In an Oped piece in last Sunday’s Washington Post Yale Law Professor Amy Chua, author of the interesting book World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003), pens a rather nativistic analysis of contemporary immigration.


Chua begins with a loaded question:

“Are too many Third World, non-English-speaking immigrants destroying our national identity?”

Stating the question this way, with harsh and loaded language like “destroying” and “Third World,” already places the discussion in an anti-immigration, old racist frame that negatively characterizes those who are immigrating to the United States from Asia and Latin America.


Then she asks if “all immigrants” are “really equally likely to make good Americans?” and cites the leading nativistic political scientist, fellow Ivy Leaguer Samuel Huntington, who has taken the biased tack that immigrants of today are inferior to those of yesteryear, the latter having allegedly assimilated easily and caused no problems for the country.


Perhaps trying to play down her harsh opening, Chua then tells us that she herself is an immigrant who has done well:

“My parents arrived in the United States in 1961, so poor that they couldn’t afford heat their first winter. I grew up speaking only Chinese at home (for every English word accidentally uttered, my sister and I got one whack of the chopsticks). Today, my father is a professor at Berkeley, and I’m a professor at Yale Law School. As the daughter of immigrants, a grateful beneficiary of America’s tolerance and opportunity, I could not be more pro-immigrant.”

In a classic non sequitur, she then shifts to a somewhat irrelevant discussion of countries overseas, and one that is rather anti-immigrant. She cites oddly selected countries “around the world today” which “face violence and instability as a result of their increasing pluralism and diversity.” She picks on the example of “unassimilated, largely Muslim enclaves that are hotbeds of unrest and even terrorism” in European countries, citing “riots in France last month”–with no reference whatsoever to the high levels of racist discrimination and discriminatory unemployment faced by France’s Muslim population at the hands of whites or of peacefully pluralistic countries in Europe. Then she cites Muslims as the problem again, this time those supposedly soon to be “a majority in Amsterdam and elsewhere within a decade,” with major European cities facing “a profound transformation.”


She claims that “Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union disintegrated when their national identities proved too weak to bind together diverse peoples,” and then cites Iraq as a recent example with “no overarching identity strong enough to unite its Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis.” Not a word is offered in regard to any of her carefully selected examples about the racial and religious discrimination faced by groups that were (are) not dominant in the (ruling) groups in these countries or the political oppressions that caused upheavals in these countries–including the reshaping of Iraq by outside interventions and occupations by European and U.S. armies over the last century.


Chua switches next to a rhetorical question from the extreme right:

“Does this mean that it’s time for the United States to shut its borders and reassert its ‘white, Christian’ identity and what Huntington calls its Anglo-Saxon, Protestant ‘core values’?”

Even stating such an extremely racist question like it is legitimate puts this racist framing of immigration back into the minds of readers, although Chua does reject this view with two good points about immigrants who were not white making major contributions to the economic health of the United States and about such rhetoric supposedly driving immigrants from the mainstream. This latter point about rejecting the mainstream is actually rather easily refuted by data, which often is in short supply in such arguments. Social science research shows clearly that immigrants of various backgrounds now aggressively seek integration into the U.S. economy and into the English language. English instruction programs in many areas have long backlogs of applicants, and most second generation immigrants (especially today) have long been able to speak English well. Indeed, by the third and fourth generations languages like Spanish are rarely spoken by these Americans, except perhaps to grandparents.


After making these modest points for immigrants, Chua again retreats to the tired rhetoric of the anti-immigration frame:

“Immigration advocates are too often guilty of an uncritical political correctness that avoids hard questions about national identity and imposes no obligations on immigrants. For these well-meaning idealists, there is no such thing as too much diversity.”

Again she uses the straw-man argument and language from the white racial frame, whose contemporary advocates actually created the term “political correctness” in the sense she uses it and who assert that immigration advocates avoid “hard questions” and impose “no obligations on immigrants.” This frame asserts without evidence that (many?) advocates of immigration and other advocates of a diverse United States are just “well-meaning idealists” who cannot envision having “too much diversity.” Where is the evidence for this?


In her rather undocumented analysis, Chua generally sides with those whites who often attack Americans who have worked so hard to bring down the racial stereotypes and racist structures created by 340 years of racial oppression in U.S. society. Somehow, the fact that nearly 90 percent of this country’s history is one of extreme white oppression (genocidal rampages against Native Americans, rape of enslaved and segregated Black women hundreds of thousands of times, and 6000 lynchings, excluding Chinese Americans on racial grounds, racial segregation of Japanese Americans before and during World War II, just to take a few examples), and the fact that this country has only been an officially “free” country since legal segregation ended in 1968, a modest generation and a half ago, are lost in this whitewashed analysis. The hostility and discrimination, and one-way assimilation pressure to conform to a white-normed society (her “national identity” is a white identity, apparently), faced by hard-working immigrants is not even considered as a societal “problem.” The image of a wonderful, tolerant, white-led country suffering great troubles at the hands of relatively moderate rates of immigration (compared to rates of immigrants around 1900) of non-European immigrants is greatly exaggerated if not ludicrous. If these immigrants were white and European, as is clear in both Chua’s and Huntington’s analyses, there would be no significant outcry and no immigration “problem” to be so aggressively and publicly discussed.


Chua’s solutions are also to a significant degree of the white nativist frame. She agrees with nativists who seek an English-only country by proposing that English be the “official national language.” For her, teaching Spanish to Spanish-language children–so they can, in my view, learn their own language better, become better educated, and likely transition more easily to English–is an “indulgence.” She asserts that:

“For many immigrants, only family matters. Even when immigrants get involved in politics, they tend to focus on protecting their own and protesting discrimination.”

For these reasons, apparently, she contends that immigrants must embrace “national civic virtues,” yet she ignores the fact that most already do embrace civic values by getting jobs and working hard, getting educations themselves or putting their children in school, buying housing and consumer goods, and eventually joining political and civic associations the longer they (and especially their children) are in the United States. She again ignores the white-generated discrimination that many non-European immigrants, and their children and grandchildren, face, which gives them good reason to protest.


Then she picks up on yet another them from the white racial frame:

“That the 11 million to 20 million illegal immigrants are 80 percent Mexican and Central American is itself a problem. This is emphatically not for the reason Huntington gives — that Hispanics supposedly don’t share America’s core values. But if the U.S. immigration system is to reflect and further our ethnically neutral identity, it must itself be ethnically neutral, offering equal opportunity to Sudanese, Estonians, Burmese and so on. The starkly disproportionate ratio of Latinos — reflecting geographical fortuity and a large measure of law-breaking — is inconsistent with this principle.”

Here, it is who the immigrants are that is the “problem.” She says not a word about how U.S. corporations’ destruction of farming economies in Latin America lies behind much undocumented immigration. It is not the tooth fairy that forces so many Latin American immigrants to come to the United States to get jobs to feed, clothe, and house their often desperate families. Presumably, she has these Latin Americans in mind in a closing sentence as well, when she says:

“Immigrants who turn their backs on American values don’t deserve to be here.”

Again, at no point in her analysis, does Chua discuss the fact that those “American values” have for centuries included much racial discrimination targeting Americans of color, especially immigrants of color. Should not all of us turn our backs on the numerous negative “American values,” which values lead some of us to conduct large-scale discrimination against Americans of color or to invade “too diverse” countries abroad that have not harmed the United States?


The real “problem” of immigration is not immigrants, who are for the most part courageous, family-oriented, economic refugees seeking better lives for themselves. The real problem is the nativist, racist, and anti-immigrant framing, which is too often found in the fearful minds of Americans who cannot see beyond it to a truly democratic multiracial America.

The kind of right-wing anti-immigration bile that CNN commentator Lou Dobbs spews regularly is closely aligned with an organization called The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which has ties to extremist white supremacist groups, according to the SPLC‘s latest Intelligence Report. This is an important connection to document for establishing the links between extremist expressions of white supremacy and the more mainstream, CNN-versions of the same ideas. I’ve suggested these connections in my own work, but there’s not enough done documenting and explaining these linkages. And, lest you think that this sort of thing is only relevant for scholarly discussions about discourse, there’s a story out of Phoenix recently about the death of 18-year-old Joe Arvizu that reminds us all of the relevance of this sort of rhetoric for people’s daily lives. From The Arizona Republic (hat tip to Jesse Wendel of the Group News Blog for bringing this to my attention):

And so the good nuns who run a local hospital – one dedicated to “serving and advocating for our sisters and brothers who are poor and disenfranchised” – did what we do anymore. They packed him up and shipped him off to Mexico – and, as it turns out, to his death.


Jose Abraham Arvizu had the rotten luck to be born about an hour on the wrong side of the border. He and his family came to Phoenix on visas 3½ years ago. His mother, Rosa, told me she and her husband wanted better for their four children than to scratch a life out of the dust. So they stayed.


Joe, as he was called by his friends and teachers, went to North, where he learned English, passed the AIMS test and embraced school life. Even those who didn’t know him knew who he was. He was easy to pick out at school functions, after all. He was the one carrying the American flag.


On Oct. 19, Joe was horsing around with friends at church when he bumped his head. It quickly became clear that something was horribly wrong, and he was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, where he underwent surgery the next day to stop the bleeding in his brain.


On Oct. 21, Rosa learned that her son had leukemia, but doctors assured her that he would be OK. His chance of recovery, she said, was put at 85 percent.


Five days later, Joe was packed into an ambulance and sent to a hospital in Mexico.


“They said they knew that we couldn’t pay the bill, so they couldn’t continue with the treatment anymore,” Rosa said, through a translator. “I asked for a payment negotiation, but they said that no, we couldn’t make it with the income we have. I didn’t want to make any decision by myself, but they told me the ambulance was ready.”


Over his mother’s objections, Joe was taken first to a hospital in Agua Prieta, then transferred to one in Hermosillo. His mother followed the next day while his father, a bricklayer, stayed behind with their other children.


Joe died on Dec. 3. Rosa couldn’t supply the hospital with blood for a needed transfusion.

The hospital officials involved have a certain amount of plausible deniability here that racism was involved; instead, they insist that it was business as usual. But, in this case, business as usual results exclusively in the deaths of brown-skinned kids, not white-skinned kids, and that, my friends, is pretty much the definition of institutional racism. Under the heading of “less-deniable” is the marked upswing in racially motivated violence against all Latinos, regardless of immigration status, according to the SPLC Intelligence Report:

According to hate crime statistics published annually by the FBI, anti-Latino hate crimes rose by almost 35% between 2003 and 2006, the latest year for which statistics are available. In California, the state with the largest population of Latinos in the country, anti-Latino hate crimes almost doubled in the same period.

Of course, it’s impossible to establish anything like a causal link between the rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric and the rise in anti-Latino hate crimes, but it’s a pretty damning correlation. And, deaths of immigrants like Joe Avrizu are testimony to the fact that no one needs to be a foaming-at-the-mouth extremist for institutional racism to operate. All you need are pundits to run the ideological justification department, and some petite bureaucrats to operate the machine, and both are all the more effective if they think they’re doing the Lord’s work, as Dobbs suggests in this commentary from CNN back in May, 2007 in which he first quotes a Bible verse from Romans about “Everyone must submit himself [sic] to the governing authorities,” then supports his neocon exegesis with polling data:

A Zogby poll last year asked churchgoers if they supported the House bill that would make illegal aliens return home and reduce future illegal immigration by securing the border and performing checks on illegal employers. Seventy-five percent of Protestants responded that was a good or very good idea, 77 percent of born-again Christians also agreed, and 66 percent of Catholics also backed tougher enforcement measures.

So, I guess from Lou Dobbs’ perspective, the nuns who run the hospital that deported Joe Avrizu really were on God’s errand when they shipped him back to Mexico to die. That’s what I’d called sanctified institutional racism. It’s not always the case that religion is on the side of repressive political regimes; in fact, there’s a long history of liberation theology tied to social justice movements, including the civil rights movement in this country.  However, when ordinary people are convinced that they are engaged in doing “God’s work,” or pursuing any “great good,”  it makes it that much easier to continue to operate the banal machinery of death camps  and deportation.