Culling the Masses

David Scott FitzGerald, David Cook-Martín

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674369672
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Emigración e inmigración

Culling the Masses questions the widely held view that in the long run democracy and racism cannot coexist. David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín show that democracies were the first countries in the Americas to select immigrants by race, and undemocratic states the first to outlaw discrimination. Through analysis of legal records from twenty-two countries between 1790 and 2010, the authors present a history of the rise and fall of racial selection in the Western Hemisphere.The United States led the way in using legal means to exclude "inferior" ethnic groups. Starting in 1790, Congress began passing nationality and immigration laws that prevented Africans and Asians from becoming citizens, on the grounds that they were inherently incapable of self-government. Similar policies were soon adopted by the self-governing colonies and dominions of the British Empire, eventually spreading across Latin America as well.Undemocratic regimes in Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Cuba reversed their discriminatory laws in the 1930s and 1940s, decades ahead of the United States and Canada. The conventional claim that racism and democracy are antithetical—because democracy depends on ideals of equality and fairness, which are incompatible with the notion of racial inferiority—cannot explain why liberal democracies were leaders in promoting racist policies and laggards in eliminating them. Ultimately, the authors argue, the changed racial geopolitics of World War II and the Cold War was necessary to convince North American countries to reform their immigration and citizenship laws.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Nineteenth century democracy needs no more complete vindication for its existence than the fact that it has kept for the white race the best portions of the new world’s surface, temperate America and Australia. Had these regions been under aristocratic governments, Chinese immigration would have been encouraged precisely as the slave trade is encouraged of necessity by any slave-holding oligarchy, and the results would have been even more fatal to the white race, but the democracy, with the clear instinct of race selfishness, saw the race foe, and kept out the dangerous alien. The presence of the negro in our Southern States is a legacy from the time when we were ruled by a transoceanic aristocracy. The whole civilization of the future owes a debt of gratitude greater than can be expressed in words to that democratic polity which has kept the temperate zones of the new and the newest worlds a heritage for the white people.

—Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy Theodore Roosevelt, 1897

JUAN BAUTISTA ALBERDI, the leading Argentine intellectual of the nineteenth century, famously observed that “in the Americas, to govern is to populate.”¹ Open immigration policies in the nineteenth century allowed nearly anyone to walk off the docks in Buenos Aires, Havana, New York, or Halifax. By the 1930s, intellectuals from Argentina to Cuba had attached a qualifier to his dictum: “to govern is to populate well.”² The governments of every independent country in the Americas created the legal and bureaucratic machinery to cull only “ethnically desirable” human stock from the millions yearning to breathe free.

The United States led the way in creating racist policies beginning with its nationality laws in 1790 and its immigration laws in 1803.³ In his book American Ideals written in 1897, just four years before he became president, Theodore Roosevelt praised the democratic wisdom of the United States and the other Anglophone settler societies for selecting immigrants on racial grounds. Like most contemporary leaders, Roosevelt believed that Chinese deserved exclusion because they were racially inferior and incapable of governing themselves in a democracy. He warned against the dangers of business interests attempting to attract Chinese immigrants to work as indentured servants. In Roosevelt’s view, Chinese were only one step up from the descendants of black slaves, which plantation owners had imported to the detriment of free white workers. Democracies needed racist policies to protect their citizens and democracy itself.⁴

Roosevelt would have been astonished to learn that a century later, a nearly universal consensus took it for granted that democracy and racism cannot coexist. Racial selection of immigrants had become taboo. An academic study of major liberal-democratic countries of immigration in 1995 declared that the “boundaries of legitimate discussion of immigration policy are narrow, precluding argument over the ethnic composition of migrant streams, and subjecting those who criticize liberal policies to charges of racism.”⁵ The ubiquitous racist immigration and nationality laws that Roosevelt cherished had all but disappeared, beginning with Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Cuba in the late 1930s and early 1940s and finally extending to the United States and Canada in the 1960s and Australia in the 1970s. While immigration policies continue to have a differential impact on particular national-origin groups, and discriminatory practices persist, the history of the region plainly shows that policies have dramatically moved in the direction of non-racial selection.

Why have governments throughout the Americas turned against selecting immigrants by race and national origins? Why did that process take longer to unfold in the most liberal-democratic countries? Against the prevailing wisdom, we argue that the anti-racist turn was not a product of liberal ideology or democracy. Liberalism and the institutions of democracy actually promoted racist immigration policies in nineteenth-century North America, as did populist politics in Latin America in the early 1930s. The demise of racist immigration law began in Latin America in the late 1930s, spread to North America in the 1960s, and had become the norm throughout most major liberal-democratic countries of immigration by the 1980s.⁶ By analyzing the interaction between domestic and international politics in countries of immigration throughout the Western Hemisphere, we unexpectedly find that geopolitical factors were the main drivers of the demise of racial selection, as externally oriented elites overcame the public’s racist preferences.

Racist Democracy

What is the relationship between liberalism, democracy, and racism? Simply put, democratic input—whether in its liberal or populist variations—historically has been linked to racist immigration policy in the Americas.

The classical liberalism of the mid-nineteenth century exalted the liberties of citizens and economic activity unhindered by the state. In its ideal form, liberalism meant freedom of movement, exchange, and political participation. A representative system of government was the means to foster these principles. Rights were inherent and equally applicable to all autonomous moral individuals within nation-states.⁷ Liberalism influenced the development of political institutions throughout North America and Europe. It also shaped the aspirations of many Latin American elites, even when liberal institutions were not as robust as in the United States. The liberal doctrines of political participation expressed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776) and Constitution (1787), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1793), and the Spanish Cádiz Constitution (1812) had a broad impact in Latin America. Constitutions across the region copied many of their institutions and principles of liberty and self-government.⁸ To be sure, there have been many versions of liberalism in different historical contexts, and the bundle of principles has sometimes loosened. Moreover, the term has been appropriated by politicians to take on numerous meanings, such as the widespread contemporary usage by U.S. conservatives in which liberal is a slur meaning statist, the opposite of the classical sense of the term. Despite these conceptual difficulties with liberalism, comparisons of political processes across many times and places require a common analytical vocabulary. In this book, we think of liberalism in the classical sense following the set of principles articulated above. We take an etic approach that uses liberalism as a standardized concept, rather than an emic approach of charting the shifting meanings of liberalism as it is used by politicians in different contexts.

Our perspective draws on political scientist Robert Dahl’s 1971 classification of regimes by levels of “societal inclusiveness” and political “contestation.” Inclusiveness refers to levels of participation by the public in governance, typically through electoral or corporatist mechanisms. Contestation refers to the openness of government to public demands. Liberal democracy, what Dahl calls “polyarchy,” is at one end of the spectrum of political regimes, with a comparatively high level of inclusion through universal suffrage and openness to public contestation by means of a representative form of government in which interest groups can contest government decisions. The United States throughout most of its history and Canada after becoming a self-governing dominion have been examples of liberal democracy. Corporatism or populism has a high level of formal inclusion, but few avenues for contestation of central government decisions. Whether the channeling of interests from below is direct, as in the U.S. case, or managed by populists like Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico and Getúlio Vargas in Brazil in the 1930s or Juan Perón in Argentina in the 1940s, the result is the selection of immigrants by ethnic origins.

The gap between abstract principles of universal equality and the conjoined histories of liberalism and racism in practice has long puzzled political observers. Analysts have explained this puzzle in three ways: as a temporary anomaly linking two phenomena that are generally incompatible, as a case of inherently linked ideologies, or as an instance of distinct traditions that happen to coincide in particular contexts.

A conventional, whiggish account is that liberalism and its expression as democracy have experienced an evolution toward ethnic universalism in the law. Liberal democracies, on this view, have purified themselves of a “resilient pre-modern heritage” with the extension of equal rights from propertied white men to all white men, then to ethnic minorities, and finally to women. The presence of racism is an anomaly to be worked out of the body politic.⁹ Scholars have also argued that incompatibility between liberal democracy and racism extends to immigrant selection. The end of ethnic selection in immigration law in liberal democracies like the United States and Australia is attributable to the “exigencies of liberal stateness as such” and represented “the unfolding of the internal logic of the core values of liberal democracy.”¹⁰

In contrast, scholars with a critical perspective on race have argued that the historical record tells a fundamentally different story, which shows that liberalism and racism are inherently linked. Racism has been the cultural frame that allowed inferences about people’s morality and capacity for democratic participation from their appearance or cultural practices. Political philosopher Charles Mills has argued that liberalism is an expression of European/white Enlightenment ideals built on the exclusion of nonwhites.¹¹ The basic terms of eligibility for the liberal social contract—who constitutes a political person—have been racially determined. In political systems in which sovereignty is derived from below, the only rationale for excluding parts of the population from democratic participation is that they lack personhood and hence are naturally incapable of self-government. The notion that Catholics, southern and eastern Europeans, blacks, and Asians were not fit for democracy was used later to restrict their immigration. John Stuart Mill warned that people characterized by “extreme passiveness, and ready submission to tyranny” were unfit for representative government.¹² Mill wrote to the New York Times in 1870 to warn that Chinese immigration could permanently harm the “more civilized and improved portion of mankind.”¹³ Similarly, in Australia, the main architects of colonial liberalism excluded Chinese based on the argument that only Anglo-Saxons were fit for self-government.¹⁴ Scientific racism in France, Latin America, and the United States offered an authoritative foundation for this exclusionary rationale. Historian George Fredrickson has argued that the revolutionary emphasis on equal rights of citizens required “special reason for exclusion” and that “the one exclusionary principle that could be readily accepted by civic nationalists was biological unfitness for full citizenship.”¹⁵ Building on Louis Hartz’s argument that U.S. liberalism could only sustain anti-black racism by defining blacks as naturally inferior, Paul Lauren argues that “racism actually increased as democracy expanded” in the nineteenth century. Under Jacksonian democracy, the forced separation between Indians and whites increased, and the line between blacks and whites hardened.¹⁶ Desmond King locates racial selection of immigrants in liberalism as well.¹⁷ The link between scientific rationales for assessing political personhood reached its height between the two world wars. Writing about this “dark side of democracy” and nationalism, Anthony Marx and Michael Mann have shown that even when elites acquiesce to demands from below by extending citizenship rights to a widening circle of groups, they do so by maintaining exclusions against the most despised outsiders or by killing them.¹⁸

A third group of scholars argue that liberalism and racism are long coexisting traditions with distinct rationales and that it is therefore difficult to reach a final judgment about the nature of liberal politics and racial equality.¹⁹ Sociologist Benjamin Ringer has argued that the main exemplar of liberalism in the Americas—the United States—was founded on and perpetuated an ideological dualism between the American creed and the racial creed. “America’s historic treatment of its racial minorities has been both an expression and product of the dialectal tension and struggle between these two models,” he notes.²⁰ Ringer goes on to discuss how this duality has expressed itself in policy. Relatedly, political scientist Rogers Smith has shown that white racism in the United States—what he calls ascriptive inequality—has been a tradition in its own right with theological and scientific rationales. Smith criticizes accounts of American political ideology that stress its liberal democratic features at the expense of its “inegalitarian ascriptive ones.” This implies taking a “multiple traditions” view of U.S. politics. For two-thirds of U.S. history, the majority of the population was explicitly excluded from citizenship based on ascriptive criteria such as race and sex. Elimination of those criteria has not followed the straight line toward greater openness that the conventional story describes. Immigration law was much more racially restrictive in 1924 than it was in 1860.²¹ Carol Horton’s history of the relationship between racism and different forms of U.S. liberalism similarly concludes that these strands have coexisted but that there is no definitive connection between them.²²

Liberalism was less hegemonic in Latin America than in the United States, given the strength of conservativism in many settings, but Latin American countries also had multiple traditions that often included different forms of liberalism and racism. Racial distinctions were disavowed in constitutions but pervasive in everyday life.²³ An overarching lesson is that some forms of liberalism could coexist with racist policies, which came to the fore or receded depending on struggles among interest groups and the extent to which politics was built on a mass base.

How well does each of these three perspectives explain ethnic selection in immigration law? The whiggish and critical race perspectives leave unresolved a double historical puzzle. First, if racism is incompatible with liberalism in practice, as the received wisdom maintains, why did liberal democracies implement racially discriminatory immigration and nationality policies before other countries and then lag behind undemocratic countries in doing away with such policies? The view of racism as an anomaly to be worked out in the fullness of history’s progression to a liberal state of universal equality is empirically wrong. As we show in Chapter 3, the leading hemispheric exemplar of liberal democracy pioneered and persisted in the application of ethnic exclusions. Moreover, as Rogers Smith points out, there was no linear progression toward universalism. Second, if liberalism is inherently racist, as critical race theorists maintain, why have the most egregious historical discriminators—the United States and Canada—allowed the transformation of their populations by letting in large numbers of formerly excluded groups? We show that liberalism is not i...