Immigration Article of the Day: Manners of Exclusion: From the Asiatic Barred Zone to the Muslim Ban by Sherally Munshi

Manners of Exclusion: From the Asiatic Barred Zone to the Muslim Ban by Sherally Munshi

Abstract

From the moment President Donald Trump signed it into effect, the Muslim ban would become the focus of outrage. Thousands gathered at airports across the country to protest the executive order. Lawyers filed challenges. Universities and CEOs issued public condemnations. Earlier that same week, the President signed another executive order, calling for the creation of a massive deportation force which, within a few months, rounded up hundreds of thousand of undocumented immigrants, terrorizing millions more. Another executive order halved the number of refugees annually admitted to the country and cancelled the protected status previously extended to displaced Haitians and Central Americans. Those orders generated far less outrage, few protests, no corporate press releases. Why does the Muslim ban seem to betray “everything we stand for,” as Dick Cheney announced, while the other orders are received with relative complacence?

This essay attempts to answer that question by tracing a set of shifts in the rhetorical norms and legal architecture governing immigration law and policy over the past century. The controversial enactment of the Muslim ban is particularly resonant with failed attempts to pass a “Hindu” ban, almost exactly one hundred years before. Constrained by a shift in global norms governing racial discourse, Congress hoping to exclude Indian immigrants from the United States eventually succeeded in passing a law to exclude “Hindus” not “by name” but through the invention of a geographic designation, the “Asiatic Barred Zone.” In the post-colonial era, the exclusion of immigrants on the basis of racial identity is no longer tolerable, but the exclusion of immigrants on the basis of nationality or place of origin has become entirely normative—as the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the Muslim ban demonstrates.

KJ