Philosophical and Pragmatic Links Between US Foreign Policy and Immigration Policy

Philosophical and Pragmatic Links Between US Foreign Policy and Immigration Policy The Case of El Salvador Bridget O’Neill November 21, 2018 1 In the American imaginary, discourse surrounding both foreign policy conduct and immigration are parallel: both are vague and self-idealizing frameworks. Foreign policy decisions reduce global enemies to figures of external evil and posit American troops as saviors; military myths purposefully leave little room for criticism. There is a disconnect between self- idealizing rhetoric in American foreign policy and the specific and often covert violence carried out under broad, moralistic justifications. Similarly, despite the popular categorization of the US as a “nation of immigrants,” this glorified title implies a fictitious timeless homogeneity; it offers no historical texture to a constant renegotiation of who belongs and who doesn’t. The lack of specificity or consensus regarding an immigration philosophy (more concretely, the lack of any codified criteria to evaluate asylum applications with) is exactly what enables immigration policy to become deployed in specific and disparate ways. Within the nation of immigrants, immigrants exist in hyper-policed political limbo. The idealized version of American immigration and its violent reality are imagined as separate entities, even though the latter underpins the former. The same distance is used to avoid acknowledging that foreign invasion destabilizes countries and drives the emigration that Americans subsequently police: establishing a causal link implies responsibility. The ideological web is held intact only because the romanticized conceptualizations do not break down: historical reinforcement have posited these claims as crucial to American national identity. These myths are believed with sincerity -- by necessity. There can be no admittance of culpability, the fact that the relationship between the two is not an apologetic one is what keeps this complex intact. Existing between a cloudy idea of citizenship and immigration in the public sphere is a web of legal red tape. The relationship between foreign policy and immigration policy (and, in large part, the presence of immigration itself) is best demonstrated by a long history of invasion 2 and displacement in Latin America. The rhetorical distance maintained within and between these two philosophies can be traced in a particularly nuanced fashion by examining the situation of Salvadoran immigrants in the 1990s, and the ways in which other Latin American immigrants were legally categorized comparatively. In other words, there is a relationship between how effectively a country is portrayed as host to an externally located threat and the degree to which its migrants are granted asylum. There is historical precedent for the lack of a cohesive American immigration philosophy, which creates space for propagating foreign policy justifications in written into immigration law. Immigration as a Contentious Conceptualization The construction of immigration philosophy as a self-glorifying myth--vague enough to enable personal projections to ease any potential cognitive dissonance--is traceable in legal precedent. In her essay Carved From the Inside Out, Elizabeth Cohen explains an internally- focused history of negotiating citizenship as the country grew. The process was largely ignorant of immigration because the conversation instead focused on how to exclude a diversifying populace as the US expanded territorially and later struggled to limit political participation to white, property-owning men. The painful toggling between integrating and excluding Native Americans, Black Americans, and women, among others, created a norm of second-class citizenship. This debate took center stage, and “Americans did not produce a philosophy of immigration alongside their philosophy of citizenship.”1 Cohen anchors the legitimation for 1 Elizabeth Cohen, “Carved from the Inside Out: Immigration and America’s Public Philosophy of Citizenship,” in Debating Immigration, ed. Carol M. Swain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 36. 3 preserving immigrants and marginalized native-born populations as outside the core American populace in the legal precedent of Calvin’s Case. In brief, Calvin’s Case (1608) discussed the citizenship status of constituents after King James, a Scot, claimed the British throne. The ruling granted citizenship to those born after the joining of the two kingdoms, on soil considered to be British dominion. Those born before the unification, before King James’ rule, were offered a newly developed naturalization process. Thus, the case manipulated both jus soli (citizenship based on birth right) and jus sanguinis (citizenship based on blood/ancestry) to selectively ascribe citizenship. Sections of the population were excluded despite birthright based on their previous nationality, “the Irish in particular were left in the netherworld between full and noncitizenship.”2 This arbitrary exclusion, now legalized, was what later allowed Chief Justice Taney to avoid granting citizenship based on birthright to free blacks in the Dred Scott v. Stanford (1857).3 In drawing an analogy between the status of the Irish after Calvin’s Case and the situation of free blacks in the United States, the Supreme Court was able to circumvent jus soli (citizenship based on birthright) and instead institute a racialized conception of citizenship. Thus, Calvin’s Case offered legal precedent for an arbitrary process of granting citizenship to those already living within the country. This “meshed effectively with our own commitment to racial and other internal classifications to produce an understanding of citizenship that was not attentive to questions of immigration.”4 While historically, US law has 2 Cohen, 43. 3 Cohen, 43. 4 Cohen, 33. 4 slowly moved toward more egalitarian constructions of citizenship, subtler efforts persist today to prioritize the rights of some citizens over others. Perhaps the most straightforward example would be efforts to restrict the voting rights of black citizens in the American South, where white (and more likely conservative) voting rights are prioritized.5 Determining what it is to be American has not been the “nation of immigrants” mantra that is preached in the abstract. Instead, it has been an argument in which belonging is racially determined. Therefore, the most applicable legacy of Calvin’s Case was that: A range of circumstances can change and, in so doing, alter the contours of the population considered eligible for citizenship…it therefore framed questions of citizenship for the British and Americans who looked to it in ways that paid more attention to idiosyncratic and internally generated racial distinctions than to immigration. This functioned well within the unique context of the British Empire and fed into a long- standing American tradition of legalized racial citizenship hierarchies.6 Calvin’s Case is thus not the cause of an American tradition of racializing belonging, but instead a key component in legalizing this uncomfortable ideology. While this legal framework lends itself most readily to internal constructions of second- class citizenship, it must be noted that what is relevant here is a construction of quasi-citizenship and thus a precedent for degrees of belonging (or perhaps more appropriately, degrees of exclusion). For the purpose of this paper, it would be arrogant to assume that a conversation on citizenship can be conflated with one on immigration. Part of the preservation of American self- idealization is the belief that the rest of the world is vying for membership. It would also be 5 Russ Bynum and Christina A. Cassidy, “Tight Race in Georgia Shines Light on Voting Restrictions,” Associated Press, November 10, 2018. 6 Cohen, 44-45. 5 ignorant to assume that quasi-legal status comes anywhere close to citizenship; the experience is one more akin to legalized modes of marginalization. Nonetheless, Calvin’s Case illuminates racial borders as integral to conceptualizing an American constituency. This unpalatable, discriminatory structure is hidden under a public discourse on immigration that is romanticized and purposefully vague. This ambiguity, instead of questioning a pro-immigrant national mantra (the American Dream calls out directly to immigrants, the idea of the US as a “Melting Pot,” a country founded upon religious freedom, a land of opportunity, and so on), displaces the moral ambiguity onto the body of the immigrant. The questioning is directed to the individual’s moral character, origin, and legal status rather than questions about the moral obligation of the American host. The empirical grounds for crafting the specifics of immigration policy are masked by a moral conception of a ‘nation of immigrants.’ Instead, immigration policy offers (often modest) refuge only to those who can perform as refugees within the American image on a global scale: it is here where immigration and foreign policy most notably intersect. While we encouraged the world to give us their tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, we were not particularly interested in ferreting out anyone who might have been huddling voiceless in the dark recesses of poverty or political oppression. Only under the threat of appearing hypocritical, and with the incentive of weakening our cold war enemies, did the federal government institute a policy of refuge, and the terms of that policy limited the right to those fleeing communism.7 The two narratives reinforce

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