pilot, were welcomed with open arms, and none were taken into custody. Yet, a few days later, a boatload of Chinese seeking asylum landed in San Francisco Bay, and every single person on board who could be rounded up was incarcerated. Many applied for asylum arguing that they feared persecution because of their opposition to China’s one-child-per-family birth policy or because they had supported the protesting students at Tiennanmen Square in 1989. It was the nature of these claims that exclusionists labeled outrageous, citing the Chinese as perfect examples of how the asylum system was being exploited. After several Chinese boats arrived—particularly the highly publicized Golden Venture in New York Harbor in 1993—exclusionists were able to rally great public and political support for their cause, and asylum and undocumented immigration has been on the front page ever since.
Facing a severe budget problem, California’s Governor Pete Wilson added a good deal of fuel to the fire in 1992 by blaming many of the state’s fiscal woes on immigrants. His charge was that immigrants were costing state taxpayers billions in public assistance, medical care, and education. Armed with gubernatorial support, the main lobbyist for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in California, the former national INS Commissioner Alan Nelson, and a former INS regional official, Harold Ezell, joined forces with other neonativists in California to place Proposition 187 on the 1994 ballot. Targeting undocumented immigrants in Proposition 187 proved to be a smart political tactic which enabled its proponents to attract supporters who might otherwise not have been opposed to immigration per se.
Throughout the Proposition 187 debates, its major proponents claimed that they were motivated only by a concern with undocumented immigrants, and that documented immigrants were beneficial to the country. They lied, of course. As soon as Proposition 187 passed, neonativists immediately set their sights on reducing the flow of legal immigrants. Thus, responding to political pressure, the Commission on Legal Immigration Re-form, chaired by the late former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, recommended reducing legal immigration by a third. Congressman Lamar Smith and Senator Alan Simpson also introduced proposals that would make cuts. Even before Proposition 187, Republicans in Congress attacked legal immigrants by proposing to reduce spending by eliminating lawful permanent residents from benefits that ranged from Supplemental Security Income to school lunch programs for their children. The welfare cuts were enacted by President Clinton in 1996.
Clearly, the historical cycles of anti-immigrant backlash can successfully sway political opinion that gets manifested in the form of exclusionist legislation. Demographic changes across the country over the last couple of decades and predictions for the future provide the impetus for much of the nativist sentiment today, especially for those uncomfortable with notions of diversity and change.
Refugees, immigrants, and their advocates have come to rely upon the final and most famous lines of the American Jewish poet Emma Lazarus’s sonnet engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
The problem is that long before this gift from the French people was even dedicated by President Grover Cleveland in May 1886, the United States had adopted policies antithetical to the spirit of the Lazarus poem. Her sentiment is simply not embodied in the constitution and has no legal meaning. Nativists and xenophobes have graffitied over the verse time and time again. And time and time again, the Supreme Court has found nothing in the constitution to nullify federal immigration laws related to admissions criteria, exclusion grounds, or deportation.
The kinds of anti-immigrant statements we hear today from Pete Wilson, Patrick Buchanan, Peter Brimelow, Alan Simpson, FAIR, and others are simply not new. When their words begin to carry weight and get implemented into immigration policies, we know that the nativisttaggers have struck again, and that the powers-that-be have once more become uncomfortable with what is becoming of the definition of an American.
chapter 3 Mi Cliente y Amigo Rodolfo Martinez Padilla
I am often asked by students and friends, especially those who work with community-based organizations, why I decided to specialize in immigration law. My sense is that they are seeking a romanticized answer about how I was moved by my parents’ struggles with the immigration process, or that I was inspired by the plight of migrants and refugees seeking freedom or a better life, or that perhaps the inequities of the immigration laws or enforcement procedures sparked my interest. Indeed any of these explanations could be plausible. But the truth is that I fell into the field because the only opening available in the office where I wanted to work was in immigration law.
Upon entering law school, specializing in immigration law was not the plan. During the summer after my first year of law school, I volunteered as a law clerk in the Chinatown/North Beach Office of the San Francisco Neighborhood Legal Assistance Foundation (SFNLAF). A variety of cases were assigned to me, but most pertained to landlord-tenant disputes or consumer issues. The work was so rewarding and stimulating that I continued to clerk there until I graduated in 1974. Clearly, law school would have been a miserable time but for my concurrent work at SFNLAF that provided context and meaning for my training as a lawyer. By bar exam time, SFNLAF was unequivocally the place I wanted to work. Since the only opening was in immigration, I grabbed it and soon found myself immersed in a workload of over a hundred open cases.
In retrospect, becoming an immigration lawyer made sense for me. As it turns out, practicing any kind of law in or near Chinatown in the mid-1970s would have meant working with immigrants, given the changing demographics of the community. Although the 1970 census counted more U.S.-born than foreign-born Chinese Americans, by 1980 the reverse was true. But as the son of an immigrant, with many immigrant relatives, and growing up in a town with numerous immigrant residents, becoming an immigration lawyer has meant something special, as it would for anyone with a similar background.
Stories from my own family’s immigration history provide plenty of fuel for my interest in the field. My father was born in Oong On Lei Village in Canton Province, China in 1893, and entered the United States on a false claim to U.S. citizenship. He admitted that he was born in China in 1893. But his father, who had been a cook during the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad, claimed that his birth certificate was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and that he had traveled to China around the time that my father was conceived. Therefore, my father entered as the son of a U.S. citizen. My mother was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1901, and was therefore a U.S. citizen at birth. When she was three, she accompanied her mother, a native of China, to China so that her mother could care for her own ailing mother. My parents met in 1920 through a marriage broker who escorted my father to my mother’s village, Ngan Voo. My mother was not one of the women in the village looking for a husband, but my father spotted her at a distance and insisted on meeting her. My mother eventually immigrated as the spouse of a U.S. citizen. Although she was a citizen at birth, she could not reenter as a citizen for two reasons. First, she did not have her birth records to prove her place of birth. And second, technically she had lost her citizenship by marrying a foreign national at a time when the law stripped women of U.S. citizenship for marrying foreign men. Of course my father was making a false claim to citizenship, so their situation presented a messy picture to say the least.
Before my mother could reenter the United States in 1926 as the spouse of a U.S. citizen, she had to pass inspection at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. Between 1910 and 1940, about fifty thousand Chinese were confined—often for months and years at a time—in Angel Island’s bleak wooden barracks, where inspectors would conduct grueling interrogations. In a sense, my mother was lucky because her detention on Angel Island lasted only a week. Months earlier, she had received coaching instructions from my father (who had returned to the United States soon after their marriage) on how to answer certain questions. This was typical of the Chinese immigrants of the time. The strict exclusion laws forced distortions of family trees and histories if immigration was to succeed. The schemes devised to thwart the racist immigration laws were ingenious. For both the successful and unsuccessful, however, it was agonizing to be compelled to lie and cheat in order to reunite with family members.
The