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Description
Midway through January, a White House immigration meeting made headlines for a choice vulgarity the president deployed to describe some foreign nations. Recounting the meeting to reporters, the Democratic senator Dick Durbin also dwelled on another curious moment. “When it came to the issue of, quote, ‘chain migration,’ ” he recalled, “I said to the president: ‘Do you realize how painful that term is to so many people? African-Americans believe they migrated to America in chains, and when you talk about chain migration, it hurts them personally.’ He said, ‘Oh, that’s a good line.’ ” Durbin’s contention was perplexing on several levels. The trans-Atlantic slave trade is not a matter of belief; it happened. It also is not typically described as migration, which implies agency and means. Slavers migrated; slaves were transported. What’s painful is having to spell that out, especially when there’s no evidence that black people have ever associated chain migration with slavery. Durbin seemed to be telling this story to signal his opposition to the president’s language — and, by proxy, to the president. But “chain migration” hasn’t always been a source of political rancor. For decades, it was a neutral description of a routine migration pattern, one in which migrants traced the previous paths of family members, friends or members of their communities. Social scientists used it to talk about black Americans moving from the South to the North in the Great Migration of the 20th century, Southern Italians venturing to New York in the late 1800s and rural Indians gathering into cities like Delhi and Calcutta. The story it told was a simple, uncontroversial one: Humans follow the humans they know. Today, though, the use of the phrase “chain migration” encodes your stance on immigration. Nativists use it to signal support for American interests and a skepticism about whether would-be immigrants serve them; immigrant advocates avoid and criticize the term. The White House website dedicates three web pages to chain migration, all demanding that it end immediately. When the president reaffirmed this opposition during the State of the Union, Democrats booed. Even the question of whether the phrase is partisan has a partisan edge. Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, tweeted in January that chain migration was “a made-up term by the hard-line anti-immigration crowd” and insisted that using it at all was akin to “declaring a side.” The conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg, on the other hand, insisted in a USA Today op-ed that “the only inventing going on is coming from liberals determined to weaponize a term to make a policy — and party — they don’t like seem racist.”
Keywords
Immigration, vulgarity, deployed, foreign nations, chain migration, painful, personally, perplexing, slave trade, migration.
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