March 16, 2005
Private: Gara LaMarche on Immigrants' Rights
Gara LaMarche of the Open Society Institute (and GaraLog) delivered a speech on Immigrant Communities in the Crossfire last February. It recounts a history of immigrant civil rights in the United States which is excerpted below:
The first challenge, for all of us, is to know our history. What we are going through now is not only not without precedent, but is chillingly familiar from events of the last century. Since we have so little shared knowledge of our past, we seem condemned to repeat it.
I spent the early years of my career with the American Civil Liberties Union, which has fought to redeem the guarantees of the Bill of Rights for eighty-five years. One of the things I most treasure from those days is a bound set of the ACLU's annual reports, starting with the first in 1920, written by the founding director, Roger Baldwin. Let's remember that the ACLU was founded in direct response to the Wilson Administration's crackdown on dissenters and alleged radicals, particularly the notorious raids and deportations carried out by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the John Ashcroft of his day, in 1920, resulting in thousands of forced deportations. In those days, we learn from the report, the deportees included John Yereb of Belleville, Illinois, Nicholai Mansevich of Detroit, Michigan, and Callo Costello of Texas. Why do I give you the names? Because the wheel that is turning today for those who are Arab, or Muslim, or South Asian, turned at that time for persons of European descent, as it turned again for Japanese-Americans in the 1940s.
David Cole, the Georgetown law professor and former Soros Justice Fellow who is one of the country's leading advocates for civil liberties and immigrant rights, reminds us in his recent book Enemy Aliens that the time I am speaking of was far more threatening to public order and security, in scope and number of incidents, than the present day. In 1919 alone, there were over 3,600 strikes involving four million workers. J. Edgar Hoover-yes, the famous persecutor of suspected Communists and civil rights activists got his start in the first American "red scare"-claimed that "civilization faces its most terrible menace since the barbarian hordes overran Western Europe and opened the dark ages." Package bombs were sent to the mayor of Seattle, a former Georgia Senator, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan, and a suicide bomber died in an explosion at the home of A. Mitchell Palmer, meant to kill the Attorney General. Fragments of the bomber's clothing indicated he was an Italian alien from Philadelphia.
The Palmer Raids that followed were first directed at suspected members of the Union of Russian workers, a social organization of Russian immigrants. More than 1,000 people were arrested, mostly without warrants, and in two months a quarter of them were deported to Russia. Here's an excerpt from Cole's book that should sound familiar in our post-9/11 world:
"One of those deported...was Joseph Polulech, a 27-year old Russian who had been living in the United States since 1912. Polulech was arrested without a warrant as he was taking a math class at the People's House in New York City, the Union of Russian Workers headquarters. He was held incommunicado for six weeks. At his hearing, he denied membership in any organization other than his church. His pastor testified that he was an ambitious and well-behaved member of his congregation. The only evidence against him was a page from the Union of Russian workers membership book. But that was sufficient in the eyes of the immigration law."
Before Communist raids were conducted in January of 1920, Cole writes, J. Edgar Hoover persuaded the Labor Department to change the ground rules regarding detained aliens' right to consult lawyers. Responding to a pamphlet drafted by union lawyers advising detainees to remain silent and to consult a lawyer before answering questions-a precursor of the Miranda ruling that the Supreme Court would issue in 1966-Hoover got the immigration regulations amended to delay access to a lawyer until the case "had proceeded sufficiently in the development of the facts to protect the government's interests."
Perhaps I should mention that many of the alleged radicals treated so harshly and arbitrarily were Jewish, a religious minority as misunderstood, feared and persecuted then as adherents of Islam are today.
Allow me to fast-forward for a moment to the present day. As the ACLU and others have exhaustively documented, after the attacks of September 11, hundreds of Muslim men from South Asia and the Middle East were swept up in government dragnets and denied basic human rights. For virtually all, there was no credible evidence of their involvement in terrorism. They were held under a presumption of guilt, sometimes even after their innocence was conclusively proven. They were denied access to counsel, held incommunicado and denied even information about the charges against them. And they were held in degrading and inhumane conditions, which we learn more about to our horror each day. Many have been deported to countries where they haven't lived in years, places of human rights abuse and economic deprivation-places they left to come to a land which represented to them the loftiest human ideals of liberty and opportunity. Upsetting as they are, many of these stories, including abusive use of German Shepherd guard dogs, will be familiar to anyone who has dealt with the "ordinary" immigration detention system.
To this day, the "no-fly" list contains mostly Muslim names and is a constant hassle for many law-abiding Arab, Islamic and South Asian travelers. And how many of us raised our voices when Muslim charities were shut down or restricted into ineffectiveness?
Now, as in the 1920s-a time when the legal protection of civil liberties, and the advocacy organizations charged with this work, were much less developed-the only way abuses like this could take place was if the immigrants involved were seen as "the other," even subhuman. In testimony about the subjects of his raids, Attorney General Palmer said that "out of the sly and crafty eyes of many of them leap cupidity, cruelty, insanity and crime; from their lopsided faces, sloping brows, and misshapen features may be recognized the unmistakable criminal type." An immigrant group which today has taken its place in the leadership of virtually every American institution, the Irish, was widely seen as criminal and degenerate-indeed, the term "paddy wagon" comes from such a racist stereotype. In his provocative book "How the Irish Became White," Noel Ignatiev writes that the Irish "commonly found themselves thrown together with free Negroes. Irish and Afro-Americans fought each other and the police, socialized and occasionally intermarried, and developed a common culture of the lowly. They also both suffered the scorn of those better situated. Along with Jim Crow and Jim Dandy, the drunken, belligerent and foolish Pat and Bridget were stock characters on the early stage. In antebellum America it was speculated that if racial amalgamation was ever to take place it would begin between these two groups."
Racist fears of the foreign are as American as apple pie. Before the American Revolution, Founding Father Benjamin Franklin wrote of the influx of German immigrants: "Those who come hither are generally the most stupid of their own nation." Earlier he had warned that "Pennsylvania will in a few years become a German colony; instead of learning our language, we must learn theirs, or live in a foreign country."
You don't have to look so far back in history, or need the climate of mass fear engendered by September 11, to find evidence of such racist attitudes as fuel for the assault on immigrants. You don't have to go far at all, if you live in California. Recall the language used to pass Proposition 187: "Save our state." In Governor Wilson's ads on behalf of the ballot initiative, the screen showed shadowy figures running, presumably across the border, as a narrator warned darkly that "they" keep coming. One INS official complained that "people are tired of watching their state run wild and become a Third World country."
I could go on and on, and cite examples that place today's Muslim, Arab, and South Asian immigrants in a long line of those once despised, feared and persecuted. After all, we tend to forget that even in the words of the poet Emma Lazarus that adorn the base of the Statue of Liberty and welcome newcomers to America; they're called the "wretched refuse of your teeming shore." But enough history. The second challenge is to listen to what immigrant communities have to say about what is happening to them, what their priorities are, and let that guide our own priorities and funding decisions. Here in the Bay Area you are extremely fortunate to have the report prepared by Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy following the roundtable with leaders of Arab, Muslim, and South Asian grassroots organizations, which tells us about the serious organizational development and capacity issues they face, the difficulties in finding common ground and working in coalition with other immigrant and ethnic communities, the pervasiveness of negative stereotypes and double standards in the media, the persistence of hate crimes, and the pervasiveness of civil rights violations. It's a full and urgent agenda.