How Anti-Blackness Shapes U.S. Immigration Policy — A Q&A with Attorney and Immigration Policy Advocate Breanne Palmer
By Oprah Cunningham
We connected with Breanne Palmer, attorney and immigration policy advocate, to discuss how U.S. immigration and citizenship policies have been shaped by the historical exclusion of Black people, particularly enslaved Africans who were denied legal personhood and citizenship. We discuss how the Fourteenth Amendment sought to rectify this injustice through birthright citizenship and how anti-Black immigration policies persist, disproportionately affecting Black migrants.
Q: How has the historical displacement and exclusion of Black people shaped U.S. immigration and citizenship policies?
A: Firstly, birthright citizenship, which is described in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, came directly out of the experience of enslaved African people and descendants of African people being granted U.S. citizenship after the end of the period of enslavement in the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment established that if you are born in the United States, you are entitled to citizenship in the United States. Prior to that, all enslaved Black people in the United States were not only considered not fully human, they were certainly not part of the group of people who could have the rights and privileges of citizenship. I connect the idea of birthright citizenship to the Black American experience because I believe that everything that comes after is shaped by that first experience of enslaved Black people not being seen as fully human.
Another concept I think about when it comes to understanding the historical displacement and exclusion of Black people in the United States and how that affects our immigration system is thinking about Black migration experiences, both when arriving to the United States and within the United States. There’s a fantastic docuseries on PBS called Great Migrations – A People On The Move from Henry Louis Gates Jr that highlights the migration stories of Black Americans who moved within the United States in the “Great Migration” of the 20th century
It’s essential for us to understand that Black Americans have a migration story. They know what it’s like to need to pick up and move, to seek a better life, to seek safety, to seek escape from systemic oppression. I want that to be a bridge between communities so that Black Americans who have migration stories can better understand Black immigrants who come here from places with different histories but similar struggles with anti-Blackness, and so Black immigrants can better understand what it’s like to be a Black American in this country. These movements helped shape what our immigration system looks like today.
Q: In what ways does anti-Blackness continue to influence U.S. immigration law and policy today? And are we seeing differences in the past couple of months?
A: Anti-Blackness plays an integral part in U.S. immigration law and policy. It is baked into it, just like it is baked into everything else in this country. There’s always been a public tension between who gets to be considered an immigrant, an asylum seeker, or a refugee. With the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment over the last 10 years especially, and then now with the new administration, anti-immigrant feelings are getting more explicitly anti-Black than they’ve ever been before. If we think of the first Trump administration, the Muslim and African ban was pretty explicit, right? He was targeting countries that were either majority Muslim or countries that were majority Black on the African continent. There are now rumors of new travel bans that would be more expansive, affecting more African and Caribbean nations.
We’ve also historically seen attacks on legal immigration pathways that are disproportionately used by or available to Black immigrants. The Diversity Visa is one example — a tool used to help diversify who could attain a travel visa to come to the United States and potentially establish permanent residence. The Diversity Visa has been in jeopardy under multiple presidential administrations. I also think of anti-Blackness as being quite explicit when you think about how Vice President JD Vance, when he was a candidate, accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating pets. I mean, that was an explicitly anti-Black attack! It bought into anti-Haitian stereotypes and also created a world where Black people in Springfield, Ohio and in other parts of the country were all suddenly vulnerable to attacks. You know, how does a passerby know someone is Haitian? They know that that person is Black. So we saw threats to Black school children and Black people on the street. It’s becoming more apparent in our present moment that attacks on immigrants include Black immigrants, and that means that there are going to be attacks on Black people in general.
One of the most flagrant ways that we could continue to see anti-Blackness is if the administration follows through on granting asylum for White South African people. We are familiar with the history of South Africa being an apartheid state until the 1990s, when the majority of Black South Africans were completely locked out of civil society and subject to incredible amounts of oppression. Now, this administration claims that white South Africans, who were in power for at least a century, if not more, are now being targeted by anti-White sentiment by the South African government as it works to grant Black South Africans the opportunities, land, and rights they were denied for so long. If this administration decides to offer refuge and asylum to White South Africans, that’s an incredibly anti-Black action. That would be a stunning development, I think, and a new low when it comes to modern American anti-Blackness.
Q: How do Black immigrants and Black Americans experience and navigate anti-Blackness differently within the United States?
A: Even though our experiences are different, I’m mindful not to create more division by highlighting the experiences of Black Americans versus those of Black immigrants. We are all racialized and caught in the same crosshairs of anti-Black racism, but we have very different consequences when encountering anti-Blackness. We’re all experiencing the over-policing of our communities. On the Black American side, you go from over-policing to criminalization to mass incarceration. For Black immigrants, you go from over-policing, to criminalization, to mass incarceration, then on to deportation. So there’s a lot of overlap. We all face the possibility of deadly encounters with law enforcement because of our Blackness. But there are just different consequences.
Q: What are the broader impacts of anti-Black immigration policies on both Black and non-Black communities?
A: Anti-Black immigration policies clue you into what everyone is potentially going to experience. Because Black people are disproportionately affected by certain systems, they give you a good idea of what everyone is going through. For example, the use of mass immigration detention in the United States began with the mass detention of Haitian migrants in the 80s and 90s. At first, we were welcoming those migrants from the Caribbean. However, as more and more Haitian migrants started to journey from the island to, generally, Florida, the United States took a different stance and attitude towards that type of migration.
It’s no coincidence that anti-immigrant sentiment and the use of mass detention of immigrants happens when that immigrant population is made up of Black people. As migration diversifies, we get more punitive and become more suspicious. We start introducing more vetting, more holding in place, and we start slowing the process down for migrants. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s also no coincidence that that happened roughly 20 to 30 years after the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement opened up legal pathways for immigration from countries around the world that we were not previously accepting migrants from. So it’s no coincidence that as soon as migration diversifies meaningfully and more non-White people start coming, now we’re mirroring the criminal legal system and holding people in detention, asking them more questions, and introducing more barriers to entry.
When moving through the immigration system or the removal process, Black immigrants also face higher rates of detention and have worse outcomes when they’re in detention. They’re less likely to win the right to bond or wait out their immigration hearings in their communities. Those are problems that all immigrants face, but Black immigrants are feeling the brunt or the worst of the immigration system at every turn.
Another piece of this puzzle is that, so often, people who hold anti-immigrant beliefs also hold anti-Black beliefs. They go hand in hand. Think of the 2022 Buffalo, New York mass shooting at a grocery store. In that case, that shooter was targeting Black people while also espousing the anti-immigrant “great replacement” theory, which is also anti-semitic. It’s a three-for-one. There was a significant overlap between anti-Blackness, anti-immigrant sentiment, and other types of discrimination and bigotry. We can’t treat these issues as cleanly separate and apart from one another. They’re all interconnected, and they require a collective response.
Stay tuned for a follow up conversation with Breanne Palmer, where we explore how to navigate these complex issues, potential solutions, and the need for solidarity.
Oprah Cunningham is the strategic communications associate at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.