184: Border Patrols: Policing Immigration in America

BackStory

History, Education

4.7 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2019

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On the heels of what may have been the biggest single-day sweep of undocumented immigrants last week in Mississippi, this week the Trump administration released a new "Public Charge" rule. The idea of a public charge – an individual who isn’t considered capable of self-sufficiency – became a part of U.S. immigration law after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The new rule will make it harder for immigrants who fail the public charge test to obtain a Green Card.

Efforts to curb immigration in the U.S. are nothing new. This episode from BackStory’s archives looks at the origins of illegal immigration and how the government’s deportation powers have grown over time.

Image: Detention pen--on roof of main building, Ellis Island, where emigrants held for deportation may go in fine weather. Circa 1902. Source: Library of Congress

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The SEPSELD was originally broadcast in 2017.
0:04.0	Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor,
0:08.0	the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.
0:16.0	From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory.
0:20.0	Welcome to backstory, the show that explores the history behind today's headlines.
0:30.0	I'm Joanne Freeman. I'm Brian Ballow, and I'm Nathan Connolly.
0:34.0	Now, if you're new to the podcast, Brian, Nathan and I are all historians,
0:38.0	and every week we take a topic in the news and explore it across American history.
0:42.0	So this week we have the second in our series on immigration.
0:46.0	And basically we're going to pick up where we left off in the early 1900s.
0:52.0	Now at that point, US officials were at their wit's end.
0:56.0	Illegal immigrants were sneaking into the United States from Mexico, as one government official complained.
1:02.0	We couldn't stop them. If we had the Navy on the waterfront, we couldn't stop them.
1:06.0	Not even a Chinese wall, 9,000 miles in length, and built over rivers and deserts and mountains,
1:12.0	along the seashores, would seem to permit a permanent solution.
1:18.0	This is historian Erica Lee.
1:20.0	Now guys, this all sounds pretty familiar, right?
1:22.0	Sadly, yeah. That sounds huge to me, Joanne.
1:26.0	Huge and familiar. Also much like today, US officials at this point were doing their best to try and catch these people at the border and detain them.
1:34.0	But there is a twist.
1:36.0	The immigrants are not actually Mexican, but are Chinese.
1:44.0	I did not see that coming.
	...

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