Is Nikki Haley Lying or Ignorant?

Above: Sikhs forced to return to India from Vancouver, British Columbia, 1914

The answer is probably both.

Nikki Haley is ignorant of the American history that most deeply affected her family.

At a press conference Wednesday, the South Carolina governor made a breathtaking comment: “When you’ve got immigrants who are coming here legally, we’ve never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion.” Haley’s comments were somewhat unfairly attacked by Gawker, which wrongly argued that she was saying Jim Crow segregation and other racist laws didn’t exist. Haley’s comments were more focused on immigration law—but she was wrong even there.

As the historian Kevin Kruse noted in a Twitter essay, American immigration law has a long history of excluding people on the basis of race and religion, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” to limit Japanese immigration in 1907, and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 (which effectively made immigration difficult for anyone who wasn’t a Northern European Protestant). Writing in Mother Jones, Kevin Drum argued we should “give Nikki Haley a break” since this history isn’t well-known. “It’s not especially common knowledge these day,” Drum says.

That’s a very Drum thing to say. And no, we shouldn’t give her a break. Is the Chinese Exclusion Act common knowledge? Well, it’s common enough. And she’s the governor of South Carolina! I think we should at least expect a basic knowledge of American history there, to the point of not making yourself a national embarrassment at your own press conferences.

And of course it does matter that Nimrata Randhawa (now Nikki Haley) is Asian. There was not a lot of immigration from India to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely because of the British colonial system that encouraged that immigration elsewhere, including to Canada where you had sizable numbers of Indians working in logging camps, whereas this was rare just over the border in Washington and nearly unknown in Oregon. But had there been large-scale Indian migration to the U.S., there certainly would have been organized movements against it, as there was toward the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos. And then her ancestors wouldn’t have been allowed to move to the U.S. between 1924 and 1965 anyway because of the Immigration Act of 1924.

Of course, Haley has no interest in asserting anything other than race doesn’t matter in this country and her own ignorance of the past only assists her in that task. It doesn’t make it less shameful and embarrassing.