Politico Magazine (Opinion)
By Claudio Saunt
October 25, 2015
Donald
Trump says that he would deport all undocumented immigrants in the
United States, an estimated 11 million people. American cities and
counties in the Southwest
and Midwest tried to expel Mexican-Americans once before in the 1930s,
with traumatic results for the families affected. But perhaps an even
more illuminating comparison is with the mass deportation that the
United States sponsored a hundred years earlier,
in the 1830s.
In
that decade, the federal government uprooted some 80,000 Native
Americans from their homes and forced them west of the Mississippi, into
what is now Oklahoma. It was
a humanitarian disaster and remains one of the most shameful episodes
in the country’s history. Though few if any Americans are proud of the
Trail of Tears, as the Cherokees call their harrowing expulsion from the
Southeast and deadly journey westward, politicians
are now seriously proposing a similar policy toward undocumented
immigrants. “I think it’s worth discussing,” stated Ben Carson, Trump’s
closest rival for the Republican presidential nomination.
There
are some obvious differences between undocumented immigrants today and
native peoples in the early 1830s. For one, American Indians had been
living in what is now
the United States since “time immemorial,” as many people observed in
the era, whereas undocumented immigrants are recent arrivals.
But
there are many similarities too. Just as Indians were a reviled
minority, so too undocumented immigrants are victims of vicious racism.
Just as Indians occupied a
legal netherworld—neither fully sovereign nor accorded the rights of
U.S. citizens—so too undocumented immigrants find themselves living in
similarly nebulous conditions, subject to unchecked administrative
rulings and often left in jail without judicial recourse.
Just as state governments passed laws to drive Indians off their lands,
so have they done with undocumented immigrants. (Alas, my home state of
Georgia led the way in both the 1820s and the 2010s.)
The
similarities and differences could be debated at length, but
undocumented immigrants undeniably face the same threat as Indians in
the early 19th century: state-administered
deportation. In the 1830s, the United States oversaw the forced
emigration of about 0.6 percent of the population within its borders. As
a proportion of the current U.S. population, Donald Trump proposes to
deport six times as many individuals.
Nearly
200 years ago the results were disastrous. Officials were hired with no
knowledge of indigenous languages and no experience with the people who
spoke them. Francis
Armstrong, who was appointed to deport the Choctaws, for example, was
said to be a “pet” of President Andrew Jackson and was “entirely
ignorant of the actual state of things” in the Choctaw Nation. Benjamin
Currey, in charge of Cherokee deportation, managed
to alienate the Cherokees almost instantly with his foul temper. After
watching a party of starving and ill-clothed Choctaw migrants pass by
his house in Lake Providence, Louisiana, one retired army officer
condemned the “unprincipled” emigration agents who
sought to profit from the miseries of the victims.
The
liquidation of property, real and personal, invited corruption.
Government agents bought the possessions that emigrants were forced to
leave behind—pots and pans,
livestock, and even violins—at a steep discount. They colluded with
business partners to purchase the most valuable land at a pittance. And,
while some earnestly made the best effort they could to ensure the
health of displaced families, others neglected to
feed the emigrants, left them stranded in frigid temperatures and
failed to provide basic medical care. When the deportees arrived in the
trans-Mississippi West, they had no means of subsistence. Some starved
to death.
Modern
air travel eliminates some of these difficulties, but not all of them.
Undocumented immigrants would still be pressed to liquidate their
possessions overnight.
They would be forced to leave behind family members. And, like native
peoples in the 1830s, they would face uncertain and even dangerous
conditions when they reach their destinations.
Indian
Removal was at the time the single-most contentious issue the nation
had ever faced, as measured by the hundreds of petitions—nearly all of
them in protest—that
flooded Congress. Petitions arrived from small towns and major cities,
stretching from Maine to Ohio. Most were a page or two, but a few, when
unfurled, reached 10 feet in length and contained the signatures of
hundreds of men and women.
With
one or two exceptions, the petitions voiced a powerful opposition to
the forced emigration of native peoples. They addressed the particulars
of the matter—broken
treaties and the imperious claims of state governments—but they also
spoke to a deep-seated belief about the young republic that is relevant
to today’s debate about undocumented immigrants. The United States, they
insisted, stood for “justice and the rights
of mankind.” It did not disregard “the cries of the oppressed and the
sufferings of the helpless.”
Recalling
their own ancestors who had fled from oppressive governments in Europe,
petitioners called for justice to be done to the native peoples who
long ago had welcomed
European immigrants. They condemned state laws that persecuted Native
Americans and questioned the ability of the government to remove so many
people safely. More generally, they called on Congress to prevent “our
national character from being disgraced, by
the perpetration of an atrocious outrage.”
The
Indian Removal Act passed the House of Representatives in May 1830 by a
mere five votes out of 199 cast. The public debate over the policy led
anti-slavery activists
such as William Lloyd Garrison to recognize the folly and immorality of
mass deportation and encouraged them to turn against contemporaneous
efforts to deport free and enslaved African-Americans to Africa. The
deportation of Indians, recognized one group of
residents from Lexington, New York, would “stamp our national character
with indelible infamy.” They were right. Politicians and their
supporters should take note. We shouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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