Abstract
This is a dense, detailed, and ambitious book. It is also a top-down history in which the voices and actions of elite, mostly White men take center stage. In Culling the Masses, authors Fitzgerald and Cook-Martin seek to explain the rise and demise of racialized ethnic selection in American immigration policy from the early 19th century to the present day. While ‘racist’ immigration laws were first enforced by the United States in 1803 and had become ubiquitous throughout the Americas by the early 20th century, by 1970, these restrictions had ‘all but disappeared’. In this text, the authors set out to explain why. Following introductory chapters designed to situate two centuries of immigration policy in international and regional contexts, the authors present chapter-by-chapter case studies of debates about immigration, race, and national origin taking place in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, and Argentina.
There are a number of big questions that the authors seek to answer in this book. The first concerns the relationship between liberal democracy and racism. Here, they take issue with two major and opposing schools of thought. First, they argue, contrary to claims made by prominent scholars of American history that liberalism and racism are fundamentally incompatible traditions, the history of immigration policy in the Americas clearly demonstrates that the two have an ‘elective affinity’. The United States, they point out, was both the world’s first major democratic nation, and the first to impose rigid ethnic selection in immigration law. This was no mere coincidence. In fact, the authors write, US policy makers argued stringently for over a century that well-functioning democratic institutions required the exclusion of members of biologically and culturally inferior racial and ethnic groups. Informed by eugenicist and scientific racist ideas, diplomats, lawmakers, social scientists, and organized White labor defended strict immigration restrictions on the grounds that various groups of people (Chinese, Roma, Eastern Europeans, Africans, and Jews) were unfit for democracy and incapable of self-government. Thus, explicitly racist immigration laws arose in the West not in spite of liberalism, the authors argue, but in large part because of it.
The second moment that the authors take up in this book concerns the shift away from ethnic selection. Here, they take issue with another set of scholarly arguments – those put forth by critical race scholars. Scholars writing in this tradition, they claim, go too far in asserting that liberalism and racism are inextricably tied, and that racism in American immigration policy and law is endemic. The historical record, they state, firmly disproves claims of racist continuity and inevitability. They point to the major demographic shifts that have taken place in the United States and Canada since the 1960s and 1970s, ones which were directly facilitated by anti-racist reforms in immigration law made by elites themselves. While subtle forms of discrimination persist, they claim, the true era of racism in immigration policy is firmly past.
A next puzzle the authors seek to explain is why this all happened – what explains the shift away from ethnic selection in the Western Hemisphere. While the United States has long branded itself as a bastion of democracy and tolerance, it was late to abandon racial discrimination in immigration. The impetus for change, the authors write, came not from the powerful, ‘enlightened’ nations of the global north, but from weaker, mostly non-democratic nation states in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. These ‘peripheral nations’, politically empowered by their membership in international institutions established after the world wars, and angered by US immigration laws, pressured the United States to abandon restrictions on their co-nationals in the name of human rights and anti-racism. Here and at other key moments in the text, the authors stress that the geopolitical context, which they call the ‘vertical plane’, was much more important than pressures internal to individual nations in explaining the evolution of immigration policy in the Americas. America’s ‘sustained global ambitions’ after World War II, they write, ‘made it slowly but inexorably susceptible to thirty years of diplomatic leverage from other countries working in concert to delegitimize racism’ (p. 139), and the national-origins quota system was finally eliminated in 1965.
The story with regard to Latin America itself is quite interesting. In stark contrast to the United States and Canada, Latin American nations began to eliminate explicit discrimination in immigration as early as the 1930s, as they ‘loudly proclaim[ed] the doctrine of anti-racism’ (p. 217) on the international stage. Anti-racist ideologies flourished in early 20th century Latin America, openly celebrating the mixing of races and declaring blacks, mulatos, and indigenous people to be as Cuban, Mexican, Argentinean, or Brazilian as their counterparts of European descent.
Culling the Masses takes a very pessimistic view of Latin American anti-racist rhetoric and immigration reform at this time, describing it variously as ‘contradictory’, ‘cynical’, ‘hypocritical’, ‘twisted’, and ‘curious’. While many Latin American nations discriminated against their non-White citizens in practice, ideologies celebrating harmonious race relations served to delegitimize anti-racist protest as divisive and anti-patriotic. Furthermore, FitzGerald and Cook-Martin write, the rhetorical inclusion and partial political incorporation of blacks, mulatos, and the indigenous was premised upon the racial exclusion of others. Jews, Roma, Middle Easterners, and Asians were broadly viewed as ‘inassimilable’ outsiders whose presence threatened the delicate process of racial mixing that Latin American nations sought to achieve. Although most formal immigration laws were ostensibly race-neutral throughout Latin America by the 1940s, members of despised racial groups continued to be excluded through administrative means. FitzGerald and Cook-Martin describe the Latin American stance on race and immigration as cynical as well because of the degree to which it was manipulated by elites seeking to achieve externally oriented political ends. Anti-racism, they say, was a ‘foreign policy tool’ used to brand Latin American nations as paragons of tolerance and harmony, in contrast with the segregated United States (p. 260). Latin American diplomats took every occasion to draw attention to America’s discriminatory immigration laws and shameful treatment of its black citizens as they sought to attain political leverage and prestige in the region.
Much scholarship on Latin America has documented the role of official-elite anti-racist ideologies in quelling racial protest and protecting White hegemony, as the authors very correctly note. Yet, FitzGerald and Cook-Martin go too far in characterizing Latin American anti-racism as entirely cynical and engineered from above, as this portrayal clearly fails to attend to the deep populist roots that these ideologies had as well. In the Cuban case, for example, anti-racism was often manipulated by elites, but it was also pushed forcefully by black and mulato activists and military officers in the early 20th century, as well as the masses of ex-slaves who had participated in the wars for independence in the late 1800s (see especially Ada Ferrer’s marvelous 1999 monograph, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898, as well Alejandro de la Fuente’s important book A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba, 2001). The promulgation of anti-racism in this context was not simply the result of elites manipulating the masses and imposing hegemony from above. Rather, it was reflective, in part, of the limited but real political and ideological gains achieved by non-Whites in Latin American nations, ones that have no parallel in the history of the United States at this time (see de la Fuente, 2001). Both racism and anti-racist coexisted in rhetoric and in fact.
What is new and interesting in Culling the Masses, and missing from much of the Latin American race scholarship, is the argument that ideologies celebrating the inclusion of people of African descent and the indigenous were premised, in part, upon the rejection of members of other racialized groups. This is, however, not so much a contrast to the story that the authors tell in this book with regard to the United States, as it is a corollary. It seems not curious, twisted, or illogical at all that multiracial populism in Latin America, like majority-White populism in the United States, led certain groups to demand incorporation at the expense of others. What took place in Latin America was deeply analogous, in this sense, to what took place in the United States.
Overall, Culling the Masses is a thought-provoking and complex book that puts forth a number of important ideas. Most significant is the notion that liberalism and racism are neither antithetical nor inherently linked. That the diffusion of anti-racist norms throughout the Americas stemmed not from the United States, Europe, or Canada, but from weaker non-democratic nations, exerting pressure on the major powers over the course of several decades. That the evolution of certain types of law and policy over time can only be fully comprehended by situating individual nations in the wider geopolitical field.
Yet, there are shortcomings of the book as well. The text is unnecessarily dense, making the narrative often hard to follow. The top-down approach of book also seems at times to go too far. In this history of legislative change and debate between elite men, voices ‘from below’ are largely missing or relegated to the sidelines. And we are told little about actual conditions on the ground. Meaning, how did debates about immigration and human rights correspond to actual human rights in the countries under study? What was the actual treatment of immigrants in receiving countries, as differentiated by national origin, social class, and by race, and what conditions had these groups of people faced in their countries of origin?
The book also claims to prove considerably more than it actually does, in my view, mainly via its oversimplification of concept of race. Race appears too often in the text as a mere variable, a ‘tool’, a proxy, or a means to an end – not as a complex social construct with internal logic and deep historical roots. The authors’ decision to focus on ‘race’ in the Americas – where cross-regional notions of race were formed in the crucible of conquest, colonialization, and the transatlantic slave trade – begs for a deeper analysis. We are told little about the social construction of race in the countries in question, about how different ethnic groups were situated over time within varying racial hierarchies, or about cross-national differences and continuities in ideas about blackness, Asian-ness, and indigenousness.
Race is also often conflated in the text with ethnicity and national origin. While national and ethnic groups may be self-apparent, race is not a self-apparent or transhistorical entity. Definitions of who belongs to what race, what the characteristics of the members of different races are, or what races even exist differ between nations and within nations over time. This all matters to a history of immigration and race in a variety of ways. Potential immigrants to the United States from Cuba, Argentina, or Brazil, for example, may have come from single groups defined in terms of national origin, but certainly not in terms of race. Greater attention might also have been paid in the book to which racialized subgroups of immigrants sending nations sought most ardently to defend and protect, and which groups, on the other hand, they were most willing or eager to send forth or expel (such as ex-felons, the disabled, the infirm, blacks or dark-skinned others, the poor, the less educated, and other undesirables).
A last critique of the text concerns the extent to which ethnic selection in immigration policy is used a proxy for racism in the world system. As overt selection has gone away, the book implies, thus racism in relations between nations, and in the treatment of immigrants, has largely disappeared as well. Racism itself then becomes simplified to the degree of exclusiveness or inclusiveness in immigration policy – that is, which people were let in or excluded – defined, as discussed above, solely in terms of national origin.
We know very little about which subgroups of immigrants were viewed more or less favorably than others – as related to national origin, race, and to social class – or how they were treated in a given nation if they were allowed to immigrate. What kinds of economic and political conditions did different groups of immigrants face in receiving countries? How hard was it for them to acquire permanent residency or citizenship? Did some become members of a permanent racialized underclass, while others were able to attain the benefits of Whiteness within a generation? In short, there are many important questions that this study does not address.
Perhaps these concerns are beyond the scope of the book. But what the authors have written, then, is not a story about the demise of racism in immigration policy, but rather a story about the demise of one particular form of geopolitical, racial, and ethnic dominance on the part of political elites. Critical race scholars and others writing about race and about immigration in the 21st century have done much to document the current regimes of dominance as complex, multifaceted, and internally contradictory, although certainly more subtle than the regimes of the past.