Toni Morrison once asked, ‘If I take your race away, and there you are, all strung out. And all you got is your little self, and what is that? What are you without racism?’ Yalidy Matos takes this further in her book, Moral and Immoral Whiteness in Immigration Politics, where she asks, ‘What are you without your whiteness?’ in the context of immigration politics in the US.
At the core of immigration politics worldwide is the dialectics of identities, be it in South Asia, Europe, or, in this case, as Matos points out, in the US. People who closed their doors to Syrian refugees welcomed refugees from Ukraine. Why? India’s 2019 (passed in 2024) Citizenship Amendment Act offers refugee status to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian migrants from its neighbouring countries, but not Muslim migrants. Why? Because immigration politics is not about demographic dynamics but essentially identity politics packaged as domestic and foreign policy. Therefore, Matos’s argument that immigration politics is driven by whiteness is not new. However, what is new is the argument that morality underpins the whiteness in US immigration policies.