All-American Nativism

by Daniel Denvir

  Extreme polarization, the establishment’s bête noire, is in fact the only solution to the long-standing bipartisan agreement that immigration is a problem for enforcement to solve. Demanded and rejected, oppressed and expelled, this country’s many others have long insisted that the promise of American freedom, designed for if never truly delivered to white settlers, belongs to them too because they too are the people.38 And contrary to what Trump’s presidency might suggest, a growing number of Americans agree and are turning against nativism and war. Racism is, as the remarkable number of Americans embracing socialism understand, an obstacle to freeing everyone.

  The issue of borders is, in turn, a simple one in principle for socialists: borders are a nationalist enterprise and thus incompatible with an internationalist workers’ creed. Migration is a symptom of social violence when it is compelled by poverty, war, or climate change. But moving to faraway and strange places is often a beautiful journey too, one nurtured by love, adventure, and the drive for self-determination and realization. Migration should be free and the choice to migrate should be freely made. The border does not protect Americans against cultural change, economic insecurity, and terrorism. It bolsters a system of global inequality that harms people everywhere by dividing them.

  Even with public opinion moving rapidly to our side, border controls will not fall anytime soon. To chip away at them, we must understand their historical particularity. The legal right to travel was, for most white people, a basic one for much of American history. It remains so for wealthy people, particularly those with passports from rich countries. Border controls arose in the United States not out of any neutral law enforcement principle but to exclude Asians, Jews, Italians, Latinos, blacks, Muslims, and other Others in the service of an exploitative and expansionist empire. Our land borders began to harden only alongside the rise of industrial capitalism, and were only militarized in recent decades.

  If Democrats stick to the center on immigration, they will find themselves fighting on two fronts. A fight against Republicans, with the left at their back, will be far easier to win—and a more noble victory. Simple realism dictates that no legislation to grant citizenship to millions will be passed until Republicans are defeated. There’s no use trying to appease them. The bipartisan consensus supporting harsh immigration and border enforcement has fractured. Democratic elected officials need to catch up or be defeated too. It’s the task of the left to accelerate the nascent split, demanding radical reforms that correspond to our dream of a world where no human being is illegal. We must transform nation-states so that they no longer divide workers but instead are conduits for the democratic control of our social, economic, political, and ecological futures.

  We must urgently develop demands for policies that will not create an open border overnight but a radically more open border soon. The border must be demilitarized, which would include demolishing the hundreds of miles of already existing wall and dramatically downsizing the Border Patrol. Criminal sanctions on illegal entry and reentry and the public charge rule must be repealed. Links between ICE and local law enforcement created by Secure Communities and 287(g) must be broken. Opportunities for legal immigration, particularly from Mexico and Central America, must be expanded. The right to asylum must be honored. And citizenship for those who reside here must be a stand-alone cause, unencumbered by compromises that are not only distasteful but also politically ineffectual—and that today would provoke opposition from both the nativist right and the grassroots left.

  The nature of struggle

  The most critical threat posed by xenophobia has not yet been examined so far in this book: unchecked climate change. Climate change, in turn, will ensure that immigration remains at the center of political conflict everywhere. Ecological catastrophe is already sending refugees fleeing within and across borders, and only movements that transcend borders can address it. The wealthy who are committed to maintaining the carbon-intensive status quo will need borders to impose a system of eco-apartheid, one fortified with new walls along external and internal boundaries guarding against ordinary people and rising seas. Militarization, segregation, incarceration, exclusion, and empire have all sought to ensure that the people who benefit most from the status quo are sheltered from its costs.

  We face two possible futures. In one, we continue to live under a highly unequal system rooted in fossil fuels and private property, let nationalist politicians deny global warming, exploit natural resources, and, ultimately, construct workarounds to mitigate climate chaos for the wealthy, subjecting the majority, here and everywhere, to crisis, precarity, and death. In this future, nationalism, racism, and xenophobia are the only tools with which the rich can win over a cross-class alliance to their genocidal program. In the other future, we recognize our shared stake in climate safety and clearly identify our common enemies. Climate change is a planetary crisis; accordingly, we must confront it by embracing internationalism. Nationalism, symptomatized by war and xenophobia, poses a greater threat to addressing global warming than climate denialism. Or, alternatively put, nationalism is climate denialism. Defeating nativism and building a mass working-class movement to transform the world are the same thing and the stakes are unspeakably high.

  The nativist movement strangely enough had its roots in the budding environmental consciousness of the 1970s. As the postwar consensus crashed, Americans paused to find their air and water filthy, and their future uncertain. Some identified population growth as a culprit. It was from this milieu that nativist godfather John Tanton emerged, warning that mass immigration posed a threat to the natural world. Yet nationalist environmentalism on an international planet never made much sense. In retrospect, hyperventilation about black and brown poor people having too many children was a smokescreen that obscured the existential threat posed by rich people emitting too much carbon.

  The restriction of people’s freedom of movement has been pursued in the name of protecting the environment, the economy, public safety, and a Euro-American majority. In every case, hardened boundaries have only served a ruling class whose hoarding of wealth visits ruin upon people on each side of every border. Freeing everyone will require that we tear down the Wall.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book was a labor of love for the movement. But labor is a social relation, and I have many people to thank and, in doing so, briefly recount what led me to write this story.

  I first decided to study the US-Mexican border in college, making lengthy visits to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in 2004 and 2005 to research my undergraduate thesis. This was a change in plan: I had initially tried to learn Arabic with the goal of studying the Middle East. The invasion of Afghanistan was launched with all-but-unanimous congressional support and a public mood pervaded by wild jingoism. Our tiny protests were lonely and too small to stop the war. Then the invasion of Iraq happened in the face of the largest global protests in history.

  I joined the radical left in high school during the late 1990s. The global justice movement brought together a “Teamsters and turtles” labor-environmentalist protest alliance against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, offering the possibility of a struggle against neoliberalism that would unite the vast majority against corporate rule. But September 11 provided the Bush Administration and its Democratic opponents alike with an opportunity to replace a nascent class conflict with civilizational war. A briefly vibrant anti-war movement, and my time with Chris Toensing and Catherine Clark of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), planted the seeds of this book’s critique of empire.

  Learning Spanish, however, was far easier. And Latin America’s new “Pink Tide” governments and the social movements that catapulted them into power were, in all honesty, less depressing to study than the US-wrought carnage inflicted in Iraq. I learned about the region through the border, an in-between place that illuminated everything it divided. It helped me understand how Bill Clinton’s beatifically flat world at the end of history had
so quickly become George W. Bush’s war on terror. Beneath the 1990s’ plastic surface lurked the raw exploitation, violence, and racism that made Thomas Friedman’s sunny pronouncements possible. And it was all most strikingly manifest at the border, where capital flowed freely and labor migration was criminalized.

  The summer after my junior year at Reed College I headed to Juárez with the support of my advisor, anthropologist Charlene Makeley. She, along with Paul Silverstein and many other professors, taught me how to think critically about capitalism, nationalism, the state, race, and gender; they taught me how to make sense of the world by reading theory with and against concrete reality as people made it, if not under conditions of their own choosing.

  In Juárez, I lived with Veronica Rosario Leyva and her family in Guadalajara Izquierda, a neighborhood built by migrants from across Mexico. Leyva’s home was built by her mother, Margarita Leyva Burciaga, who moved to Juárez from the state of Durango in the 1960s to find work. Many moved there: the city’s population nearly quintupled between 1960 and 2000 as workers sought jobs in the booming maquiladora industry. My temporary home offered a clear view of downtown El Paso, where the side of the Wells Fargo building was lit up as an enormous American flag at night. It was, I thought, an unsubtle illustration of Gloria Anzaldúa’s classic line: “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”

  Veronica had worked in maquilas and then as a labor organizer for the Labor Workshop and Studies Center (CETLAC), an effort by Mexico’s Authentic Labor Front (FAT) to reach border factory workers and street vendors in a climate ferociously hostile to independent labor unions. It is to Veronica, mi madre postiza, and her colleagues Félix Leonardo Pérez Verdugo, Beatriz Eugenia Luján, and Daniel Rocha that I owe my introduction to the borderlands. And to Alejandro Pérez Ávila, a diehard troublemaker who spent so many days guiding me across his city. He is sorely missed. And also to Veronica and Alejandro’s children José Alejandro “Alex,” Claudia Angélica, and María Margarita Pérez Leyva. And a shout out to the Kasa de Kultura para Tod@s for welcoming this gringo to punkero Juárez.

  My analysis of immigration would be impossible without the people in and around the Portland Central America Solidarity Committee (PCASC), where I inexplicably was hired as the sole staff member after graduating college in 2005. Founded in 1979 in solidarity with Central American revolutionaries, in 2006 we found ourselves at the center of the new mass immigrant rights movement. PCASC was a special place for the Portland, Oregon, left in the mid-2000s, uniting an unusual crew of young radicals, militants from El Salvador and Guatemala, Mexican jornaleros, and labor radicals from multiple union locals.

  Thanks to everyone from those days in Portland. But I’d like to thank by name those who were at the core of immigrant rights work: Romeo Sosa from Voz; Deborah Schwartz, Megan Hise, Andreina Velasco, Maribel Gomez, Trillium Shannon, Shizuko Hashimoto, and Lolo Cutamay (of famed Salvadoran band Cutumay Camones) from PCASC; Aeryca Steinbauer from Causa; Chris Ferlazzo, Laurie King, and Dave King from Jobs with Justice; and Marco Mejia and Pedro Sosa at the American Friends Service Committee. And to the late David Ayala, a union organizer first in El Salvador, where he was detained and tortured by the US-backed regime, and then in the Pacfic Northwest. He was feared by bosses and oppressors on all sides of every border and is missed. And also to Wences, a working class organic intellectual from Oaxaca who frequented my messy PCASC office near the jornalero corner to discuss the machinations of global capitalism.

  The analysis that informs this book is deeply indebted to the militant grassroots’ immigrant rights movement. These fierce activists demanded so much more than their beltway counterparts could ever imagine—and they taught me that immigrant liberation is a struggle for everyone’s freedom.

  I wouldn’t be a journalist at all if it wasn’t for a ton of people who initially helped me pretend that I was one. Ben Dangl published my first reporting at Upside Down World. Christy Thornton, then executive director at NACLA, helped me publish my first investigative work. Everyone from Philadelphia City Paper and particularly the news team—Ryan Briggs, Emily Guendelsberger, Sam Melamed, Holly Otterbein, Isaiah Thompson—and Theresa Everline, for giving me my first reporting job. Journalism and this country are much worse off without alt-weeklies. And I am forever grateful to Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara, who—after I was mercifully laid off from my brief stint at Salon—not only helped me secure this book contract but also (along with Micah Uetricht and Alex Press) welcomed The Dig, my podcast, into Jacobin’s orbit.

  My producer, Alex Lewis, makes The Dig possible every week, as have Logan Dreher and Julia Rock. Indeed, this book would have been impossible to write without the podcast: thank you to all the listeners who support the show. Jeffrey Brodsky, for crafting our signature tunes but even more so for being a great friend. The Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs provided me with a library card without which I could not have conducted this research. Portions of works that I published in Jacobin and the New York Times appear in chapter 4 and the conclusion—thanks to both.

  This book would be a mess without my editor at Verso, Ben Mabie, who figured out how I could structure an explanation of the entirety of US history through the prism of nativism in roughly 80,000 words, and who advocated for me when that was way over the initial word count I had agreed to. Thank you to Andy Hsiao for accepting a rather inchoate book proposal and to Max Thorn, Chris Gelardi, and Will Tavlin who spent dozens of hours ruthlessly fact-checking me. Yet any remaining errors, as they say, remain mine.

  Many helped me understand immigration history and politics beyond my personal experience as an activist, through interviews and conversations on The Dig and elsewhere, including Juliet Stumpf, Daniel Tichenor, David FitzGerald, Greg Grandin, Mae Ngai, Nick Estes, Paul Frymer, Kelly Lytle-Hernandez, and Charles Kamasaki. Many journalists reported the stories that kept me up to date on Trump’s latest barbarities while I buried my brain in history: Dara Lind, Aura Bogado, Monica Campbell, and Jonathan Blitzer. Thanks to the Migration Policy Institute for their voluminous research and responses to my queries. And to Nicholas Kulish for last-minute archival assistance.

  An enormous thank you to everyone who read and commented on a portion or the entirety of the book. That includes Nikil Saval (who read a first draft that no one should have ever seen), Peter Andreas, Ana Avendano, Stephanie DeGooyer, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, Adam Goodman, Carly Goodman, Hidetaka Hirota, J. Mamana, Thea Riofrancos, Quinn Slobodian, Rick Swartz, Christy Thornton, and Gabriel Winant. Frank Sharry generously read a draft even though it was quite hard on his politics. Aziz Rana not only read multiple drafts but also provided me with a framework for analyzing the history of race, class, and colonialism in the United States. Chris Newman of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) helped form my overarching analysis of immigration reform politics and gave me the idea to write the Jacobin article that ultimately became this book. Chris, a frequent draft-reader and constant consultant through every modern communication medium, was indispensable.

  My parents Jim and Rangeley encouraged me to read constantly, think critically, and dissent on principle. They no doubt got more than they bargained for and I hope only regretted it all briefly, sometime between my middle school arrest for trespassing and my high school discovery of left-wing politics (and the more noble arrests that followed). And Jamie, Emma, and Jack for surviving being my siblings.

  Not one page of this would be possible without Thea Riofrancos, my first and last advisor on everything, perfect companion, constant interlocutor, and radical anchor. I first tried to impress you after Spanish class by talking about the Frankfurt School even though I didn’t know a thing about it. You came home sunburnt from the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre, organized against military recruitment in Portland high schools, moved with me to Ecuador because
it was a place where we saw something big was happening, and led me to Philly, Rhode Island, and Chile. I have followed you everywhere because I would follow you anywhere. We are constantly striving for the perfect analysis and we are getting there. My takes and life alike would be unimaginably worse without you.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1Transcript, “CNN Tonight,” transcripts.cnn.com, April 28, 2016.

  2“Executive Order Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” whitehouse.gov, January 27, 2017.

  3Adam Liptak and Michael D. Shear, “Trump’s Travel Ban Is Upheld by Supreme Court,” New York Times, June 26, 2018; Melissa Cruz, “Trump’s Travel Ban Leaves Thousands of US Citizens Separated from Their Families,” immigrationimpact.com, January 29, 2019.

  4Lauren Gambino, “Trump and Syrian Refugees in the US: Separating the Facts from Fiction,” The Guardian, September 2, 2016.

  5Douglas S. Massey and Karen A. Pren, “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America,” Population and Development Review 38(1), 2012, available at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

  6Jynnah Radford, “Key Findings about U.S. Immigrants,” pewresearch.org, June 17, 2019.

  7German Lopez, “The War on Drugs, Explained,” vox.com, May 8, 2016.

  8“Shifting Public Views on Legal Immigration into the U.S.,” people-press.org, June 28, 2018.

  9The Editorial Board, “A Chance to Reset the Republican Race,” New York Times, January 30, 2016.

  Chapter One

  *A National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study found that “the impact of immigration on the wages of natives overall is very small,” and, “to the extent that negative wage effects are found, prior immigrants … are most likely to experience them, followed by native-born high school dropouts.” It added: “There are still a number of studies that suggest small to zero effects.” The authors found that “the fiscal impacts of immigrants are generally positive at the federal level and negative at the state and local levels.” (Francine D. Blau and Christopher Mackie, eds., “The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration,” Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2017, 5, 11, 247–48.)