Statement: House Must Strip Discriminatory, Racist Provision from Senate-Backed Immigration Bill

Liberal Action condemns Senate's decision to add xenophobic language to House-passed "Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act"

Earlier this month, the Senate approved its version of the "Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2020," which originally passed the House of Representatives last July with overwhelming bipartisan support.

While the House and Senate versions of the bill are largely similar, senators added a toxic new provision that attempts to stigmatize and discriminate against Chinese immigrants. Specifically, Section 9 of the bill would now deny admission to the United States or adjustment to Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR) status—commonly known as a "green card"— to anyone deemed "affiliated" with the Chinese Communist Party or the armed forces of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

As other analysts have noted, this categorical bar is overbroad, duplicative, and plainly motivated by racial animus. As such, it constitutes a backdoor form of unjust and unlawful nationality discrimination.

There are any number of routine and inescapable ways in which ordinary Chinese citizens interact with the governing Communist Party or with their country's military forces, none of which imply an intent to spy on or harm the United States. U.S. immigration law already contains provisions for guarding against potential espionage and inquiring into an individual's connections to foreign governments and militaries. Unlike the language that appears in Section 9 of the present bill, however, these existing security measures provide transparent and racially-neutral standards of adjudication.

Singling out Chinese nationals for impermissibly vague categorical restrictions does nothing to increase national security. Its only effect would be to deny pathways to LPR status (and ultimately citizenship) to Chinese immigrants, based solely on their country of origin. Such a policy would not only be unfair and racist, it would also violate the Constitutional right to equal protection of many Chinese Americans, who might face barriers to reuniting with family members abroad that would not apply to other U.S. citizens.

These efforts to indirectly ban and discriminate against people on the basis of Chinese ancestry are disturbingly reminiscent of the Chinese Exclusion laws from an earlier chapter of American history. They also constitute the latest escalation of conservatives' long-running effort to scapegoat Asian immigrants and Asian Americans for the Trump administration's own failure to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Over the past year, Donald Trump has publicly used anti-Asian slurs when referring to the novel coronavirus and has attempted to shift blame for his own policy failures onto immigrants from China and the Chinese government. Simultaneously, the U.S. Justice Department has undertaken a series of investigations and prosecutions under the heading of its "China Initiative" that raise grave concerns. As multiple civil rights organizations have documented, these prosecutions—which have disproportionately targeted people of Asian descent—appear to be tainted by racial profiling and animus.

Ironically, the Trump administration's undeclared "Blame China" campaign has subsisted alongside the president's own widely-reported callousness toward actual victims of human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese state. Although leaders in Trump's cabinet have condemned the PRC government's crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong and mass detention of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, Trump himself privately supported the PRC's persecution of Uighur Muslims, according to a former high-ranking member of his administration, and spoke highly of the Chinese government's use of the death penalty against drug offenders.

When House lawmakers again take up the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, in order to iron out discrepancies between the House and Senate versions, they must ensure that the racist and unjust provisions listed in Section 9 are eliminated from the text.

In its original form, this bill constituted a well-intentioned step toward reforming nationality quotas for U.S. employment visas, which often result in disproportionate backlogs for people from high-sending countries. These efforts to make U.S. law more fair for immigrants of all nationalities should not be marred by a provision that creates a new form of nationality discrimination.

Liberal Action calls on members of the U.S. House of Representatives to oppose Section 9 and work to restore the bill's text to a more just and rational form.