Earlier this year, a county commissioner in Mason County suggested a plan to banish certain residents from the county. Under the proposal, individuals convicted of specific misdemeanor offenses would be required to leave the county for up to a year if they failed to pay fines, complete community service, or seek treatment at their own expense.
In Seattle, a much more serious proposal would restrict people from entering a stretch of a busy road through the northern end of the city. While scaled down in recent proposals, the system would ban people who are part of the sex trade from entering the area.
The idea that we can just send the homeless “somewhere” is something you’ve heard before if you live around here. Pick your favorite not liked place or institution, and someone has argued that we should send the homeless there. Hippy college in that hippy government town? Send the homeless to Evergreen State College. Old island prison that the state closed down because old island prisons are expensive to run? Send those homeless to McNeil Island.
This idea of homeless exile ignores that the homeless came from somewhere already. And, knowing what we know about how homelessness has become endemic in our region, the somewhere is right here. We know homelessness is a housing issue. We made housing in short supply, and since there aren’t enough housing or even shelter beds for everyone, someone in our community is literally left on the street.
And more broadly, we’ve been dealing with this idea for as long as we’ve founded our first colonies on the doorsteps of the indigenous people. The idea that we can keep people from coming to a place, that the place will be better if we just keep some people out, is something that pervades American history in the Pacific Northwest.
Exile is different from prison because in the examples of exile I pointed to above, those exiled are still otherwise citizens or residents. We haven’t taken away their civil rights, taken away their right to vote while in prison. They aren’t wards of the state in the way that would mean where they sleep, when they eat or what they wear is controlled by the Department of Corrections. We expect them to maintain their own home, food supply and clothing. But also, there are places they cannot go that otherwise, but the rest of us can.
Washington State is like a lot of places in that we’ve used laws to exclude people of certain races. For example, we didn’t invent racially restrictive covenants in Washington State, but we seem to be stuck in a constant cycle of surprise and denial that they ever existed or that they still have an impact. We have to keep front and center that the era in which they were enforced, either legally or tacitly, was also the era when your ability to own a home became equal to your ability to maintain wealth and transfer it to your children.
Washington State also didn’t invent using single family zoning after racial housing discrimination became illegal in the 1960s to prevent neighborhoods from integrating. But many cities in Washington State downzoned in order to preserve “neighborhood character” and ensure the wrong kind of people, people that could only afford to live in houses smaller than detached, single family homes, would ever move in.
Where our exile comes from
The American colonialists’ first taste of exclusion in the Pacific Northwest came in the 1840s, as soon as the first permanent white, American settlement touched down west of the Cascades.
Unsurprisingly, early settlers to the Oregon Territory (then included what is now Washington State) brought with them the politics of slavery.
Overland settlers to Oregon were most likely to be non-slave holding farmers from Appalachian border areas around Kentucky, Ohio and Missouri. These settlers were not pro-slavery. They were also not New England human rights activists or abolitionists. They didn’t like slavery because they saw it as unfair competition in the form of cheap labor.
Appalachians came to the Willamette Valley to establish a territory of “free soil, free labor,” where smaller farmers would pay for their labor. The black exclusion laws passed in the Oregon Territory before the Civil War were technically also “anti-slavery” laws, as the Free Soil activists that settled the region would have seen them.
They were fine with slavery existing somewhere, just as we’re totally okay with criminals, poor people, people of color and homelessness existing. They didn’t want to solve slavery, just in the same way we’re agnostic to homelessness and crime. As long as it exists outside my own neighborhood, on the Evergreen State College campus, not in Mason County or not along one particular street in Seattle, we’re not concerned.
An Oregon territorial judge, in a case regarding a fugitive slave, put to words what would seem to become the regional perception of slavery. It was incompatible with what he described as the nature of the Oregon community. “Establish slavery here, and (y)ou will turn aside that tide of free white labor which has poured itself like a fertilizing flood across the great States of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.”
When Oregon was putting together its constitution, one of the points that all could agree were “…in absolute agreement about (was) the need to preserve homogeneous populations, and that was race.”
So, when Black people (or at least, non-white people) came across the mountains, they were not welcome in Oregon and told to leave. George Washington Bush was raised a Quaker in Pennsylvania, the son of an African from Indian and an Irish-American. He had already reached the Pacific Coast once in his young adulthood as a fur trapper. He set out again in his 40s from Missouri, putting a successful life as a cattle rancher behind him. George Washington Bush, as far as we know, never lived in the antebellum South. He was never subject to chattel slavery. He lived in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Illinois and traveled the Rocky Mountain West more than once. But when he showed up in the Willamette Valley, surrounded by four other white Appalachian families, he was asked to leave for fear he would bring slavery and threaten the economic order of the community.
So, while north of the Columbia was still technically part of the Oregon Territory, Bush took his party to the Puget Sound, exiling himself to a place where the racial exclusion laws could not touch.
The racial exclusion laws did not address the issues, economic or otherwise, around slavery. They did just enough to create the illusion of safety, but probably did more harm than good for a growing colonial community on the edge of the continent. There aren’t many ways to see exiling a rich rancher from the Willamette was economically beneficial.
But we see the Pacific Northwest repeat the mistake of the Oregon black codes throughout our history.
Right after the Civil War, we taxed Asian migrant workers a “police tax” to allow them to work.
We used mob violence to drive Asian families out. On November 3, 1885, a mob of white residents forcibly expelled the Chinese population from Tacoma. This event is often referred to as the “Tacoma Method” because it was seen as a methodical and organized expulsion.
The anti-Chinese riots in Puget Sound during the 1880s were part of a broader wave of anti-Chinese sentiment and violence across the United States, particularly in the Western states. These events were driven by economic competition, racism, and xenophobia, as Chinese immigrants were often blamed for taking jobs and driving down wages.
This violence was tied directly to labor organizations such as the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which were influential in the Progressive movement, often excluded Asian and Black workers. In the Pacific Northwest, labor leaders blamed immigrants for driving down wages and advocated for restrictions on Asian immigration. The Asiatic Exclusion League, founded in 1905, was a powerful force in Washington and Oregon, campaigning for further immigration restrictions.
The keystone to the wave of anti-immigrant exclusion actions in the Pacific Northwest was the Johnson-Reed Act, which banned immigration from Asia into the United States in 1924. The “Johnson” in Johnson-Reed was Albert Johnson, an Aberdeen Congressman and a prominent nativist and eugenicist. His work in Congress reflected the racial and anti-immigrant sentiments prevalent in the Pacific Northwest.
This wasn’t a sideshow in our region’s politics, this was the show.
Excluding people economically, geographically and socially within a place has hurts everyone. It keeps us from solving the problem, from addressing what is really going on. For farmers in the Willamette Valley or labor unionists in Tacoma, the issue wasn’t members of a certain race working, it was a broader system that allowed anyone at all to be exploited.
If slavery exists, we all suffer. If we exclude anyone, we all suffer.
If someone is spending the money to bring over Chinese citizens to work, it is the system that allows Chinese citizens to be underpaid is the problem.
If you hear a policy that seeks to address a social ill by keeping someone out of a particular part of town, be sure that the issue really at stake isn’t being addressed.
How we all suffer exile
Lisa Daugaard is a criminal justice reformer and co-created the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, which diverts low-level offenders into community services instead of jail.
Daugaard argues that reintroducing banishment measures in Seattle is ineffective and counterproductive. Drawing on research, she explains that exclusion fails because people return to the areas due to personal ties or access to services, leading to repeated jail stays and further destabilization. Instead of addressing underlying issues like homelessness and addiction, banishment shifts the problem to other neighborhoods without offering real solutions.
LEAD addresses the root causes by diverting individuals from the criminal justice system and connecting them to essential support services. Rather than arresting people for minor offenses, LEAD provides access to substance abuse treatment, mental health care, housing, and job training. This approach targets underlying problems and aims to reduce recidivism by offering holistic, coordinated support, ultimately helping individuals stabilize their lives and reintegrate into society more effectively.
Joshua Leavitt argued 20 years before the Civil War that slavery was an economic drain on the entire country. It may have been good for southern landowners, but for banks and northern workers and anyone else, it was a major economic drain. Today, new research Richard Hornbeck and Trevon D. Logan point out the inefficiencies of slavery were far greater than previously understood. While abolitionists made economic arguments, their research shows how emancipation generated economic gains worth between 4 and 35 percent of the American economy. This growth was at least as important as railroads.
Slavery cost the economy, cost us all. Slavery took $40 out of the economy for each slave, about four percent of the gross national product in 1860.
When some of are excluded (from a place, from the economy) it costs everyone.
The most effective way to exclude people is through zoning. One of the best examples of how we’ve exiled people in our communities has been the expansion of single family zoning since the Fair Housing Act was passed in the 1960s. Prior to the late 1970s, Olympia had a balanced approach to housing, with a significant portion of new developments consisting of multi-family units such as duplexes and quadplexes.
Driven by about barely coded concerns about “ghettos” and racial segregation, the Olympia City Council downzoned neighborhoods, drastically reducing the construction of multi-family housing. This shift led to a preference for single-family homes, resulting in car-dependent, less walkable neighborhoods. The transition to single-family zoning has contributed to increased urban sprawl, diminished walkability, and greater economic and racial segregation. The areas with more single-family homes tend to be whiter and more affluent.
While the downzones may not have been intentionally racist, they are classically institutional racism in that they have perpetuated segregation and inequity in housing. The exclusionary nature of single-family zoning has had long-lasting negative effects on community diversity and equity.
What we also know is that keeping Olympia economically (and racially) segregated ended up punishing kids at the bottom end of our community. Research by economists Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz shows children from low-income families who move to better neighborhoods show significant improvements in long-term outcomes. These include lower teenage birth rates, higher college attendance, and increased earnings as adults. Their study showed that children who moved to lower-poverty neighborhoods earned 31% more and had better life outcomes compared to those who stayed in higher-poverty areas.
A broader study of 5 million families also confirmed these findings, showing that children in better neighborhoods had higher college attendance rates, lower teenage pregnancy rates, and greater incomes. The benefits increased with longer residence in improved areas. Zoning to allow a broader use across the city will lead to less expensive housing among more expensive housing, meaning better outcomes for kids from less wealthy families. All the while, kids from wealthy families are not harmed.
Where we go after exile
I think it is important that I made this entire argument without citing the exclusion built into our colonial Pacific Northwest DNA. The treatment of treaty tribes in Western Washington (that I am most familiar with) and the Pacific Northwest broadly, is the first and largest “you don’t belong here” we ever committed. Now it is baked into a legal treaty relationship that, while we’ve gotten better at, is something we still stumble through more than we should.
We are going to continue proposing exile as a solution. This persistent practice underscores a troubling historic trend of shifting societal issues rather than addressing our root causes.
Historical patterns of exclusion, from the racial black codes of the Oregon Territory to modern-day zoning policies, are a longstanding attempt in the Pacific Northwest to manage societal problems by isolating certain people rather than integrating and addressing their needs.
