Immigration Laws and How to Use Them
2019, Walker Art Museum.
"Immigration Laws and How to Use Them" (2019) is a performance commissioned by the Walker Citizenship Series Program. This program was initiated to create works that responded to Carey Young’s Declared Void II (2013) in ways that deeply engaged with pressing sociopolitical issues of the day. I took pages from American immigration laws spanning the first Naturalization Act (1795) to the recent Travel Ban on citizens from seven counties (2017-2019) and turned them into paper airplanes, to be thrown at me while sitting in the "Void" and reading them aloud to the public. In collaboration with the James H. Binger Center for New Americans my artistic work was informed by how immigration lawyers, scholars, and activists view the “projectile” of American immigration laws, that is, the impact of such laws on the population of the US. Racial discrimination has been present throughout the history of US laws and continues till today. For example, note the racialized language of the original Naturalization Act:
"Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That any Alien being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof on application to any common law Court of record in any one of the States wherein he shall have resided for the term of one year at least, and making proof to the satisfaction of such Court that he is a person of good character, and taking the oath or affirmation prescribed by law to support the Constitution of the United States, which Oath or Affirmation such Court shall administer, and the Clerk of such Court shall record such Application, and the proceedings thereon; and thereupon such person shall be considered as a Citizen of the United States."
With its emphasis on “white persons,” laws--like these favored FIVE percent of the population then living in the United States--excluded Indigenous communities, people of color, and women also most females as ownership laws were hugely favoring white males over females based on studies such as this one: Women and Naturalization, ca. 1802–1940 By Marian L. Smith
"Immigration Laws and How to Use Them" (2019) is a critique of the discriminatory history of such laws in response to the absurdity of Carey Young’s original work.
