All-American Nativism
The Jacobin series features short interrogations of politics, economics, and culture from a socialist perspective, as an avenue to radical political practice. The books offer critical analysis and engagement with the history and ideas of the Left in an accessible format.
The series is a collaboration between Verso Books and Jacobin magazine, which is published quarterly in print and online at jacobinmag.com.
Other titles in this series available from Verso Books:
Utopia or Bust by Benjamin Kunkel
Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant
Strike for America by Micah Uetricht
The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff
Four Futures by Peter Frase
Class War by Megan Erickson
Building the Commune by George Ciccariello-Maher
People’s Republic of Walmart
by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
Red State Revolt by Eric Blanc
Capital City by Samuel Stein
Without Apology by Jenny Brown
All-American Nativism
How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants
Explains Politics as We Know It
DANIEL DENVIR
First published by Verso 2020
© Daniel Denvir 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-713-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-711-6 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-712-3 (US EBK)
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Typeset in Fournier MT by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
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CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Scarcity
2. Security
3. Empire
4. Reaction
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
INTRODUCTION
We’re going to build a wall … We don’t have a country anymore.
—Donald Trump, April 28, 20161
On January 27, 2017, a week into his presidency, Donald Trump made partially good on his campaign pledge to effect a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” banning immigrants and visitors from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States for 90 days. He also suspended the entry of refugees from everywhere for 120 days and prioritized the resettlement of persecuted religious minorities, by which Trump meant Christians.2
That Trump had promised a Muslim ban in his barnstorming mega-rallies didn’t make its enactment any less shocking. Even lawful permanent residents were initially blocked from boarding planes to the United States or refused entry once they had arrived. Protesters flooded into airports, lawyers rushed to court to file emergency motions, and Trump was swiftly dealt the first in a series of defeats as judges around the country put the ban on hold. It demonstrated, liberals swooned, the importance and resilience of institutions and the rule of law. At least until June 2018, when the Supreme Court voted to uphold the third version of his executive order, which narrowed the ban but made it indefinite, concluding that Trump’s unambiguous bigotry had been duly laundered by way of bureaucratic procedure.3
Despite Trump having proclaimed that he was motivated by anti-Muslim animus, the conservative majority ruled that the ban’s final version passed muster because it had been administratively justified in the language of national security. Trump’s language had seemingly broken with establishment precedent. But, as his lawyers persuasively argued, his policies had not. Racist policy in post-1960s America was perfectly legal if it was called something else. One of Trumpism’s achievements was to resist the pretense of doing so.
Even today, that Trump is actually president is still hard for many to accept or, more basically, to comprehend. But for supporters, Trump was telling basic truths—truths that elites from both major parties had long denied and even covered up. He was doing bold things that his predecessors had been afraid to do because they were too weak, corrupt, compromised. The United States, he said, had been sold out by its leaders. They exported American jobs to foreign countries and imported foreign workers to steal jobs at home. They sacrificed American blood and treasure in futile wars for other people’s freedom, spent hard-earned taxpayer dollars on a global welfare scheme called “foreign aid,” and, too politically correct and squeamish, failed to protect “our people” from terrorism and immigrant criminality.4
Once in office, Trump rendered in administrative and legislative prose a nativist presidential campaign suffused with the toxic poetry of race, nation, and religion. Trump had won by portraying a country under siege from a globalist elite that prioritized themselves and the interests of a foreign-born underclass over those of forgotten white Americans. Trump, rambling through speeches that seemed incoherent to detractors, expertly struck a resonant chord with millions. And whenever the crowd grew restless, he snapped them back to attention with a phrase that summarized it all: “Build the wall.” Nothing tied his multifarious warnings of criminal, economic and even existential threat together as tightly as immigration. His subsequent success in transforming anti-immigrant vitriol into a perfectly legal Muslim ban provides a clue to an unsettling truth. Far from an anomaly, Trump’s rhetoric and policies alike draw on and expose a deep well of all-American nativism. He was, detractors charged, simply un-American. But that was far from the case. The revulsion Trump inspires among liberal elites is rooted not just in the fear of the unfamiliar; they’re also shaken by the even more disturbing encounter with the uncanny.
Trump shattered political norms by launching vicious personal attacks and stating obvious lies frequently and without shame. 2016 was a year zero for American politics, establishment critics believed. An indecorous, authoritarian cartoon character, leading an army of extremist rednecks, threatened the rule of law as we knew it.
There is some truth to these caricatures. But the historical reality is less comfortable. Trumpism was the result of American politics at its most normal. It was also the logical conclusion of a decades-long trajectory. This is nowhere truer than with the long-standing bipartisan agreement that immigration is a “problem” in urgent need of solving. For decades, hard-core xenophobia had seeped into conservative politics, transmitted across an ascendant network of right-wing television, radio and, ultimately, internet outlets. Republicans and Democrats, facing a series of insurgencies on the right, provided ideological cover to a constellation of stridently anti-immigrant organizations and constructed an enormous machinery of repression. Escalating deportations, crackdowns that would explode the populations of jails, detention centers and prisons, restrictions on public benefits, the erection of hundreds of miles of fencing, and the deployment of thousands of agents to the border with Mexico were together intended to convince Americans that the immigrant threat was under control. Instead, these actions manufactured the threat and made it seem all the more real.
Until Trump’s election, it had been almost a century since nativism had stood among the country’s explicit and central governing i
deologies. And Trump stands out as a president who has become the country’s leading nativist. Yet nativist politics, if sometimes articulated in more sober tones, proved far from archaic, and its appeal was by no means limited to the followers of fringe far-right characters like David Duke, Richard Spencer or even Jeff Sessions.
As I tell it in this book, the proximate story of the Trump administration begins in the 1960s and ’70s. But the longue durée of European settlement serves as historical backdrop and founding condition: since the colonial period and then the nation’s founding, government has tried time and again to ensure that the United States is a white country for white people—and sometimes to ensure that it belongs to a specific subset of whites at that. That is not hyperbole. Whiteness was the documented, comprehensive, and official policy until 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act, ending a quota-based immigration system that had since the early 1920s brazenly sought to maintain a demographic majority descended from northern and western European nationalities.
After the passing of Hart-Celler, authorized immigration boomed. But rather than the largely English, Irish and German immigrants of prior decades, newcomers were mostly Asian and Latin American. At face value, the law was a major victory for civil rights. But the year before, the United States had also sharply restricted authorized migration from Mexico, terminating the massive mid-century Bracero guest worker program, which had brought millions to labor on US farms. That program’s termination was followed, in the Hart-Celler Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1976, by the government setting limits on Mexican immigration, initiating the transformation of a long-standing pattern of often temporary and circular migration from Mexico into a permanent and rapidly growing population of undocumented immigrants who were now declared “illegal.”5
Political debates over immigration often involve competing ideas about how to solve a problem. But migration is not self-evidently a problem; for much of American history, European migration was in fact the solution. In a society that was expanding westward, dispossessing indigenous people, and seeking to grow its base of productive settler citizens, European immigrants were often desirable. As settlement consolidated and was normalized throughout the nineteenth century, Euro-American settlers simultaneously became natives and nativists. Then, in the “colorblind” post–civil rights era, they became members of a “nation of immigrants” confident that their families, unlike Mexicans, had “come the right way.” Government action and nativist politics combined to make Mexican migration into a problem of illegality. That broad consensus created the conventional wisdom that enforcement was the solution.
As non-white immigration increased and Mexican migration became criminalized, it faced a white backlash. This backlash did not come from nowhere. Rather, it drew from a long history of white population politics, including another anti-migrant movement that is not often remembered as such: the resistance to the integration of African Americans migrating from the South into schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces in the cities of the North, Midwest, and West. Just as racial liberals joined the war on crime and helped propel mass incarceration in order to protect the post-1960s order, the ostensibly pro-immigration figures commanding the political establishment nurtured anti-immigrant reaction in an attempt to manage it.
Demographic change was accompanied by the rise of a new, neoliberal economic order. Though neoliberalism shaped only part of that immigration-driven demographic change, it decisively shaped the political response to it. Beginning in the 1970s, a coordinated political offensive on the part of big business dismantled the New Deal order and crushed labor militancy. It represented a corporate assault on the power of labor and the welfare state, seen as obstacles to profitability and restored growth in an increasingly cutthroat global economy. Working-class communities were eviscerated and union power was decimated as industry decamped. Undocumented immigrants joined black Americans on the lowest tiers of an increasingly unequal labor market; both were readily blamed for the violent social disorder and alienation that are neoliberalism’s morbid symptoms. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans responded to fears over the free movement of capital—particularly as those fears related to the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) implemented in 1994—by joining nativists in demonizing the free movement of people. After invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq violently destabilized the world, immigrants, particularly Muslim ones, were scapegoated for that, too.
Anti-immigrant politics became defined by attacks from both right-wing nativists and the bipartisan establishment on “illegal immigration.” It was a form of security theater that functioned to safeguard not only neoliberalism but also (to nativist consternation) legal immigration. Legal immigration enabled by the 1965 reform is the largest driver of the demographic change that nativists oppose: more than three-quarters of foreign-born people in the United States are here with authorization.6 But the larger and newly diverse large-scale legal immigration since the passing of the Hart-Celler Act has always been protected by ethnic advocacy organizations, labor unions, religious groups, business interests, and powerful figures within both major parties. Anti-“illegal” politics, then, have been at the center of a public immigration debate that has blamed undocumented people for most everything.
The historical record examined in this book demonstrates that the story is painfully simple: fences and cages for the lowest, racialized rungs of the working class gave political sustenance to an economic order punishing working people as a whole. American borders hardened and prison walls were erected for everyday people at the very moment that borders opened wider than ever for capital flows.
As social and economic welfare declined, public funds and political capital were earmarked for demonizing rhetoric and repressive policies. The system of mass incarceration locked up a disproportionately black surplus labor force and immigrant workers side by side. The immigration enforcement system, having grown to unprecedented scope and systematization, criminalized the very foreign-born workers demanded by business. The coincidence of a crisis in economic security and the massive expansion of the state’s repressive institutions shifted political unrest onto the terrain of racial and cultural conflict, physical safety, and American sovereignty.
Nativism reemerged as a mass politics demonizing immigrants as a criminal and economic threat in the early 1990s, as the Republican Party openly courted an anti-Mexican revolt that took off in California. Many—though by no means all—Democrats followed suit as President Bill Clinton steered his party to the right. Through the Bush and Obama administrations, the deportation machine grew and became further enmeshed in the country’s gargantuan criminal justice system. The unprecedented militarization of the country’s Southwestern border and the systematic identification and removal of unauthorized non-citizens became routine in a bipartisan political theater to convince Americans that everything was under control. It wasn’t.
The crackdowns were scripted for voter approval but rarely if ever achieved outcomes that substantively met stated objectives. It is unclear to what extent the militarization of the border reduced unauthorized migration. But it did clearly shift migration routes into the deadly heat of the Arizona desert. And, ironically, it made would-be circular migrants into permanent criminalized residents—ballooning the undocumented population. In the interior, deportations wreaked catastrophe on millions even as the undocumented population climbed above 10 million. A narcotic threat blamed on Colombian and Mexican cartels and on “inner-city” black criminals was met with an estimated trillion-dollar-plus drug war that resulted not in a drug-free America but rather in record-setting overdose deaths and the violent destabilization of Colombia, Central America, and Mexico.7 Likewise, the war on terror led to more terrorism and war. All the while, the immiserating economic order that all this war and repression functioned to protect, however haphazardly, blew up in 2008, and long-standing inequality and deprivation reached crisis pro
portions.
Enforcement successes celebrated by Democrats and Republicans alike have always proved to be a mirage; demands for politicians to crack down on immigration have intensified over the past few decades. The contradictions remained unsolvable because anti-immigrant policy could not deliver the better country it promised. As symbolically satisfying as one might find them, you can’t eat racism and war. The prevailing response, however, wasn’t that the strategy was wrong, but that it simply wasn’t being implemented with sufficient vigor. So the most appealing solutions increasingly became the maximalist ones: a border wall, mass deportations, and the “shutdown” of Muslim immigration.
This is the basic paradox at the heart of US immigration politics: the border has never been more militarized, our prisons never more full, and our military never more hopelessly entangled, yet a vocal minority of Americans have become apoplectically adamant that our nation is insecure, inside and out, and vulnerable to threats foreign and domestic. This is a story about Americans’ deep sense of unease in a rapidly globalizing world, and their resentment toward elites who seem to conjure a world full of violence, uncertainty, and downward mobility. It’s also about the racist anti-tax and pro-segregation politics that emerge among affluent people who believe that their wealth is solely the product of their own hard work and talent. Trump’s wall was a simple answer to complex challenges that were created in significant part by the same established order that many politicians in the anti-Trump camp hope to revivify. Trump’s predecessors built more walls and cages than he will ever manage to construct—an irony that contains an explanation for our present situation.
This is not a book about the social, political, and economic drivers of immigration, though it necessarily sheds some light on them. Also, though the struggles of immigrants make frequent appearances throughout, it is not about the immigrant rights movement. It is about their enemies. And while this book is primarily focused on the politics of immigration as it is conventionally understood—people’s migration across national borders—it also unsettles the false presumptions of conventional thinking that is analytically constrained by those same borders. In particular, I argue that the logic animating white resistance to the black Great Migration and freedom struggle has been similar to that behind the anti-immigrant movement—and that the latter in many ways grew out of and alongside the former. The origin of the migrants who have been targeted should not obscure the shared resistance to racialized migrants foreign and domestic portrayed as posing an economic, criminal, and demographic threat. Nativism is a powerful subset of American racism and nationalism. Nativism is also, however, a concept that allows us to rethink racism itself as a bedrock nationalist population politics that functions to control the movement and status of racialized others—abroad, at the border, and in the interior. The commonalities are clarified when placed in deeper historical context: the continuation of a settler-colonial population politics, which from colonization through 1965 endeavored by law to maintain a white majority in a country that demanded racial others to do much of its least-valued labor.
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