The Huddled Masses

• Publication year: 2022

The Huddled Masses

John Medeiros ^*

Abstract: Anyone who wishes to practice immigration law in this country must understand two things: the stories of those who have immigrated—both willingly and unwillingly—to the United States, and the development of laws that have prevented others from doing so. America's immigration laws have widely been based on exclusion, rather than inclusion. On taking from, rather than giving to. Taking the reader on a journey that begins several thousand years ago, "The Huddled Masses" is a literary exploration written in a style that pays homage to famed Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and social commentator Eduardo Galeano, that fuses legal research with elements of poetry and creative nonfiction to chronicle the history of U.S. immigration and the development of U.S. immigration law.

The greatest nations are defined by how they treat their weakest inhabitants.

—Jorge Ramos

Prehistory: Beringia

There is a stretch of water between Asia and North America that measures a mere 55 miles in width. It links the Arctic Ocean with the Bering Sea, and it is so cold that, even in summer, drift ice can be seen floating on its surface. It is the end of the Ice Age and monumental glaciers lock up so much water that the world's ocean levels are more than 300 feet lower than they will be in the year 2000. The result? A continuous land bridge that stretches between Siberia and Alaska. Most archeologists and anthropologists will later agree that it is across this bridge, known as Beringia, that a human first passed to populate the Americas. They will assume that he came to this land hunting elk and caribou.

"He could not be a fish eater," they will say. "That would require a different migration."

So here he is, crouching toward Asia, our first immigrant: a wanderer in search of food. ¹

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Prehistory: Spirit Caveman

As he sits down to his last meal amid the cattails and sedges on the shore of the ancient lake, the frail man grimaces in agony. A fracture at his left temple is still healing; deep abscesses in his gums shoot bolts of pain into his skull. Still, he is a survivor; at forty-something, longlived for his people. But soon after he finishes the boiled chub that he nets from a stream in what will be western Nevada, he feels his strength ebbing like a tide. He lies down. Falls asleep. Within hours he is dead, felled by septicemia brought on by the dental abscess. When his people find him, they gently wrap his body in a rabbit fur robe and secure his bulrush-lined leather moccasins patched twice with antelope hide on the right heel and toe. His people dig a shallow grave in a rock shelter, line it with reed mats and lie him within. Some 9,400 years later, anthropologists will discover him, and they will name him Spirit Caveman.

He isn't supposed to be here. He is the wrong guy, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. According to standard anthropology script, anyone living here at this time should resemble Native Americans or, at the very least, the Asians who are their ancestors and thus, supposedly, the original Americans. But Spirit Caveman does not follow that script and neither do more than a dozen other skeletons of the Stone Age.

Who, then, were these First Americans? ²

1492: A New World

The land is teeming with inhabitants. We witness Arawak men and women. Earthen, full of wonder as they notice something they have never seen before in their entire history. An unfamiliar boat carrying a man in fancy clothes across the ocean. When his sailors make it to shore, the Arawak, holding true to their custom to greet strangers, run to them, bringing food and gifts. The fancy man writes of this day:

They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned . . . They were wellbuilt, with good bodies and handsome features . . . They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane . . . They would make fine servants . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. ³

The Arawak give him gifts galore; what he really wants is gold.

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1495: The Second Trip

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. So when Christopher Columbus found no gold during his first voyage, he promises it for his second. In reality, the booty would be far greater. He rounds up 1,500 Taíno men, women, and children, and brings them to La Isabela, on the island of Hispaniola, for the best to be shipped to Spain, but first they must deliver tributes of gold every three months. On the island where Columbus and his men imagine huge gold fields to exist, they order all persons 14 years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they bring it, they are given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token have their hands cut off and bleed to death. Bartolomé de las Casas, the most famous of the accompanying Spanish missionaries from that trip, would later report:

It was a general rule among Spaniards to be cruel; not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings or having a minute to think at all. So they would cut an Indian's hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and they would send him on saying "Go now, spread the news to your chiefs." ⁴

Thus begins the history, over 500 years ago, of the European invasion of the Indian settlements in the Americas. This starts America's recent history of immigration to its shores. A history based on subjugation.

A history based on race.

August 18, 1587: America's First English Child

On this day Captain John White's daughter, Eleanor, wife of Ananias Dare, gives birth to the first English child born in America: Virginia Dare. She is given the name because she is the first Christian born in Virginia. No one would know what becomes of her nine days after her birth, ⁵ and naturalization laws developed 200 years later would disqualify her from U.S. citizenship for being born a girl. ⁶

1620: The Great Puritan Migration

This is the story of the Mayflower and how it arrives on America's shores with the first boatload of undocumented immigrants. The 180-ton vessel begins its historic voyage on September 16, 1620, with 102 passengers. But sometime during their journey they decide to relocate altogether in the Americas, and after 65 days, the Pilgrims sight Cape Cod.

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They anchor on November 21 at Provincetown, Massachusetts, but they have no legal right to settle in that region. To overcome this technicality, they draw up the Mayflower Compact, in effect creating their own government. The document does not imply that the settlers agree upon any new or radical democratic system of government. Instead, it is a modified form of a customary church covenant to meet a temporary crisis in an unfamiliar situation. It is signed, and the first European theocratic dictatorship state in the New World is a throwback to the 1200s.

A pillory over here.

A public stockade over there.

All for those who engage in any disallowed activity. The Mayflower Compact, the first American settlement based on a social contract or covenant, derives its power from the consent of the people and guarantees that the colony shall remain under the iron control of the Pilgrim Fathers for the first 40 years of its existence. Forty-one men sign the compact, including societal leaders, hired men, and bond slaves, some of whom could not even write. ⁷

Extraordinary about this document is its establishment of a government, by consent, at a time when England's liberties are still conditioned by the remnants of feudalism. It is not the "cornerstone of American democracy" as some enthusiasts will later claim (equal rights will come centuries later), but the compact does create a foundation for local self-government. ⁸

1638-1655: Swedish Presence

Perhaps inspired by the riches other Great Powers gathered from their overseas colonies, Sweden too seeks to extend its influence to the New World. In 1637, Swedish stockholders form the New Sweden Company to trade furs and tobacco in America. The ships reach Delaware Bay in March 1638, and the settlers build a fort at Fort Christina, the site that would later be called Wilmington, the first permanent European settlement in the Delaware Valley.

During the next 17 years, more than 600 Swedes immigrate to America. The colony eventually consists of farms and small settlements along the banks of the Delaware River into Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. New Sweden rises to its greatest heights during the governorship of Johan Printz, but his autocratic rule leaves many settlers dissatisfied, and a petition for reform returns him to Sweden.

Johan Rising becomes governor of the Dutch capitol of New Amsterdam, which will later be called New York City. It is ruled by the hot-tempered Peter Stuyvesant. Soon after arriving in New Sweden, the Swedish Rising attempts to remove the Dutch from the colony, infuriating the Dutch leadership. In retaliation, Stuyvesant sends seven armed Dutch ships and 317 soldiers to attack the Swedes. Resistance would be useless, and the vastly outnumbered Swedes surrender to the Dutch.

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Within the next twenty years, the Dutch would lose all their colonies to the British. ⁹

1610-1650: Servitude Indentured

Here is how we will finance the recruitment and transport of workers from England to the colony. This convenient system shall be called "indentured servitude," and, with a little luck, it shall become one of the most successful business enterprises in the New World. There will be four forms of immigrant servitude, three of them voluntary:

1. Under the most common form, servants sign

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