Xeno comes from the Greek
for foreigner or stranger,
like a friend you haven't met yet
or a new neighbor from a different state or country.
And phobia means fear.
You know it when you feel it,
spiders, heights, the Wi-Fi going out.
But the difference here is that xenophobia,
the fear of foreigners,
isn't something that only affects you,
it's learned through others,
building on misinformation and fear
with roots that affect entire
races, nationalities, and religions.
In America, we have been teaching xenophobia for a long time
and we have yet to unlearn it.
Standing tall on Ellis Island,
the words of the Statue of Liberty read,
"Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
"yearning to breathe free."
And though we have called ourselves a nation of immigrants,
our history tells a different story.
Since America's founding over 200 years ago,
80 million immigrants have come to the U.S.
Since 1882, however, 57 million of them have been deported.
Immigrants who are poor or from countries or races
thought to be inferior,
were seen as dangerous invaders.
They were used as scapegoats
for social and economic problems.
In this way, xenophobia and racism worked together
to create labels and persecute all kinds of people
as others who supposedly did not belong.
With the arrival of the first settlers,
indigenous peoples were labeled inferior,
undeserving of their own lands.
They were forced from their homes
and subjected to both cultural and physical genocide.
They were labeled as less than human
and that rhetoric not only worked,
it became a pattern.
A similar pattern is seen again
when Africans were kidnapped, brought to America,
and enslaved for centuries.
And when slavery ended in 1864,
black people in America were still subjected
to laws, social restrictions,
and racially motivated violence
that made it impossible
to be fully equal as American citizens.
The xenophobic pattern emerges again with immigration.
Chinese immigrants were labeled
a "dangerous immigrant invasion"
as they arrived during
the California gold rush of the 1850s.
The anti-Chinese movement came to a head in 1882
with the Chinese Exclusion Act.
This was the first federal law
that singled out an immigrant group
for exclusion based on race or class.
All Chinese laborers were barred
but members of the wealthy and professional classes
were still allowed to apply for admission.
Laws like this reinforce the xenophobic pattern.
They created a system that prioritizes the wealthy and white
and excludes almost everyone else.
They helped create the idea
of good versus bad immigrant communities.
Good immigrants, often those who are wealthy
and came from northern and Western European countries,
faced few restrictions entering the country
and becoming naturalized citizens.
Others deemed bad immigrants
faced growing restrictions and inspections
upon arrival in the country.
Asian immigrants were even barred
from becoming naturalized citizens.
The Chinese Exclusion Act also established the country's
first federal detention and deportation system.
In the San Francisco Bay,
the Angel Island immigration station opened in 1910
as the main port of entry for Asian immigrants.
By 1940, 100,000 Chinese were detained on Angel Island
as they tried to enter the country.
They made up 70% of all detainees
and their average stay was for two to three weeks.
Meanwhile, across the country,
only 20% of the mostly European immigrant arrivals
were detained for one or two days.
The Immigration Restriction League,
formed in Boston in 1894,
used the damaging and scientifically
disproven field of race science
to outline a racial hierarchy that put
northern and Western Europeans at the top
and all others below them.
They argued that immigration from those at the bottom
would mean the disappearance of a pure, white America.
President Theodore Roosevelt furthered this viewpoint
by calling on all southern
and Eastern European immigrants already in the country
to fully assimilate to preserve what
he called an "America for Americans."
During this mass hysteria,
the KKK circulated materials
condemning the "flood of foreigners"
and their xenophobia fueled their larger campaigns
of racial terror directed at African Americans.
This racist propaganda worked.
By the 1920s, the federal government
passed national origins quotas,
reducing immigration from southern and Eastern Europe
and all but eradicating Asian immigration.
During the economic disaster of the 1930s,
calls to "get rid of the Mexicans"
led to hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants
getting pushed out of the United States.
Some left voluntarily,
but many were coerced or deported.
Ultimately, 60% of those pushed out
were American citizens by birth.
The U.S. Border Patrol was quickly formed
to enforce new laws that made it punishable
to enter the country without permission
and, at the same time,
new laws targeted immigrants already in the country.
Between 1913 and 1923,
many states passed laws that
restricted non-citizens from owning property
while the federal government enacted new laws
that restricted their pathways to citizenship.
In 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled to bar Japanese immigrants
from becoming naturalized citizens.
It was a ruling that reflected
a growing anti-Japanese movement,
one that ultimately to the illegal incarceration
of over 120,000 Japanese Americans
after the attacks on Pearl Harbor.
2/3 of the incarcerated population were American citizens.
Following World War II,
the nation found a new openness to addressing
racial injustice and immigration inequality.
And although the Civil Rights movement
in the 1960s led to the end
of official policies of segregation,
racism and xenophobia persisted.
The 1965 Immigration Act ended the national origins quota
but it was still designed to prioritize European immigration
while targeting Mexican immigrants.
And as immigrants continued to come,
often with the partnership of U.S. employers,
they had to do so without documentation
and lived their lives in the shadows.
In 1984, the first privately owned
immigration detention center was opened.
A facility designed to profit from the strict immigration
and detention policies continuing to take form.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11th,
the 2000s saw an intense increase in Islamophobia
as well as the doubling down on xenophobia
around Mexican and Latin American immigrants.
Detentions and deportations grew rapidly
as the federal government poured funding
into the Border Patrol
and building a fence along the southern border.
Today we have between 45,000 and 55,000 immigrant detainees
held in over 200 detention centers,
both privately owned and government run.
Mass incarceration in our domestic prison complex
impacts Black and brown Americans the most
with Black Americans being imprisoned
at over five times the levels of white citizens.
These are the effects of xenophobia and racism.
They are part of a pattern that
has shaped America's history.
But it doesn't have to shape its future.
It's up to all of us today
to rebuild the foundation on which we all live,
to stop cycles of fear and violence,
to stop yearning to breathe free
and to help free each other.