By Dean Kevin R. Johnson

Consideration of the intersection of race and class in American social life is timely in light of the 2008 Presidential election, which undeniably focused national attention on both race (with the first African American elected President) and class (with the nation reeling from the devastating impacts of the worst economic downturn in the U.S. economy since the Great Depression).   In my estimation, there is no better body of law to illustrate the close nexus between race and class than U.S. immigration law and its enforcement.  Put simply, U.S. immigration law historically has operated — and continues to operate — to prevent many poor and working noncitizens of color from migrating to, and harshly treating those living in, the United States.

As in many areas of law, matters of race and class in the U.S. immigration laws are unquestionably more complicated today than in the past.  Fortunately, express racial exclusions can no longer be found in the immigration laws.  A by-product of the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, the Immigration Act of 1965^[1] abolished the racially discriminatory national origins quotas system that had remained a bulwark of U.S. immigration law since 1924.

Although Congress eliminated the racial exclusions, provisions of the current U.S. immigration laws regulating entry into the United States, such as economic litmus tests^[2] and arbitrary annual limits on the number of immigrants per country,^[3] have racially disparate impacts.  All else being equal, people from the developing world — predominantly “people of color” as that category is popularly understood in the United States — find it much more difficult to migrate lawfully to this country than similarly situated noncitizens from the developed, and predominantly white, world.  Nonetheless, because of the consistently high demand among people in the developing world to migrate to the United States, people of color dominate the stream of immigrants to this country.

Although racial exclusions are something of the past, the express — and aggressive –exclusion of poor and working people remains a fundamental function of modern U.S. immigration law, embodied in the provisions of the omnibus Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.  This express discrimination against poor and working immigrants by the U.S. immigration laws in operation has disparate national origin and racial impacts, especially on prospective migrants from Mexico.

This paper offers concrete recent examples of the clear intersection of race and class in immigration law and its enforcement in the United States, with a focus on state and local efforts to regulate immigration.  Previously on this website, Professor Bill Hing analyzed the racial impacts of Arizona’s efforts to regulate immigration through a controversial measure known popularly as SB 1070.  Unfortunately, Arizona is not the only state or local jurisdiction that has entered the realm of immigration regulation.

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