Race, Geography, and Mobility

Abstract

Racism in the United States has proven to be a remarkably recombinant ideology, ever shifting in its dominant practices and expressions, but invariably reproducing distinctions among people as justifications for preserving social distance. This article, through a recovery of the history of “Hindu” exclusion from the United States in the early twentieth century, traces the emergence of what some scholars have identified as the “neo-racism” of our contemporary global order, a “racism without races” that disappears into the naturalized horizon of national boundaries. Almost as soon as Indians began immigrating to the United States, exclusionists hoped to pass a Hindu Exclusion Act modeled after the Chinese Exclusion Acts. Though their efforts failed, in 1917, another law, barring immigration from an invented “Asiatic Barred Zone,” was passed by Congress with an overwhelming majority. The ingenuity of that law was that it restricted immigration not on the basis of identity — racial or national — but on the basis of geographic origin. That law powerfully shifted the ground of exclusion from racialized bodies to the apparently neutral and natural relation between peoples and places.

Keywords: Immigration, Immigration Law, Race, Racism, Chinese Exclusion, Asia, Hindu Exclusion