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Moms Are Punished in the Workplace, Even When We Own the Business |
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Monday, 05 February 2018 09:41 |
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Nelson writes: "We sent women to work in this country decades ago as we embraced feminism. History pretends that we invited them to the table. But actually, we let them into the room without giving them a seat, let alone a chance to sit down."
Mothers in the workplace. (photo: Getty Images)
Moms Are Punished in the Workplace, Even When We Own the Business
By Amy Nelson, The Washington Post
05 February 18
 t is 11 p.m. My phone battery is dying. I am sitting at Gate A10 at San Francisco International Airport holding my 9-week-old baby, surrounded by a laptop and a breast pump. A voice overhead announces that my flight will take off two hours and 10 minutes late. I know immediately how I will use the time. I recently started a company that provides shared workspaces and events targeted to women, and the work is endless; eight months after launch, I have 15 employees and an entire business to grow and manage. But there is also the issue of the baby in my lap. I compromise and dictate a to-do list into my phone.
The average age of a tech entrepreneur at their company’s founding is 39. This is an inconvenient age for a family’s primary caretaker, particularly for a caretaker also tasked with gestation, birth and nursing. Take me, for example: I had three daughters in the span of three years and 12 days. But what I found even more challenging than starting a company while surviving a toddler’s sleep regression and my first-trimester morning sickness was my attempt to somehow “have it all” in today’s outdated, inflexible corporate America.
We talk often about the glass ceiling but less about the “maternal wall,” the barrier built by discrimination against working mothers. I was a successful corporate litigator for a decade, working for elite law firms and Fortune 500 companies. When I became a mother, my commitment was questioned: If I could not be at my desk every day from 9 to 6, could I do the job? If I worked at home on a Tuesday, was I really working? What finally became my breaking point wasn’t unique. On parental leave with my second baby, I asked my boss to consider me for an open position that would have been a promotion. He looked at me across a desk. I don’t know who he saw: A tired mother? An accomplished attorney? The end of a story? He said, “We’ve discussed it internally, and it isn’t the right time because you’ve just had a baby.” I smiled to try to hide my disappointment. And my shock.
I did not report the incident to anyone because I feared retaliation, and because I saw my boss as a “good guy” and did not want to “hurt” him. Here’s the thing, though: Even “good guys” can be wrong. And all men benefit from an America where men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it. Indeed, women are 15 percent less likely than men to be promoted — and a mother is half as likely to be promoted as a childless woman.
We sent women to work in this country decades ago as we embraced feminism. History pretends that we invited them to the table. But actually, we let them into the room without giving them a seat, let alone a chance to sit down. This tightrope walk is nearly impossible: Forty-three percent of highly trained professional women with children leave the workforce at some point in their careers. The system is broken, and we know it. Yet we do nothing. Instead, we celebrate the woman who can juggle a career and children with grace, as if this is some sort of achievement. It shouldn’t have to be.
I tried to make an end run around the maternal wall by leaving the office park and launching my own business. I hoped that by founding a company, I could avoid the doubts about my commitment to work that arose from being a mother. I was not alone: Women start businesses at a rate five times faster than men do, launching 1,000 new companies a day. I credit this to resourcefulness. If the old men hanging on to the glory days of the old boys’ club refuse to open the door, women will just set up shop and work outside.
Except it turns out that the maternal wall touches everything. Walk into a bank or talk to an investor, and you’ll see the bricks. Female business owners are offered smaller loans for shorter terms at higher rates than men. Only 2 percent of venture capital dollars went to women in 2016, when 5,839 male-founded companies received VC funding, compared with 359 female-founded companies. A prolific angel investor recently claimed that “a pregnant founder/C.E.O. is going to fail her company.”
That man is wrong. Many women, like me, launch companies while pregnant or with small children. Even though my first two daughters were counted against me in corporate America, I knew I wanted another child. I also wanted to start a business. So I did both at the same time. Now that the baby is here, I hope my work and the work of other mothers can set an example for the next wave of female entrepreneurs. I also hope those women do not hear the same things I did. One adviser suggested that I hide my pregnancy from potential investors because they would only “see me as a vessel.” An investor explained his commitment to female founders by telling me that he had just invested in an incredible entrepreneur who was “absolutely gorgeous, like a supermodel.” And another potential partner asked me at the end of an hour-long pitch if I was “physically prepared” to build a national company, given that I had three children.
While I nurse my baby on the airport floor, I think back to my last days of lawyering. I told my boss I was leaving to start a company. He told me he thought I’d have a latte and stay home. That was one year ago. Every day is different now. I never imagined I would be flying around the country with a newborn, hoping my milk wouldn’t leak during an investor pitch. Some men, like my old boss, may never get it. Some men will keep trying to build walls. Women, though? We will keep showing up. Doing the work. And we will take down those walls, brick by brick.
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Memo to the Public: The President Wants to Make the FBI His Instrument |
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Sunday, 04 February 2018 14:54 |
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Schiff writes: "In the run-up to the release of a deliberately misleading memo, some Republicans hyped the underlying scandal as 'worse than Watergate.' When it was published, however, it delivered none of the salacious evidence of systemic abuse that it promised 'only a cherry-picking of information from a single FISA court application.'"
Donald Trump. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
Memo to the Public: The President Wants to Make the FBI His Instrument
By Adam Schiff, Esquire
04 February 18
A guest column from Rep. Adam Schiff.
n the run-up to the release of a deliberately misleading memo, some Republicans hyped the underlying scandal as "worse than Watergate." When it was published, however, it delivered none of the salacious evidence of systemic abuse that it promised—only a cherry-picking of information from a single FISA court application. The memo’s release provided none of the vindication the President sought or would claim, but it was hugely consequential nonetheless, in how it undermined the system of checks and balances designed to insulate the FBI from White House meddling established in the wake of Watergate.
The years after the Watergate scandal saw multiple Congressional investigations into misuses of law enforcement and intelligence powers. Under the leadership of Director J. Edgar Hoover, who served in that role for nearly 40 years, the FBI targeted domestic political groups it deemed to be “subversive” for unconstitutional surveillance and covert actions. The targets of these actions included socialist groups, anti-war protesters, and civil rights groups and leaders, among them Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jimmy Carter campaigned for President in 1976 promising a scandal-weary nation that he would wall off the Department of Justice and FBI from political influence and direction. As President, Carter did just that, for the first time putting in place formal rules to govern interactions between the Department of Justice and the White House. Perhaps more important, he established an expectation that the extraordinary powers of the Department of Justice and the FBI would not be wielded as a cudgel against the political opponents of the president. As new checks and balances were added in the Executive Branch, new oversight mechanisms were established in Congress and the courts as well.
For the first time, the intelligence committees in the House and Senate allowed a select group of democratically elected representatives to oversee the most sensitive work of the intelligence agencies, and to be read into the most closely-guarded national security secrets and programs. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was established in 1978 to supervise and provide an additional check on highly-classified counterintelligence surveillance processes. The norms and institutions protecting the Department of Justice from political interference in the years since have been tested, but never before as they are under President Donald Trump.
What we have witnessed during the first year of the Trump Administration is a determined effort to demolish the separation between politics and the fair administration of justice—an attempt to turn the DOJ’s investigative powers into the personal political tool of the president. Some have attempted to dismiss the president’s conduct as the actions of a new president, a free-wheeling businessman unaccustomed and unacquainted with the finer points of the office and government in general.
However, a year later, it has become clear that the president views the idea that the DOJ should be anything other than an extension of his political operation as an unacceptable constraint on his authority. He told a reporter in December that he has “the absolute right” to do whatever he wants with “his” Department of Justice. The president has sought to put that statement into action from the very day he was inaugurated.
Early in his tenure, President Trump demanded former FBI Director James Comey’s “loyalty,” and fired him when he did not get it in the form of ending the Flynn investigation and removing the cloud of the Russia probe. He has repeatedly called for the reopening of the investigation into his 2016 opponent, Secretary Clinton. He publicly berated Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, a step recommended by the Department’s professional ethics staff. Finally, just in the past week it was reported that the president asked Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the official responsible for overseeing the Special Counsel’s investigation, whether he was “on my team,” and then-Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe if he voted for the president.
Both the president’s public statements and his private actions make it clear that he is seeking nothing less than to destroy the institutions and norms that shield the Department of Justice from his direction. This is all the more pernicious considering the fact that his own campaign is under investigation for possible collusion with the Russians in their interference in the presidential election. He would take the reins of the FBI to protect himself and to deploy their immense investigative powers against his political opponents at will.
During numerous oversight hearings over the years, I had many occasions to question former FBI Director Robert Mueller about the Bureau’s important work. Director Mueller frequently referenced in his testimony a little-known requirement for FBI trainees—each class of FBI agents would visit the Holocaust Museum to get a visceral look at what can result when law enforcement becomes a tool of repression, or worse.
As they launch their all-out assault on the pillars of the rule of law in this country, Republicans would do well to remember the abuses that prompted the creation of the wall between the DOJ and the White House, and the stakes if the FBI becomes simply another instrument of the President's power.
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The Real Damage of the Nunes Memo |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=37309"><span class="small">Chas Danner, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Sunday, 04 February 2018 14:53 |
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Danner writes: "Two days after the release of the Nunes memo, the only people who still consider it a conspiracy-revealing bombshell are, predictably, the same pro-Trump figures and politicians who oversold its importance in the first place."
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) speaks with reporters outside the West Wing of the White House following a meeting with President Trump on March 22. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
The Real Damage of the Nunes Memo
By Chas Danner, New York Magazine
04 February 18
 wo days after the release of the Nunes memo, the only people who still consider it a conspiracy-revealing bombshell are, predictably, the same pro-Trump figures and politicians who oversold its importance in the first place. While the memo has generated a lot of media coverage, that attention has mostly focused on how the memo does not prove what House Intelligence Community chairman Devin Nunes, President Trump, and others say it does — and how it supports, rather than invalidates, the rationale behind the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.
But even if the memo doesn’t lay the groundwork for cancelling Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, as some of its cheerleaders clearly hoped it would, that doesn’t mean it won’t do lasting damage to the institutions now caught in Trumpworld’s covering fire. More specifically, critics have pointed out that the memo will likely harm the credibility and reputation of the FBI and larger US law enforcement bureaucracy. That is surely the point: Trump and his allies object to the scrutiny he has received from the country’s law enforcement institutions, so they are conducting an unprecedented campaign to demonize and discredit those institutions and any conclusions they subsequently make against the president.
The Nunes memo, at its heart, calls into question the fairness of U.S. law enforcement, since it alleges that federal law enforcement officials were able to abuse their power in order to pursue partisan political gains, particularly in the application for a FISA warrant to surveil a former adviser to the Trump campaign, Carter Page.
Speaking with McClatchy, Todd Hinnen, a former acting chief of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, offered a definitive dose of skepticism towards that charge. “I would be very, very surprised to learn that the numerous FBI and Department of Justice officials, and likely several judges appointed by Chief Justice John Roberts, had subverted the safeguards of the FISA system and were pursuing a political agenda,” he explained. “All three branches of government have worked very hard to develop a system of integrity that’s subject to safeguards and the rule of law.”
That integrity is now under attack. Josh Campbell, a supervisory special agent at the FBI, said in a Friday New York Times op-ed that he was quitting the agency “to join the growing chorus of people who believe that the relentless attacks on the bureau undermine not just America’s premier law enforcement agency but also the nation’s security.” (Regulations prevent FBI employees from publicly speaking out on such matters.) These are the stakes as Campbell sees them:
When the F.B.I. knocks on someone’s door or appeals to the public for assistance in solving crime, the willingness of people to help is directly correlated to their opinion of the agency. When an agent working to stop a terrorist plot attempts to recruit an informant, the agent’s success in gathering critical intelligence depends on the informant’s belief that the agent is credible and trustworthy. And, as the former director, James Comey, would frequently say in underscoring the importance of high standards, whether a jury believes an agent’s testimony depends on whether it has faith in the bureau’s honesty and independence. To be effective, the F.B.I. must be believed and must maintain the support of the public it serves.
According to Campbell, individual agents, not the officials targeted by the Trump administration, will suffer the most from the pro-Trump attacks:
The assumption among confused and dismayed F.B.I. employees is that the attacks are meant to soften the blow should the investigation by Mr. Mueller, the special counsel, lead to additional charges. However, these kinds of attacks by powerful people go beyond mere criticism — they could destroy the institution. Although those critics’ revisionist supporters claim their ire is reserved for institutional leadership and not the rank and file, it is the F.B.I. agent on the street who will be most severely affected as public support for federal law enforcement is sacrificed for partisan gain.
There’s also the concern that agents might become reluctant to report information related to the president in light of these partisan attacks, as former CIA agent Robert Baer suggested during a CNN appearance on Friday. And will a juror who watches a lot of Sean Hannity now be willing to believe an FBI agent’s testimony in the courtroom?
Indeed, some damage seems to have already been done to the reputation of the FBI in the minds of Republican voters, some of whom are clearly buying into the anti-FBI/Russia investigation spin. A Gallup poll taken in December found that only 49 percent of Republicans thought the bureau was doing a good job or better, a drop of 13 points from three years ago. The results of a new Axios/SurveyMonkey poll taken on Thursday and Friday paints an even bleaker picture, with only 38% of Republicans saying that they currently hold a favorable view of the FBI, and 47 percent holding an unfavorable view.
There’s also the matter of further damaging the credibility of the already controversial FISA process. Even the American Civil Liberties Union, no fan of FISA warrants, has criticized the Nunes memo. Explained the ACLU’s Christopher Anders in a statement on Friday, “The completeness and accuracy of government representations to the FISA court are longstanding concerns,” but the Nunes memo “does not contain the facts needed to substantiate its charges.”
Those who support FISA warrants, like Just Security’s Jennifer Daskal, are even more concerned:
FISA is an incredibly powerful – and incredibly important – tool that authorizes the gathering of foreign intelligence evidence regarding U.S. citizens and residents pursuant to a court-issued warrant based on probable cause, albeit in situations that are shrouded in secrecy. Its continued vitality depends in significant part on faith that those entrusted to exercise this extraordinary authority do so with ultimate commitment to uncovering truth and abiding by the rule of law. …
[A]n allegation of abuse, in the absence of actual abuse, or even more concerning in a one-sided representation of the facts for purposes of partisan gain, would constitute a dangerous, short-sighted attack on a critically valuable national security tool, in ways that could undercut our national security over the long term.
The Nunes memo and Trumpworld’s continuing attacks on the law enforcement apparatus could have repercussions for the dynamic between Congress and the intelligence community as well. Also at Just Security, Julian Sanchez acknowledged that while you never want the relationship between the House Intelligence Committee and the intelligence community to be too cozy, the Nunes memo goes too far:
The Justice Department and FBI were pretty reluctant to hand over sensitive material relevant to an ongoing investigation, and to then see it mined for items to attack the Bureau in a way they clearly regard as misleading and unfair would, obviously, tend to confirm their initial reluctance. Needless to say, you don’t want it to be an exercise in pulling teeth whenever House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) needs sensitive material to conduct its oversight responsibilities. If the agencies aren’t just worried about genuine errors being exposed, but about material being politically repurposes this way, the overseers jobs are predictably going to get a lot harder.
Sanchez’s colleague Michael German agreed that the memo has done significant damage to the Committee’s credibility, particularly since the congressional intelligence committees were created to ensure non-partisan oversight. “I think this [memo] puts a dagger into that notion,” German explained, “which will make it harder for the agencies to share information with them in the future, and harder for the public to accept that they are looking out for our interests rather than their own.”
For a broader view of the repercussions, here is what the folks at Lawfare pointed out at the end of their exhaustive analysis of the Nunes memo:
At the end of the day, the most important aspect of the #memo is probably not its contents but the fact that it was written and released at all. Its preparation and public dissemination represent a profound betrayal of the central premise of the intelligence oversight system. That system subjects the intelligence community to detailed congressional oversight, in which the agencies turn over their most sensitive secrets to their overseers in exchange for both a secure environment in which oversight can take place and a promise that overseers will not abuse their access for partisan political purposes. In other words, they receive legitimation when they act in accordance with law and policy. Nunes, the Republican congressional leadership and Trump violated the core of that bargain over the course of the past few weeks. They revealed highly sensitive secrets by way of scoring partisan political points and delegitimizing what appears to have been lawful and appropriate intelligence community activity.
It was a heavy blow to a system that has served this country well for decades, and it is one that will not be forgotten any time soon.
And again, the damage was already being done. President Trump had already said the FBI’s reputation was “in tatters” and the “worst in history” two months before Nunes’s memo became a Republican cause célèbre. On Saturday, he said the the Russia investigation was an “American disgrace.” Whether or not the damage lasts, or in some way protects Trump from the potential consequences of the Russia investigation, is what remains to be seen. “Thanks to this rhetoric, there is a subset of the public that won’t believe what comes out of the Mueller investigation,” former FBI agent and prosecutor Christopher Hunter told the Times after the Nunes memo landed. That may also be true for GOP senators, or at least arguably true as part of a cover story to protect their president and party. Max Boot outlined that fear in the Washington Post on Saturday:
If special counsel Robert S. Mueller III delivers a scathing report on the president and if Democrats win the House in November, it’s almost certain the House will vote to impeach. But it takes 67 votes in the Senate to remove a president.
The case against the FBI that’s being assembled by Trump and his minions is not designed to convince dispassionate observers. It’s only supposed to give the thinnest of cover to true believers — and at least 34 senators — to do what they are predisposed to do anyway, i.e., protect the president at all costs.
In the end, as some are already arguing, Trump’s version of the Saturday Night Massacre — referring to the infamous night of Nixon Administration resignations which preceded the firing of the Watergate special prosecutor — may already be happening, only in such a slow-motion way as to protect, rather than doom, this president.
In a new Politico Magazine piece, Nixon biographer John A. Farrell compared and contrasted the Watergate scandal to the Russia investigation and Trump, and in doing so spoke with James Doyle, who served as the spokesman for Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. In Doyle’s opinion, even if Trump triggered a Saturday Night Massacre-like event, times have changed, and because of the confusion around this scandal, the system would probably fail this time around. In other words, the obfuscation by Trump and his allies may have already succeeded.
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The Fight for a White America |
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Sunday, 04 February 2018 14:52 |
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Bouie writes: "President Trump has proposed nothing less than a vast overhaul of the country's immigration policy, seeking an end to the diversity visa lottery and family sponsorship programs in favor of a system that would privilege immigrants from mostly white countries."
'A century ago, nativists won the battle over immigration. The Trump administration is determined to repeat it.' (image: Lisa Larkin-Walker/Slate)
The Fight for a White America
By Jamelle Bouie, Slate
04 February 18
A century ago, nativists won the battle over immigration. The Trump administration is determined to repeat it.
 resident Trump has proposed nothing less than a vast overhaul of the country’s immigration policy, seeking an end to the diversity visa lottery and family sponsorship programs in favor of a system that would privilege immigrants from mostly white countries. “It is time to begin moving towards a merit-based immigration system,” Trump proudly proclaimed to a crowd of cheering Republicans in his first State of the Union on Tuesday night, “one that admits people who are skilled, who want to work, who will contribute to our society, and who will love and respect our country.”
The president and his allies claim such an immigration policy would promote cohesion and unity among Americans “and finally bring our immigration system into the 21st century.” Far from forward-facing, however, the president’s policies evoke the beginning of the 20th century, when war abroad and opportunity at home brought waves of immigrants to the United States, from Italians, Polish, and Russians to Chinese and Japanese. Their arrival sparked a backlash from those who feared what these newcomers might mean for white supremacy and the privileged position of white, Anglo-Saxon Americans. Those fears coalesced into a movement for “American homogeneity,” and a drive to achieve it by closing off America’s borders to all but a select group of immigrants. This culminated in 1924 with the Johnson-Reed Act, which sharply restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and all but banned it from much of Asia.
Members of the Trump administration have praised the Johnson-Reed Act for its severe restrictions on who could enter the country, and the act’s history helps illuminate what exactly Trump means when he says he wants to put “America first.”
The cohesion Trump espouses isn’t national or ideological. It is racial. The fight over immigration isn’t between two camps who value the contributions of immigrants and simply quibble over the mix and composition of entrants to the United States. It is between a camp that values immigrants and seeks to protect the broader American tradition of inclusion, and one that rejects this openness in favor of a darker legacy of exclusion. And in the current moment, it is the restrictionists who are the loudest and most influential voices, and their concerns are driving the terms of the debate.
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At the heart of the nativist idea is a fear of foreign influence, that some force originating abroad threatens to undermine the bonds that hold America together. What critics condemned as “Know Nothing-ism” in the 19th century, adherents called Americanism. “The grand work of the American party,” said one nativist journal in 1855, “is the principle of nationality … we must do something to protect and vindicate it. If we do not, it will be destroyed.”
In the first decades of the 20th century, the defense of “the principle of nationality” took several forms. At the level of mass politics, it meant a retooled and reinvigorated Ku Klux Klan with a membership in the millions, whose new incarnation was as committed to anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic politics as it was to its traditional anti-black racism. In Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, historian Nancy MacLean notes how Georgia Klan leader William Joseph Simmons warned his followers that they were, in his words, “being crowded out by a “mongrel population … organized into Ghettos and Communistic groups … and uplifting a red flag as their insignia of war.” Likewise, Klan leaders and publications blasted Catholic immigrants as “European riff-raff” and “slaves of ignorance and vice” who threatened to degrade the country at the same time that they allegedly undermined native-born white workers. When, in 1923 and 1924, Congress was debating the Johnson-Reed Act, the Klan organized a letter-writing campaign to help secure its passage, turning its rhetoric into political action.
At the elite level, it meant the growth of an intellectual case for nativism, one built on a foundation of eugenics and “race science.” Prominent scholars like Madison Grant (The Passing of the Great Race) and Lothrop Stoddard (The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy) penned books and delivered lectures across the country, warning of a world in which “Nordic superiority” was supplanted by those of so-called inferior stock. “What is the greatest danger which threatens the American republic today?” asked eugenicist Henry Fairfield Osborn in the preface to Grant’s book. “I would certainly reply: The gradual dying out among our people of those hereditary traits through which the principles of our religious, political and social foundations were laid down and their insidious replacement by traits of less noble character.” The aim of the nativists was to preserve those traits and admit for entry only those immigrants who could fully and easily assimilate into them.
The Johnson-Reed Act codified this nativism into law. The “national origins” provision set quotas limiting the number of immigrants from a given country to 2 percent of the people from that country as of the 1890 census, rather than the 1900 or 1910 census. In calculating those quotas, it excluded immigrants from within the Western hemisphere (primarily those from Mexico, Central, and South America) and their descendants, as well as black Americans, and all Chinese, Japanese, and South Asians, holding the latter as racially ineligible for citizenship.
Choosing an earlier census ensured a low baseline for foreign-born Americans. The effect was a drastic reduction of immigration from much of the world, but especially from those countries outside of Western Europe and Germany. Great Britain and Ireland, for example, received more than 65,000 quota slots in the post-1924 world. Russia, by contrast, received just under 2,800, and China received a scant 100. The 1924 law had a profound impact on racial categorization in American life. “At one level, the new immigration law differentiated Europeans according to nationality and ranked them in a hierarchy of desirability,” writes historian Mae Ngai in a 1999 essay titled “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924.” “At another level, the law constructed a white American race, in which persons of European descent shared a common whiteness that made them distinct from those deemed to be not white.” By not precluding citizenship for European immigrants in the way that it did for Asian ones, the Johnson-Reed Act created space for an expansion of “whiteness” to groups that stood outside of its boundaries. “Euro-Americans acquired both ethnicities—that is, nationality-based identities that were presumed to be transformable—and a racial identity based on whiteness that was presumed to be unchangeable,” Ngai writes.
Restricting immigration on racial lines increased the value of whiteness, tightening the connection between racial whiteness, citizenship, power, and opportunity. It’s no accident that the beneficiaries of that change—the descendants of Southern, Central, and Eastern European immigrants—would become jealous defenders of racial privileges as battles over housing, jobs, and access flared across industrial cities in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.
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President Trump and his allies in and outside of Washington have been vocal about their concern over a rapidly diversifying America. And in the same way that the authors of the Johnson-Reed Act sought to preserve Anglo-Saxon dominance over American life, today’s crop of extreme restrictionists—or at least, those with the most sway and influence—seek to stop a demographic transition that might interfere with white racial hegemony. In that, they have been backed by a conspicuous contingent of white supremacists—the self-proclaimed “alt-right”—who see the president as a kindred spirit in the fight to preserve a white nation.
It is true that there are some more moderate restrictionists in the mix, for whom the drive to reduce legal immigration is driven by concern and prudence—concern over immigration’s impact on wage and employment, especially among the country’s working-class citizens, and prudence regarding our ability to assimilate and absorb new arrivals.
The facts do not support these misgivings. Low-skilled immigration does more to bolster prospects for working-class Americans—providing complementary employment to construction and farm labor—than it does to lower wages. Likewise, immigrants to the United States have shown a remarkable capacity for assimilation, quickly integrating themselves into the fabric of American life by building homes, businesses, and families. To the extent that native-born workers need protection, it’s best provided by stronger unions and more generous support from the government.
But those moderate voices aren’t setting the agenda. Instead, it’s the hardliners who have used their initiative to inject nativism into mainstream politics and channel, in attenuated form, the attitudes that produced the 1924 law. President Trump, for example, ties Hispanic immigrants to crime and disorder, blaming their presence for gang violence. He attributes terror attacks committed by Muslim immigrants to the “visa lottery and chain migration” that supposedly allows them unfettered access to American targets. And in a recent meeting with Democratic and Republican lawmakers, Trump disparaged Haiti and various African nations as “shitholes” (or “shithouses”) whose immigrants should be turned away from the country in favor of those from European countries, like Norway. It’s unclear if Trump is aware of Rep. Albert Johnson, who spearheaded the 1924 immigration law. But in his racial ranking of immigrants, the president echoed the congressman’s sentiments. “The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended,” proclaimed Johnson on the passage of the bill that bore his name.
The president isn’t alone in his views. Before joining the Trump administration, former White House adviser Stephen Bannon openly opposed nonwhite immigration on the grounds that it threatened the integrity of Western nations. And while Bannon has been exiled from Trump’s orbit, that legacy lives on. Stephen Miller, who is now the driving force behind immigration policy in the Trump administration, is a notorious hardliner who has echoed Bannon’s views, bemoaning the number of foreign-born people in the United States.
Miller is the former communications director for and protégé of Jeff Sessions, who as Alabama’s senator praised the Johnson-Reed Act and its restrictions on foreign-born Americans. “When the numbers reached about this high in 1924, the president and Congress changed the policy, and it slowed down immigration significantly,” Sessions said in a 2015 interview with Bannon. “We then assimilated through the 1965 and created really the solid middle class of America, with assimilated immigrants, and it was good for America.”
As attorney general, Sessions has leaned in to these views. “What good does it do to bring in somebody who’s illiterate in their own country, has no skills, and is going to struggle in our country and not be successful?” said Sessions during a recent interview on Fox News. “That is not what a good nation should do, and we need to get away from it.” Rep. Steve King of Iowa, a staunch defender of Trump, is especially blunt in his defense of hardline immigration policies. “Assimilation, not diversity, is our American strength,” he said on Twitter last year.
Assimilation in those middle decades of the 20th century was built, to a considerable extent, on racial exclusion. It was assimilation into whiteness, one which bolstered and preserved the racial status quo. There’s no return to the America of that era, but one could slow the nation’s demographic transition. The White House proposals for immigration reform seem designed to do just that. According to an analysis from the Cato Institute, President Trump’s framework for immigration would slash entries by 44 percent, excluding almost 22 million people from the United States over the next 50 years. And in an analysis tied to the “Securing America’s Future Act”—a House-produced bill which hews closely to what the president wants—the Center for Global Development finds that white immigrants would be twice as likely to attain entry into the United States than black and Hispanic ones, while a majority of Muslim and Catholic immigrants would be barred from the country. Couple these measures with voter suppression, a biased census, apportionment by citizenship, extreme gerrymandering, and the existing dominance of rural counties in national politics, and you can essentially rig the system for the preservation of white racial hegemony.
Immigration policy is inextricably tied to our nation’s self-identity. What we choose to do reflects the traditions we seek to uphold. In the 1920s, most Americans wanted a more homogenous country, and they chose accordingly. Forty years later, in the midst of the civil rights revolution and a powerful ethos of inclusion, Americans reversed course, opening our borders to millions of people from across the globe. In this moment, we have two options. We can once again take the path that wants to keep “America for Americans,” and which inevitably casts American-ness in ways circumscribed by race, origin, and religion. Or we could try to realize our cosmopolitan faith, that tradition of universalism which elevates the egalitarian ideals of the Founding, and which seeks to define our diversity of origins as a powerful strength, not a weakness to overcome.
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