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Immigration Unilateralism and American Ethnonationalism Loyola University Chicago Law Journal Volume 51 Issue 2 Winter 2019 Article 8 2019 Immigration Unilateralism and American Ethnonationalism Robert L. Tsai Follow this and additional works at: https://lawecommons.luc.edu/luclj Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Robert L. Tsai, Immigration Unilateralism and American Ethnonationalism, 51 Loy. U. Chi. L. J. 523 (2020). Available at: https://lawecommons.luc.edu/luclj/vol51/iss2/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by LAW eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Loyola University Chicago Law Journal by an authorized editor of LAW eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Immigration Unilateralism and American Ethnonationalism Robert L. Tsai* This essay places the Trump administration’s immigration and refugee policy in the context of a resurgent ethnonationalist movement in America as well as the constitutional politics of the past. In particular, it argues that Trumpism’s suspicion of foreigners who are Hispanic or Muslim, its move toward indefinite detention and separation of families, and its disdain for so- called “chain migration” are best understood as part of an assault on the political settlement of the 1960s. These efforts at demographic control are being pursued unilaterally, however, without sufficient evidence there is a broad and lasting desire on the part of the people to alter the fundamental values generated during that period. In order to withstand Trumpism’s challenges, we will have to better understand the Immigration and Naturalization Act’s origins as an integral component of the civil rights revolution. When we revisit this history, we learn that this settlement introduced three principles into the immigration context: equality, a presumption of cultural compatibility, and family integrity. These crucial principles must be made part of any judicial evaluation of a president’s policies—especially those conducted unilaterally. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................. 524 I. THE IMMIGRATION SETTLEMENT OF 1965 ................................. 530 II. TRUMPISM’S ASSAULT ON THE CIVIL RIGHTS SETTLEMENT ..... 536 III. PRESUMPTION OF EQUALITY, CULTURAL COMPATIBILITY AND FAMILY UNITY ...................................................................... 549 * Clifford Scott Green Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law, Temple University, Beasley School of Law (Fall 2019); Professor of Law, American University, Washington College of Law. A rudimentary version of this essay was presented at the conference, Democracy in America: The Promise and the Perils, organized by the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, in the spring of 2019, as well as Drexel University’s law faculty workshop. My gratitude to Emilie McGuire, Chris Dempsey, and the staff of the Journal for superb editing. Thanks to Jack Chin, Anil Kalhan, and Peter Spiro for their helpful and probing comments. 523 524 Loyola University Chicago Law Journal [Vol. 51 INTRODUCTION There is a transformation underway in the United States, but not everyone recognizes the scope of the challenge or understands how we have reached this point. It is an ambitious effort that spans a broad range of policies, institutions, and constitutional doctrines. That plan is to overthrow the political settlement of the 1960s, which brought us the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968—landmark laws that codified the grassroots push for racial equality in the areas of employment, voting, and housing. Collectively, these laws are understood today as the legal achievements of the civil rights revolution. The reaction against this constitutional settlement began almost immediately. At the time that President Lyndon B. Johnson expended most of his political capital to ensure passage of these laws, he knew there would be backlash, the kind that would damage his own party’s electoral fortunes. America would come to support racial equality, but that principle has encountered, and so far survived, episodic resistance. Party realignment followed, as skepticism of equality became channeled through the national Republican Party as six of the next nine administrations following Johnson’s have been Republican. While Johnson’s ignominious handling of America’s involvement in Vietnam cut short the Democratic Party’s ability to fulfill the promise of the Great Society, many of the policies inscribed fundamental values and set in motion chains of events that even political resistance could not completely roll back. Now, the Trump administration has opened a new front in the battle to dislodge the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 (Immigration Act or Hart-Celler Act). This watershed legislation repudiated the national-origin quotas of the Immigration Act of 1924 that had long been considered racist,1 as well as the long-standing preference for migrants from northern and western Europe, along with the associated logic that immigrants from elsewhere were culturally incompatible and that they and their families could be treated differently. However, this monumental achievement has not been widely appreciated as part of America’s civil rights legacy. Most accounts of this period leave out the crucial changes wrought by this law, as well as the criticisms of the older immigration regime. Like its domestic counterparts, the Immigration Act aimed to 1. As James Whitman has demonstrated, Adolf Hitler admired America’s immigration laws for “simply exclud[ing] the immigration of certain races.” JAMES Q. WHITMAN, HITLER’S AMERICAN MODEL: THE UNITED STATES AND THE MAKING OF NAZI RACE LAW 46 (2017). 2019] Immigration Unilateralism & American Ethnonationalism 525 create America as “a place where people can live in dignity and without fear.”2 As just one example, Bruce Ackerman, who treats the Civil Rights Acts as the equivalent of informal constitutional amendments, never mentions the Immigration Act in his work on this period.3 The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Ackerman writes, revived and codified the “lost logic” of the “anti-humiliation principle” announced in Brown v. Board of Education.4 And yet the Immigration Act, which extends the same principle to cover foreigners—at least those with some contact with the United States because of their families or their opportunities—plays no part in his narrative of this epoch and no role in his theory of constitutional change. It is a glaring omission, for the same architects of the domestic civil rights laws of the 60s also designed the Immigration Act to expand the rights of equality, dignity, and family autonomy. And the same coalition that pressed for legislative action to reduce inequities in so many other areas of American life approved the Immigration Act as part of the same political project.5 Our collective failure to appreciate the Immigration Act’s origins as part of the civil rights revolution has left its transformative quality not only poorly understood by many Americans, but also politically and jurisprudentially isolated. It has kept the Immigration Act from fulfilling its intended role in helping to create an egalitarian society, even as 2. Gabriel J. Chin, Were the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 Antiracist?, in THE IMMIGRATION AND NATIONALITY ACT OF 1965: LEGISLATING A NEW AMERICA 11, 54 (Gabriel J. Chin & Rose Cuison Villazor eds., 2015) [hereinafter LEGISLATING A NEW AMERICA] (quoting 111 CONG. REC. 21,783 (1965) (statement of Rep. Findley)). 3. See generally BRUCE ACKERMAN, 3 WE THE PEOPLE: THE CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION 40– 41 (2014). 4. Id. at 137. 5. Ackerman is not alone in this. The Immigration Act of 1965 is also missing from the account of “super-statutes” offered by William Eskridge and John Ferejohn. See generally William N. Eskridge, Jr. & John Ferejohn, Super-Statutes, 50 DUKE L.J. 1215 (2001). Additionally, many leading biographers of Kennedy and Johnson omit their work on immigration or mention it only in passing. See, e.g., ROBERT DALLEK, AN UNFINISHED LIFE: JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1917–1963 (2003); RICHARD REEVES, PRESIDENT KENNEDY: PROFILE OF POWER (1994); While we wait on Robert Caro’s fifth volume of Johnson’s biography covering 1964–65, it is worth noting that Volume 4 does not mention immigration reform at all. When he writes of Johnson’s “victories in the fight for social justice,” he mentions the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, along with other bills that do not address immigration. ROBERT A. CARO, THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON: THE PASSAGE OF POWER 604 (2013). An exception is Rogers Smith, who briefly observes that the politics of equal respect is “clearly expressed” in these landmark laws, including “the 1965 Immigration Act.” ROGERS M. SMITH, CIVIC IDEALS: CONFLICTING VISIONS OF CITIZENSHIP IN U.S. HISTORY 473 (1997). Hugh Graham says more, including immigration reform among the “triumphant reforms of 1964–65” that were all “based on the principle of nondiscrimination by race or national origin.” HUGH DAVIS GRAHAM, COLLISION COURSE: THE STRANGE CONVERGENCE OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND IMMIGRATION POLICY IN AMERICA 7 (2002). 526 Loyola University Chicago Law Journal [Vol. 51 immigration policy has fallen into a confusing state of conflicting interests. It gets worse. Now, with the erosion of institutional protections of basic values surrounding the treatment of migrants once afforded by the Republican Party and Congress, this part of the civil rights legacy
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