship as applied to Black Americans is not a God-given right, innate and unchanging. It was a purposeful granting of particular privileges and immunities, triggered by the end of slavery and the Civil War.
I propose that Black Americans and Black immigrants reframe and reimagine what U.S. citizenship means. I believe there is a pervasive myth among both Black American and Black immigrant communities that somehow, Black Americans are, by default, included under the protective umbrella of U.S. citizenship. As I have tried to flesh out above, it is important to note that Black Americans were not always citizens: the nation had to undertake one of its most extreme methods (the amendment of the Constitution) to grant Black people in particular, and anyone born on U.S. soil in general, the privilege of U.S. citizenship. Taking it a step further, I hope we also examine just what that citizenship grant did for Black Americans. What has U.S. citizenship truly done for Black people in America? Tamara Nopper, an activist in Asian American and immigration politics, states, “Under the racial state, there is no such thing as Black citizenship.” She goes on, in her works, to describe the “myth of Black citizenship.” Black people in America with legal status (citizens, lawful permanent residents, visa carriers, etc.) are still subject to state-sanctioned violence, racial profiling, discrimination, and other evils. Black people in America with legal status are still murdered extralegally. What protection has U.S. citizenship granted Black Americans with legal status?
Notably, the birthright citizenship EO does something both insidious and disingenuous. It nods approvingly to the 14th Amendment’s repudiation of the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, “which misinterpreted the Constitution as permanently excluding people of African descent from eligibility for United States citizenship solely based on their race,” and immediately follows with, “[b]ut the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”
To start, that’s false. Since the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the 14th Amendment has been unwaveringly interpreted to mean that children born within the United States are U.S. citizens by right. That said, do you see what they did there? They threw a paltry, begrudging bone to Black Americans while denigrating immigrants of all races in the same breath. I call the rhetorical bone paltry because the United States has yet to fully eschew anti-Blackness and treat the Black people living and dying within its borders with the dignity to which they are entitled. The birthright citizenship EO wants Black Americans to think they are safe from this open threat, that their citizenship—based on their ancestors’ status as formerly enslaved people—is totally unassailable. But those immigrants over there, the ones seeking to enter or remain in this country? Not so fast. This is a prime example of a wedge issue: an issue that divides or otherwise causes conflict in an otherwise unified group (or a group that should be unified).
At least a handful of Black American pundits have taken up this wedge issue with gusto. Carol Swain is one of the most vocal. Swain erases the existence of Black immigrants completely, casting all “illegal immigrants” as overwhelmingly Latinx and positing “illegal immigration” as a direct threat to Black American job security. What’s worse, Swain believes that due to the U.S. legacy of racism, slavery, and segregation, “low-educated” Black American workers have a stronger “moral claim to justice” than “illegal immigrants.” To me, this line of thinking is nakedly abhorrent. It first insults Black Americans, embracing stereotypes of “low-skilled” or “low-educated” status as the destiny of all Black Americans. It then misidentifies the threat to Black American upward mobility, pitting our communities against one another instead of targeting the true architects of our collective oppression. Liberation is a collectivist project. We cannot get there by leaving other oppressed people behind. To my dismay, the popularity of this line of thinking has flourished online in the last decade, finding footing with certain Black Americans who think they must crush other people underfoot to get closer to the reparations the U.S. government continues to withhold. It’s also been pushed by white supremacist political operators like Steve Bannon, who while railing against Elon Musk’s love of immigrant workers with H-1B visas, claimed that Silicon Valley jobs should go to Black and Latinx Americans first.
The current presidential administration, through its official actions and words attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion, has made it abundantly clear that they yearn for the days of rigid racial segregation. They wish to remake segregationist policies to exclude LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, disabled people, Black people, indigenous people, and all people of color from mainstream society.
Austin Kocher, a professor at the Syracuse University Newhouse School of Public Communications, highlights the long-term problems the birthright citizenship EO creates:
There is one final nightmarish scenario that this executive order creates. If implemented, this EO would create an entire class of stateless people in the United States—including, let’s remember, the children of two parents who were both legally in the US—who would go on to have children who were also, therefore, not U.S. citizens and so on.
The long-term complications and damage that would be caused by this EO would be staggering. It means that immigrants would not only have their own legal status scrutinized throughout their lives (as they already do), but that this form of legal precarity could extend, in perpetuity, to their children and grandchildren in convoluted ways that could produce an enormous underclass, not to mention widespread bureaucratic confusion.
That bureaucratic confusion could range from a lack of Social Security Numbers or government-issued identity documents to whether someone is charged in-state or international student tuition at university. A permanent underclass of U.S.-born-but-undocumented descendants of immigrants also creates a permanent wedge issue. The birthright citizenship EO as written tries to reassure Black Americans of a spurious, limited inclusion in the upper class of “U.S. citizens” in name only, while the powers that be constantly erode the meaning of Black American citizenship. What does Black American citizenship truly mean in the face of systemic racism, anti-Blackness, mass incarceration, overpolicing, mass disenfranchisement, voter suppression, district gerrymandering, persistent discriminatory hiring, the destruction of race-conscious university admissions, and more? Is this false reassurance of Black American citizenship worth the perpetual social exclusion of not only Black immigrants, but all nonwhite immigrants?
I’ve argued in the past that enslaved Black Americans were one of this country’s first undocumented labor forces, a people rendered stateless and without rights or privileges because they were not legally considered human. The birthright citizenship EO would do to others what has already been done to Black Americans. This should be wholly unacceptable.
If the contours of U.S. citizenship can be expanded or restricted based on contemporary notions of white supremacy, your Black American citizenship will never, ever be safe. White supremacy does not make exceptions. Do not fall for false promises; nothing our ancestors won can nor should be taken for granted.
All that said, I propose that we take a proverbial machete—a symbol recognized across the African diaspora—to this dangerous wedge issue. How can we do that?
Resist and refute rhetorical attempts to pit Black Americans against Black immigrants (or all immigrants). Where they crop up, chop them down
Talk (lovingly) to your family members, friends, or peers who might repeat anti-immigrant talking points from a Black American perspective. Hammer home the truth that immigrants are not a threat to the hard-won achievements of Black Americans; they are instead a scapegoat trying to distract most people from understanding who 1) has the power to strip away our civil rights and 2) who is wielding that power right now with glee.
Familiarize yourself and get involved with Black immigrant organizations. To name but a few: ABISA (African Bureau for Immigrants and Social Affairs), African Communities Together, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Cameroonian Advocacy Network, Haitian Bridge Alliance, and the UndocuBlack Network.
Build bridges in your own life between members of the African diaspora where you can, understanding that being Black in America means you are subject to and under attack from anti-Blackness, regardless of your ethnicity or nationality. Cherish our commonalities and relish in our differences.
