A More Appropriate Way to Couch Immigration Law

I heard an immigration scholar recently say something like, "It's not that we have some immigration laws that are or have become racially tinged. It's that all of our current immigration laws were built upon racist foundations." 

For so many well intentioned people, law and order has become the predominant point of defense for maintaining and strengthening immigration laws. It should be noted that in the 1840s, Rhode Island Governor Samuel Ward King formed the Law and Order Party specifically to stand against immigrant blight. Only propertied white men had legal rights in his view. The law and order motif shortly after became a common claim by slave holders in the south in preserving slavery against the disorder of freeing them. Law and order as a phrase has racist roots, whether or not we feel we are applying it in such a way. Still, we push the law and order concept. It boils down to the simple fact that people are illegally crossing our border and so the laws need to be absolutely or more rigidly enforced. It's simple black and white. 

Actually, it's simple yellow and white. 

Our first set of immigration laws were absolutely racist and largely aimed at the increases of Chinese immigrants, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This Act and subsequent immigration laws up unto the 1960s relied on similar tropes applied to various ethnic groups. In reality, the same assumptions are applied to current illegal immigrants, from their lack of assimilation to cultural impacts to welfare abuse. Nothing has changed, except we neuter the racial aspect of our tropes to make it look like our focus is on order and security. In short, we justify our xenophobia by denying its very existence, yet we still use its fundamental arguments to keep or harden our immigration laws. 

This doesn't mean that safety or security ought not be concerns, but rather that we need to steer away from old stereotypes and excuses, re-humanize the immigrant, and then find an amiable solution instead of our current reticence. We need real reform and not just old rhetoric.