From Johnson-Reed to Hart-Celler: The Theo-logic of U.S. Immigration Policy

Familiarity with the discourse around U.S. immigration policy seems to suggest a tension bordering on a paradox, which is heralded by the two iron giants of the U.S. border: the Statue of Liberty, with its beacon-promise of welcome, and the borderwall, with its death-dealing rebuff. Since its origins in the nineteenth century, U.S. immigration policy has possessed imaginaries of both inclusion and exclusion—John F. Kennedy’s nation of immigrants and the Klu Klux Klan’s America for Americans. This tension is often read as a cycle, with the country swinging between more and less nativist rhetoric and policy; the movement understood to be driven by other social pressures, primarily economics and national security. In the United States today, it would seem that the cycle has swung back towards a more robust nativism, with the Klan’s “America First” rhetoric revived for a new era of immigrant demonization.

Historians such as Kunal Parker and Aristide Zolberg have challenged this reading of the history of immigration policy.[i] While not denying the waxing and waning of nativist sentiment and policymaking, both Parker and Zolberg show how practices of inclusion and exclusion are not a paradox but a production. It is through selective inclusions and exclusions along lines of indigeneity, race, religion, gender, and class that both legal and symbolic Americanness is created and recreated. And, as Parker argues, excluding the other occurs not only at the territorial border or in relation to the newly arrived; rather, the law has made foreigners of long-term residents and non-residents, inside and outside the territory, including African Americans, women, and the propertyless. To perceive a paradox in immigration policy assumes a coherent national citizenship that either grounds a narrative of inclusion, the nation of immigrants, or a narrative of exclusion, America for Americans. But the assumption of coherence is flawed; it is, rather, through practices of both inclusion and exclusion that national citizenship is continually constituted, frequently, if not exclusively, along racial lines. 

In this paper, I build on the work of scholars like Parker and Zolberg by attending to the theological dimension of making foreigners. While Parker and Zolberg note that religion is among those factors upon which foreignness is calculated, I am interested in how foreignness is theologized through the concept of the heathen. Drawing on Kathryn Gin Lum’s history of the heathen in the United States, I argue that the idea of the heathen is central to the discursive foreignness that ungirds legal practices of exclusion.[ii] My argument is twofold. First, the idea of the heathen connects practices of exclusion, and in particular racial exclusion, to discourses of European Christian civilizational superiority. In addition to the work of Gin Lum, I engage with the work of Sylvester Johnson, Charles Mills, and Sylvia Wynter to develop the role of the racial heathen as a submerged category of modern political thought driving exclusion in settler-colonial states such as the United States.[iii] Second, the exclusion of the heathen is integral to the consolidation of the American narrative of exceptionalism constructed around a theo-logic of chosenness. The chosen is the counterpart of the heathen and makes space for forms of exclusionary inclusion into the City on the Hill in furtherance of the United States fulfilling its political telos. Along these two lines of argument, the heathen-chosen dynamic offers critical insight into the theo-logic of the intertwined dynamics of inclusion and exclusion observed by Parker and Zolberg.

To illustrate my argument, I read two dichotomous moments in U.S. immigration policy, the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act that created the national origin quota system and the 1965 Hart-Celler Act that ended it. These two laws, like the Statue of Liberty and the borderwall, could be read in terms of the paradox of inclusion and exclusion. The Johnson-Reed Act tied immigration quotas explicitly to national origin and implicitly to race with the intended purpose of restricting immigration from outside of Northern Europe. Hart-Celler, by contrast, was a civil rights era law that ended the quotas and replaced that model with a facially neutral system of preference categories organized primarily around family reunification and employment. By reading each legislative development contextually through the framework of the heathen-chosen dynamic, I argue that each of these legal developments, nevertheless, incorporates forms of inclusion and exclusion that function to advance a religio-racial idea of American exceptionalism. From Johnson-Reed to Hart-Celler is a swing away from nativist exclusion when read through the paradox narrative, but when read in light of the heathen and the chosen it reveals the ongoing theo-logic of U.S. immigration policy.  

[i] Kunal M. Parker, Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). I also work from Roxanne Dunbar-Oritz's insight that the inclusion-exclusion dynamic in immigration policy is built on a foundation of settler conquest. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Boston: Beacon Press, 2021).

[ii] Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022).

[iii] Sylvester Johnson, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.