Immigration and Race

At a key moment in The Good Shepherd, the 2006 film about the birth of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), agent Edward Wilson (played by Matt Damon) pays a visit to the Mafia boss Joseph Palmi (Joe Pesci). As they sit down to discuss their common “problem” of Fidel Castro's Cuba, Wilson insinuates to Palmi that he will be deported to Italy if he refuses to cooperate with the CIA. Clearly insulted, Palmi retorts, “You're not going to deport anyone. I've lived in this country since I was two months old.” Palmi then questions Wilson, “Tell me something. We Italians got family and the Church. The Irish got the old country. The Jews got their tradition. Hell, even the Blacks got their music. But, what have you people got?” Perfectly calm and deadly serious, Wilson (a Yale graduate and member of Yale's secret society, Skull and Bones) responds, “We've got the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.”

The preceding pointed exchange captures with dramatic precision the mid-century assumptions about the way that immigration and race are linked in U.S. history. Though often celebrated as an idyllic “melting pot” or mythic “mosaic” of racial equality and ethnic tolerance, the history of race and ethnic relations in the United States is actually one of struggle for inclusion as full and equal members by a series of immigrant and racial “minorities”—often thought of as immigrant outsiders “just visiting.” Ironically, one “ethnic” or “racial” group never directly named during the above exchange, who Palmi refers to as, “you people” (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants or WASPs), is the very group that founded the United States as a nation and established itself as the charter group atop a surprisingly resilient, if still evolving and increasingly complex ethnoracial hierarchy.

More ironic still is that this fictionalized exchange between a “blue-blooded” representative of the U.S. “mainstream” and an Italian American (both of whom would be defined as “White” today) took place before 1965, the year that heralded the arrival on U.S. shores of a massive new wave of non-European and largely non-White immigrants from all across the world. Given their large numbers and unprecedented racial diversity, the arrival of this most recent wave of immigrants has challenged long-established notions of race and ethnicity in the United States. This group has also tested as never before the nation's ongoing effort to balance the assimilation of immigrants with respect for their racial and ethnic pluralism. In short, what is at stake is the United States's definition of itself as “a nation of immigrants.” This entry looks at immigration through the lens of race.