Civil Rights Movement and Immigration Part II

As I mentioned in my last post about links between Civil Rights Movement and immigration, Black people were not fighting for immigrants to come to the United States. They were fighting against racial discrimination, but the outcome indeed was the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed it on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and natural origin. Racial segregation was no longer the law of the land in schools, public accommodations, or employment. While The Civil Rights act was extremely important for eradicating discrimination once people were already here, it did not change immigration law. That would be Hart-Cellar Act aka The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

Changes in immigration were due to the United States reacting to both internal and external factors. I will highlight just a few.

The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act began a wave of immigration policy closing US borders in waves of nativism. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, Black immigrants who were European colonial subjects qualified for entry under the generous national origins quotas for European migrants. In addition, the borders were more open for people from Latin America and the Caribbean. [1] This was how West Indians settled in places like Harlem in the early 20th century. In 1916, Marcus Garvey even planted a US branch of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in New York City. Mexico often served as a labor reserve to recruit and cruelly expel people at the will of both US and Mexican governments. As the United States increased its empire in the Pacific and the Caribbean, migrants from the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Korea came to the United States. World War II led to the migration of thousands of Caribbean immigrants to fill labor shortages in Europe and the United States. Most Africans of means attended higher education in Europe, such as The Sorbonne or Cambridge University due to colonial ties. Many of these West Indians who migrated to the UK were known as the “Windrush Generation” who became stateless with the independence of Caribbean countries.

Before many English-speaking African nations became independent, they were British citizens. This allowed them to travel to the United States before the Civil Rights Movement. Nnamdi “Zik” Azikwe, Nigeria’s first president, studied at several universities in the United States beginning in the late 1920s. A staunch pan-Africanist, Azikwe attended Howard University and the University of Pennsylvania and created a course on African history at Lincoln University, before returning to Africa in 1934. In 1935, Kwame Nkrumah started college at Lincoln University in Philadelphia where he earned a degree in Sociology and an MA in sacred theology before becoming Ghana’s first president. Unlike their peers, who often went to the UK to pursue higher education, Zik and Nkrumah avoided this colonial education by studying at HBCUs in the United States.

However, the United States was not the primary destination for many British colonials. When Africans migrated outside of the continent, they largely went to the land of their former colonizers; those from English-speaking Africa went to England and those from French-speaking Africa to France or Belgium. But the end of World War II war saw the growth of anticolonial movements around the world, the US Civil Rights Movement, and later movements for marginalized peoples in the United States. Many leaders of the Civil Rights Movement participated in the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia where they exchanged ideas and shared tactics with representatives from Asian and African nations. They gained inspiration and momentum from newly independent countries around the world.

The 1940s to 1960s largely saw an end to British Empire, including India in 1947, Ghana in 1957, and Nigeria in 1960. There were now newly independent nations all around the world, from Malaysia to Uganda to Jamaica. Upon independence, East African nations like Kenya and Tanzania expelled South Asian-origin minority merchant middlemen. These now stateless British citizens migrated to the UK where they were met with backlash. The same was true for many others who migrated from former colonies to the United Kingdom. With rising nativism, the British Parliament passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962. It prevented people from the Commonwealth countries from migrating to the UK.

But just as the UK was restricting immigration from the Global South, the US Civil Rights Movement demonstrated the hypocrisy of US democracy. How can this global leader for democracy ignore the rights of millions of Black Americans? The Cold War was already brewing with Russia and China gaining influence around the world. The Korean War (which continues today) had split the peninsula into a North Korean Communist state and a South Korean democratic one. Although many in Africa considered the Cold War to be a problem of the West, the United States was still a white settler society that oppressed Blacks, Latines, and indigenous peoples. This made it look less attractive as a model of liberal (capitalist) democracy. The global reputation of the United States as a democracy was at stake.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. This was at odds with different quotas based on national origins. The following year, the Voting Rights Act 1965 ensured the equal right to vote for Black Americans and all US citizens. The 1965 Immigration Law or the Hart-Cellar Act was introduced by two Congressman. It eliminated nations quotas from select European countries and created tracks for high-skilled immigrants to come to the United States as well as family reunification.

Ironically, for the first time in its history, this 1965 immigration policy imposed national origins quotas on countries in the Western hemisphere. This new law created the concept of the “illegal immigrant.” These quotas made immigration from Mexico and the rest of the Americas more restrictive. For this reason, when it comes to countries in the Americas, the 1965 made it harder, not easier, to migrate to the United States.

The end of US warfare in Cambodia, Vietnam, and throughout southeast Asia led to an upswing in refugees migrating from Asia and the Pacific. But Western-backed military coups, the 1970s oil crisis, and neoliberal structural adjustment programs implemented by the World Bank and the IMF, challenged the independence of many newly independent nations in the 1970s and into the end of the 20th century. The installation of military and religious leaders in formerly democratic states throughout the Global South and the rise in the tech industry, alongside Hollywood’s global appeal facilitated an increase in international migration with the United States as a highly desired destination. Highly skilled migrants combined with family reunification and labor needs led the United States to see a marked increase in highly skilled migrants from around the world at the end of the 20th century.

"Why do immigrants come here?" is the question uttered by many Americans and others in the Global North.

It's the same reason we buy peaches from Chile in the winter, IPhones made in China, and bottles of wine from South Africa: capitalism.

Companies are in a never-ending pattern of cutting costs and increasing profit. This means it is always in their best interest to pay workers less and less. One of the ways it is able to do, especially in a country with low levels of collective bargaining, is to hire foreign-born workers. Whether they are H-1b visa holders or undocumented/illegal workers, companies recruit people from all the developing world to work for them in the United States or any other place in the developed world. Companies want immigrant labor since they can pay them less. It's why we do not see many immigrants from Norway or Sweden-- their high taxes yield a society where you do not need to work low wages to feed your family. Europeans strong history of labor movements and reactions to less-fettered capitalism is very different from the US where the Supreme Court said corporations are people. Wealthy capitalists get richer from paying us less for our work. Immigrants help them make it happen.

For more on the topic:

Echevarria-Estrada, Carlos, and Jeanne Batalova. 2019. "Sub-Saharan Africans in the United States."Migration Information Source, Migration Policy Institute. Retrieved October 10, 2020

(https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/sub-saharan-african-immigrants-united-states-2018).

Halter, Marilyn, and Violet Showers Johnson. 2014. African and American: West African Immigrants in Post-Civil Rights America. New York: New York University Press.

Keely, Charles B. (1979). “The Development of U.S. Immigration Policy Since 1965,” Journal of International Affairs, 33 (2): 249-263.

Keely, Charles B. (1979). “The Development of U.S. Immigration Policy Since 1965,” Journal of International Affairs, 33 (2): 249-263.