The way in which many historians, and I think a very popular understanding of the way in which the US’s history of welcoming and then excluding immigrants has, um, played out, is one of ebb and flow and ebb and rise as, as well. And I, I taught immigration history that way. I wrote about it in that way. I wanted to see a sort of resolution of a reckoning of Americans to adhere to those democratic ideals upon which the country was founded. And to think about the more extreme and prejudiced periods as aberrations.

My name is Erika Lee. I’m a Regents Professor of History and Asian American studies at the University of Minnesota, and I’m also director of the Immigration History Research Center. 

I found that in researching and writing this book, The History of Xenophobia in the United States, that that didn’t really hold up, that even during times of, of, you know, so called welcome. So, like, after World War II when we did open up the United States to displaced persons, the very first iterations of those laws explicitly barred Jews. I mean, who were we supposed to be helping but Jewish refugees fleeing the holocaust? And still anti-Semitism was not only strong but embedded in the law. Even when exclusion, Chinese exclusion was repealed, and even when Franklin Roosevelt who signed repeal into law said, “This was a historic mistake.” After 61 years of a law that was supposed to be temporary, the actual law only opened up the United States to 105 persons of Chinese descent. 

So is that a welcome? You know? Not really, and I think that one of the challenges in trying to grapple with, you know, “How can the United States be a nation of immigrants and a nation of xenophobia at the same time?” Or one versus the other is to not question how “welcoming” that actual welcome was.
I found that even during the civil rights movement when the United States passed the 1965 immigration act, this is the last time that we ever had comprehensive immigration reform, it actually abolished discrimination in immigration law. So it’s been heralded as this major civil rights law. Even during this time period, when you look at the congressional testimony, when you look at what the law actually did, we still had discrimination built into the law. It was mostly meant to still welcome European immigrants, but there was a very clear intent to not increase immigration from Africa, Latin America, or Asia. 

So even during these times of welcome, even with the 1980 refugee act, there is restriction built in, and I think that is one of the most important lessons. I mean, we’re thinking about this particular moment. If one disagrees with the way that our country is going in terms of its immigration policy, it is not enough to simply reset to 2016. It is necessary to take a very sober and critical look at all of our policies, and to reveal the built-in biases that our policies have been based on for a many decades, if not generations.

My name is Erica Lee. I’m a Regents Professor of History and Asian American studies at the University of Minnesota, and I’m also director of the Immigration History Research Center https://cla.umn.edu/ihrc.

The Immigration History Research Center and Archives was founded in 1965 by historian-activists and community members who felt that it was so important to preserve our nation’s immigrant history, and to do so in a number of different ways. So, the Archives has the largest collection of materials related to immigrant and refugee life in North America, and the Immigration History Research Center focuses on research, programming, academics, and community outreach.

One of the projects that we founded a few years ago is called Immigrant Stories, and it’s a community-based digital storytelling project that works with recent immigrants, to refugees, to create, preserve and share their own stories. They’re available online as part of the Minnesota Digital Library and the Digital Library of America. They’re searchable by theme and by place and, because Minnesota has such a long history of welcoming refugees, many of those stories directly relate to the themes in this exhibit. They are of refugees themselves or first-generation Americans, whose families fled as a result of war and persecution.

So, I hope that viewers and visitors will be able to access some of those stories of their neighbors and friends and co-workers and fellow Minnesotans to get a glimpse of what it really is like to be forced from home and to make a new one in Minnesota. And I hope that they’ll also visit the Immigrant Stories website to tell their own stories. We have many resources and tools. The site is available in seven different languages, and it’s never been easier to tell your own story and to share it with friends, family and, hopefully, the wider world. https://cla.umn.edu/ihrc/immigrant-stories

My name is Erika Lee. I’m a Regents Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota. I’m the author of many books on immigration, most recently “America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States.” And I’m also Director of the Immigration History Research Center.

Kader Attia’s La Mer Morte, or The Dead Sea, is one of these pieces in this exhibit that speaks to me on so many different levels. The title is clearly a play on words, referring to both an actual place, as well as the high rates of mortality amongst migrants fleeing their homelands in the Middle East and Africa, and seeking refuge in Europe.

There’s something extremely powerful in seeing the dozens of pieces of clothing scattered across the gallery, representing the dead who’ve been washed ashore, often unknown. But remembered here, in what is both a powerful and sobering anonymity. The artist is known for challenging xenophobic representations of migrant communities. They seek to humanize them and also to correct false representations about migration.

This is a common theme in my own work. I try to show how powerful xenophobia has been in American society, in shaping not only our policies and our treatment of immigrants and refugees, but also our understanding of ourselves. I’ve found that the more that we see others as others, and the wider that that circle of strangers becomes, the less we can find commonality amongst ourselves and amongst our differences.

It says in the program notes that the artist created this work in 2015 when the UN reported that over a million migrants fled to Europe. In 2020, the most recent statistics by the UN shows that there are now 70.8 million people who are forcibly displaced worldwide. This is unprecedented. This means that one person is forcibly displaced every two seconds as a result of conflict or persecution.

As our world becomes more challenged by climate change, and as migration will continue to increase, we cannot afford to make strangers of those who we may depend on in the future. This work, like so many others in this exhibit, asks us to imagine a different future.