SCU Prof places Labor's anti-immigrant politicking in historical perspective

South Bay Labor's recent hit piece on Supervisor candidate Johnny Khamis has been roundly denounced as inaccurate and trafficking in ugly racial and ethnic tropes. Cruz Medina, associate professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Santa Clara University, connects the piece to the long legacy of anti-immigrant politics in California and Silicon Valley, which continue today.

The appeal of this kind of dog-whistle, anti-immigrant rhetoric is something that can be traced back to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 when California became a territory and the discovery of gold provoked financial reasons to discriminate. This exclusionary rhetoric became law with the passage of the Foreign Miner's Tax in 1850 that targeted Mexican and Chinese miners. With the implied connection between immigrants and disease, Silicon Valley's legacy of exclusionary immigration policy becomes more visible. Silicon Valley props up certain "unicorn" migrants in the tech industry while excluding an invisible majority, which has been noted with the popular use of H1-B visas that allow tech companies to pay non-U.S. citizens less, many times keeping these visa holders offshore and contained.

Cruz Medina can be reached here:

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