American Outsiders: The Border Crisis and Civil Rights

Strip away the minute identifiers, the stray license plate, and the occasional bit of bureaucratic signage, and the images emerging from the growing crisis at the border have the look of dispatches from someplace far beyond America. They evoke the type of story that invariably features terms like “insurgency”and “vulnerable population”—conflicts in which the moral obligations are clear. The crammed concrete-walled rooms, the padlocked fences, and the dejected women and children bear the look of circumstances that, aside from an incident like Hurricane Katrina, we prefer to think of as outside the American frame of reference. The paralytic political discussions would be the stuff of dark satire were the human consequences of inaction not so damning. There are fifty thousand people stalled in migrant purgatory: that is not simply a crisis, it’s a culmination.

Partisans will debate the role of the 2008 immigration law and Barack Obama’s 2012 executive order in sparking the surge of minors entering the country illegally, but only in the most blinkered of perspectives can the crisis be understood outside of the immigration policy that has been failing for decades. The most immediate questions—What is to be done regarding the detainees? Where should they sleep, and which will be sent back?—invariably lead to broader, more complicated ones that have been too long deferred. What are the rights of people who reside within our borders, who occupy a niche in the lower tiers of the economy, whose citizenship remains an unsettled question?

The questions are critical, but they are not novel. Fifty years ago this month, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. The opening paragraph of the legislation reads like a to-do list for the creation of a modern democracy:

To enforce the constitutional right to vote, to confer jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations, to authorize the Attorney General to institute suits to protect constitutional rights in public facilities and public education, to extend the Commission on Civil Rights, to prevent discrimination in federally assisted programs, to establish a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, and for other purposes.

In the sepia-tinged version of the story, the law was the result of a collaboration between Martin Luther King, Jr., and Johnson—the orator and the operator, a testament to the possibilities of galvanic will. The reality was not nearly as neat. The heavy lifting, as Clay Risen points out in “The Bill of the Century,” was done by under-heralded lawyers and activists. There were opponents who, like Al Gore, Sr., and William Fulbright, did not easily fit into the mold of morally benighted segregationists; they were more akin to the contemporary elected officials who look at immigration reform and find themselves hemmed in between morality and self-preservation. (Orval Faubus, whom history recalls as the recalcitrant Arkansas governor whose opposition to integration triggered the 1957 crisis in Little Rock, had in fact seized upon segregation as protection against McCarthy-era attacks on his earlier leftism and his integration of public transit.)

We commonly think of the civil-rights era as a moral quest for equality. But the movement understood itself as engaged in a struggle for something more foundational: for citizenship, the status from which freedom and equal rights flowed. The more charitable critics of the racial order that then existed referred to the problem of “second-class citizenship.” Those less prone to euphemism recognized that there are no tiers in a true democracy; you are a citizen of a nation in which you have the right to vote, or you are an outsider in one in which you do not.

That outsider population was nonetheless a critical part of the economy: swelling the ranks of the military in times of war, paying taxes without reasonable input on how funds were allocated, alienated by Jim Crow from the political process. For nearly a century after emancipation, black labor remained the cornerstone of American agriculture. Those who migrated into cities were derided for “taking jobs” from whites, some of whom, during the Great Depression, organized under the banner of “No Work for Negroes” until there was full employment for whites. It’s worth recalling that Social Security and certain other liberal reforms of the New Deal era initially bypassed agricultural and domestic-service workers—who were disproportionately black (and female)—specifically to appease Southern Democrats who might otherwise oppose Roosevelt’s legislation.

The Civil Rights Act had as its objective the unambiguous rejection of the binaries that had defined the nation up to that point. And we have, for understandable reasons, become accustomed to speaking of it in the context of its successes. Obama’s second term coincides with the half-century anniversaries of the most pivotal moments in the civil-rights movement. His mere existence is a comment upon its abiding hopes. But boundless self-congratulation requires overlooking the parallels between the status of unauthorized immigrants today and of African-Americans fifty years ago.

Last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics pointed out that non-native-born workers—a category that includes those who are undocumented—are 16.3 per cent of the population. They have a labor-force-participation rate of 66.7 per cent—four points higher than that of the native-born population—and are disproportionately represented in the service sector. In the mid-nineteen-thirties, groups like the N.A.A.C.P. and the National Urban League fought against the sexual and economic exploitation of black women domestic workers. We’re far enough beyond that history for films like “The Help” and “The Butler” to be billed as uplifting narratives about a cartoonish past. Look beyond the borderland limbo, and the unsettling question becomes whether we’ve vanquished the antiquated contempt that made a civil-rights movement necessary or simply given it a new form. We scarcely notice the extent to which women working in domestic service—nannies, housekeepers, health-care aides—encounter problems much like those that confronted black American women in the Jim Crow era.

It’s easy to overlook the extent to which the civil-rights struggle was connected to economic questions that remain achingly familiar. Black exclusion from the burgeoning labor movement effectively created a separate, lower wage scale for black workers, who commonly were denied legal rights to challenge those differences. The 1963 March on Washington is now understood as a massive demonstration in support of the Civil Rights Act, but A. Philip Randolph—a labor leader and its chief architect—initially conceived of it as a gathering to protest economic exploitation. Later discussions with Martin Luther King, Jr., led them to collaborate on an event for civil and economic rights; it became the “March for Jobs and Justice.” The wage gap between blacks and whites persists, though now it exists in tandem with the gap between citizen and non-citizen labor.

There are also stark divergences in the dilemmas of immigrants and African-Americans. The point of recalling the civil-rights movement, though, is not to confirm the triumph of the American moral conscience. It’s to understand what happens to people whose labor is compensated under the table, to whom the legal system offers scant protection, and who exist along the social margins.

The year after signing the Civil Rights Act, Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act, which eliminated the immigrant quota system that was designed in the xenophobic early twentieth century. The 1965 Act liberalized immigration from places like Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean—and, in so doing, set in motion demographic resentments that are quietly ubiquitous in our current immigration debate. Until the recent dethroning of Eric Cantor, it was possible to understand the Tea Party as fundamentally driven by economic conservatism; it’s now apparent that it is, in large measure, an outlet for nativist anxieties.

One suspects that we have not eliminated the concept of second-class citizenship so much as replaced it with second-tier humanity—a category all the more durable because the denial of the title of “citizen” masks its true hypocrisy. A part of America lives in a precipitous state of exploitation. Fifty years after Johnson’s defining endorsement of civil rights, what is past is present. It is all familiar, all irreducibly American.

Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters