On the campaign trail, President Trump made his promise to drastically slash immigration a rallying cry. Since taking office, he’s issued a flurry of executive orders(link is external) aimed at achieving those goals, from ending birthright citizenship to freezing funding for refugee resettlement and migrant legal aid organizations.
Immigrant rights groups have responded with lawsuits(link is external) challenging the legality of these orders and report a climate of fear that is making people question whether to accept farm jobs(link is external) or take children to school(link is external).
Trump’s rhetoric and policy actions alike are dramatic. But heated political conversation about immigration, laced with issues of race and class, is nothing new in the United States. Trump’s executive actions are the latest entry in the long saga of our nation’s fraught relationship with immigration, a subject on which Hidetaka Hirota(link is external), an associate professor of history at UC Berkeley, is an expert.
Hirota studies American immigration law, stretching back even before the U.S. was formed. Anti-immigrant, or at least anti-outsider, sentiment has existed throughout our nation’s past, he says, and many tensions over labor and race that fuel immigration debates today are continuations of a centuries-old standoff.
“Trump is really outstanding, in a sense. He is bold,” Hirota said. “But at the same time, his language, his approach, the way he views immigration were actually built on earlier discourses.”