Immigration Part 1: Introduction

After a few arguments on Facebook (and in real life) over the issues of immigration in the United States, I have come to the realization that 1) most people, particularly on the Right, have great ignorance of both history and current immigration law, and 2) the right wing media machine (particularly white nationalists like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon) are spreading a LOT of outright falsehoods, which have poisoned the debate.

I care about this both as a decent, compassionate human being, and as the descendant of immigrants, none of whom would be allowed to immigrate under current law.

This series of posts is intended to clarify these issues, and give some real information, not “alternative facts” about the issues. I suspect it will also serve to strip away a lot of the pretense and rhetoric which serves as a disguise for Nativism (aka Racism and Xenophobia) that drives this debate on the right.

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First, a disclaimer:

I am an attorney, but I do NOT practice in, nor am I an expert on Immigration Law. These posts are NOT intended as legal advice, and should not be viewed as such. While the broad sweep of the law is fairly easily understood from publicly available laws, documents, and history; individual circumstances vary, and the law AS APPLIED to your situation may be very different from your understanding of what a statute means.

Therefore, if YOU have an immigration problem, I urge you to contact an attorney who practices in that specific area.

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Throughout these posts, I intend to explain the history of immigration in the United States, and give a broad overview of the law as it currently is. Regarding our current laws, I hope to show how many - indeed most - of our current debates over immigration are directly due to the dysfunction of our immigration policy, which is based, as it has been for the past 130+ years, on the goal of excluding “inferior races” from the United States. Because the desire to seek a better life is innate to human nature, there is great pressure toward geographic movement of people, and the stronger this pressure grows, the stronger - and more violent and vicious and unjust the measures must be to successfully oppose it.

I will update the table of contents below as I add posts:

Part 2: Immigration and Naturalization Before 1882

Part 3: The Chinese Exclusion Act and the Racist History of Immigration Restrictions

Part 4: The Reality of Current Immigration Law

Part 5: The Expressly Racist Goals of the Trump Administration
Part 6: Why We Can't (or Won't) Fix Our Broken Immigration Laws

Part 7: My Family's Story

Potential future posts...

Part 8: How We Can Actually Fix Our Laws

Part 9: Lies and Falsehoods About Immigration

Part 10: Thinking Ethically About Immigration