Family Separation and Lives in Limbo: U.S. Immigration Policy in the 1920s and during the Trump Administration

• Date: 01 July 2020
• Author: Yael Schacher
• Published date: 01 July 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716220941571
• Subject Matter: Sense-Making and Policy-Making

192 ANNALS, AAPSS, 690, July 2020

DOI: 10.1177/0002716220941571

Family

Separation and

Lives in Limbo:

U.S.

Immigration

Policy in the

1920s and dur-

ing the Trump

Administration

By

YAEL SCHACHER

941571ANN The Annals of the American AcademyFamily Separation and Lives in Limbo

research-article2020

Drawing on the author’s work with refugees and asylum

seekers in the United States, this article examines poli-

cies and practices related to family separation among

immigrants in the 1920s and now. I use data collected

from historical archives and firsthand interviews with

refugees and asylum seekers and describe how restric-

tions on the admission of relatives leaves immigrants

and refugees in the United States feeling unsettled and

divided. I compare the situation in the 1920s to more

recent years, when the federal government has pursued

policies to restrict admission and impede integration.

Keywords: family separation; immigration policies;

asylum seeking; refugees

The Southern Poverty Law Center has

recently published a series of emails by

Stephen Miller, senior advisor to President

Donald Trump, praising President Calvin

Coolidge and the immigration laws of the 1920s

(Hayden 2019). While the racism underlying

immigration policy in the 1920s and today has

been discussed elsewhere, less has been writ-

ten about family separation then and now

(Morris 2019; Okrent 2019).

By family separation, I do not mean exclu-

sively the zero tolerance policy that led the Trump

administration to send parents to criminal court

and render their children “unaccompanied.”

(Arguably, though, the 1920s had an equivalent to

this: unmarried immigrant women with children

were assumed to be sexually immoral and eco-

nomically dependent and could be deported

without their children [Gardner 2005, 163–65;

Yael Schacher is senior U.S. advocate at Refugees Inter-

national in Washington, D.C., where she focuses on asylum,

refugee resettlement, temporary protected status, and

humanitarian visas. She taught American studies at the

University of Connecticut and was a postdoctoral fellow

at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of

Texas at Austin.

Correspondence: yael@refugeesinternational.org