A.    A “Nativist” Political Coalition Advocated Severe Restrictions On Non-White Immigration In The 1920s

 

The felony unauthorized reentry after deportation statute codified at 8 U.S.C. 1326, like its misdemeanor counterpart, codified in Section 1325, traces its origins to the 1920s. That era saw increasingly vocal and active white resentment of other racial groups, a period so racially fractious that it earned the moniker the “Tribal Twenties.” Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965, at 131 (2017) (City of Inmates) (citing *6 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, at 264-299 (1988)). This was “a time when the Ku Klux Klan was reborn, Jim Crow came of age, and public intellectuals preached the science of eugenics.” Ibid.

Over the course of the decade, a group of white lawmakers known as the “Nativists” increased their political influence by pushing an agenda that demonized all immigrants from anywhere other than certain favored European countries. City of Inmates 131. The Nativists warned that freely permitting the inflow of immigrants from around the world would repeat the “tragedy” of the slave trade, though ironically the Nativists used the word “tragedy” to refer not to the evils of slavery but rather to the introduction of African people into the United Sates. Ibid.

Meanwhile, Mexican immigrant laborers were making a home for themselves in borderlands and building a “MexAmerica.” City of Inmates 131-132. These immigrants settled into and created communities, built homes and “established everything from newspapers and businesses to bands and baseball teams.” Id. at 132. They “made full and permanent lives for themselves and their children-an increasing number of whom were U.S.-born citizens-in the United States.” Ibid. The Nativist movement saw these burgeoning communities as a threat to its national project of restricting permanent immigration to select Europeans. Id. at 134 (discussing how the boom in Mexican immigration “unnerved the Nativists” as it “threatened to degrade the nation's ‘Aryan’ stock”).