Sixty years ago, the United States abolished immigration restrictions based on nationality alone. By 1965, such discrimination had become an embarrassment. In an emotional ceremony by the Statue of Liberty, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that the legislation he was signing “corrects a cruel and enduring wrong” and makes Americans “truer to ourselves both as a country and as a people.”
Now the Trump administration is reviving nationality-based discrimination. After an Afghan refugee allegedly shot two National Guard members on Nov. 26, the Trump administration “indefinitely” stopped processing immigration-related applications for all Afghans — even those who have lived legally in the United States for years. The administration extended that same suspension to immigrants from 18 other countries, including those on the verge of receiving green cards or citizenship. President Trump declared that Somalis are “garbage” on Tuesday, adding that they should “go back to where they came from,” and has threatened to denaturalize citizens. Meanwhile, his administration claims it can classify undocumented 14-year-old Venezuelans as “alien enemies” and deport them without judicial review.
Starting in 1875 and for most of the century that followed, country-specific immigration bans were the norm, not the exception. To be born in a disfavored country was considered to be inherently unfit to immigrate to the United States.
Nativism escalated gradually. In 1875, a law barred prostitutes from “China, Japan, or any Oriental country” from entering the United States. Although people from all backgrounds practiced the world’s oldest profession, Congress perceived women from these countries as a particular threat. “Virtue is an exception” among Chinese women, one lawmaker had claimed years earlier. Another had warned that these women “spread disease and moral death among our white population.” The law succeeded in shutting down immigration for almost all Asian women, prostitutes or not.
Seven years later, the Chinese Exclusion Act went further, barring all laborers from China. Once again, Congress relied on sweeping generalizations about the Chinese. “Alien in manners, servile in labor, pagan in religion, they are fundamentally un-American,” said one congressman, referring to hundreds of millions of people.
Once the nation started thinking this way, it was hard to stop. When a Jewish factory manager was accused of murder in 1913, his conviction fueled antisemitic xenophobia. Likewise, the 1921 murder conviction of two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, helped incite the Red Scare and the restrictive immigration laws that followed. At the heart of these crackdowns were not only assumptions of collective national guilt, but beliefs in a collective national character.
Nativist fervor culminated in 1924 with the Immigration Act. Aimed at slowing immigration from undesirable countries, the law capped immigration to 2 percent of a nationality’s U.S. population as of 1890, over 30 years earlier. It proved impossible to unwind Americans’ tangled ancestry, but no matter. The law was used to justify giving the majority of visas to Northern and Western Europeans, while strictly limiting immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe — a change celebrated by the Ku Klux Klan for keeping out Catholics and Jews. The door remained almost entirely closed to people from Asia and Africa.
Why would lawmakers choose to reject a promising scientist from Asia while welcoming an illiterate farmer from Germany? Because they conflated race, nation and culture into a set of immutable traits attached to entire countries. The national character was in their “alien blood,” lawmakers said, rendering some nationalities inherently unfit for membership in the United States.
If the Trump administration has its way, these assumptions will once again govern U.S. immigration policy. Last week, Stephen Miller, the architect of President Trump’s immigration policy, defended collectively punishing Afghans for the shooting that killed one National Guard member and injured another. “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies,” he wrote. “Migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” Mr. Miller would have felt right at home in the 1924 Congress.
Mr. Miller and others in the Trump administration do not appear to know that those 1924 immigration restrictions are no longer on the books. Abolishing national origin discrimination was a sea change in law that stands alongside the Voting Rights Act as one of our most important pieces of civil rights legislation. That 1965 law allocated visas based primarily on family reunification and an applicant’s ability to contribute to the labor market. Every immigrant is individually vetted, and immigration is capped worldwide, but no longer are any nationalities automatically restricted.
America is stronger for it. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children — and many came from countries that were heavily restricted before 1965. Immigrants generally commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans, and Afghans are no exception.
The recent shooting was horrific, and the perpetrator should be punished to the full extent of the law. But collective punishment is just the sort of bigotry that the nation rejected decades ago.
It’s also likely to be illegal. As the Supreme Court explained when upholding Mr. Trump’s first travel ban back in 2018, the president has statutory authority to suspend entry into the United States based on national origin, at least for some period of time. But that does not permit him to deny visas, cancel green cards or denaturalize immigrants based on nothing more than their country of origin.
Without question, today’s antiquated immigration system is in need of a major overhaul. But we should never go back to a system that made collective judgments about the worthiness of specific nationalities to immigrate to the United States — particularly not based on an incident involving a single person.
At his 1964 State of the Union address, Johnson told the nation that it should ask prospective immigrants, “What can you do for our country?” not “In what country were you born?” Johnson was right, whatever the Trump administration would like to believe.
Amanda Frost is a law professor at the University of Virginia and the author of the book “You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers.”
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