Abstract
Better remembering the Chinese Exclusion Act does not only teach us lessons about American history, culture, and identity, it also connects to and influences contemporary issues and debates. Those include the Obama administration’s deportation policies toward illegal immigrants, the DREAM Act and its narratives of American identity, and the Define American website and project created by illegal immigrant activist José Antonio Vargas. In all those ways, and many others, public American Studies scholarship and conversations impact our present and future just as much as our understanding of our past and identity.
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Notes
Perhaps the best example I can cite is one I mentioned in the Introduction: Glenn Beck’s Beck University, the online, for-profit “educational” institution that presents itself quite explicitly as public scholarship from which all Americans can and should learn. Beck University’s motto is “Learn History as It Really Happened”; but its “American” expert is David Barton, the minister and pundit best known for his profoundly inaccurate arguments that the Founding Fathers intended America to be a Christian nation.
For official year-by-year statistics on both removals and returns, see for example http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/08/deportations_st.html. For more on the ICE report, see USA Today story: http://www.usatoday.com/USCP/PNI/Front%20Page/2012–04–05-pni0405met-parentsdeportedPNIBrd_ST_U.htm.
In June 2012, President Obama issued an Executive Order that, while not providing such a path to citizenship, exempted certain such young Americans from the threat of deportation. Controversial as the Order was and is, particularly among opponents of the DREAM Act, it remains a very partial and preliminary step, and does not resolve any of the questions with which I am concerned here.
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© 2013 Ben Railton
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Railton, B. (2013). Conclusion: So What?. In: The Chinese Exclusion Act: What It Can Teach Us about America. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339096_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339096_5
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