All-American Nativism

by Daniel Denvir

  Resistance to desegregation, a white identity politics of racial grievance, mass incarceration, the war on terror: all were dedicated to a quixotic mission to keep dangerous others from crossing US borders and to restrict the free movement of those already inside them. At a time when America’s power to ensure economic and military dominance spun into crisis, government orchestrated repression to produce an illusion of order. In their fits and starts, these politics and policies were aimed at consolidating a neoliberal political-economic order that was threatened by dissent and contradiction from its inception.

  And so how did the war on immigrants fare? It depends on how you measure success: Trump is in the White House, neoliberalism reigns, the privatized detention industry is booming. But this book argues that this moment of maximal nativist power is more like a supernova: a big, terrifying explosion marking the end, not the beginning, of a political cycle.

  The future of the system that nativism stabilized is now in doubt. A global political and economic order that made the world smaller by intertwining economies and metastasizing foreign military intervention contained the seeds of its own crises: people followed the trails of weapons and money, but in reverse, to the center of the American empire. Immigrants traveled in large numbers to places where they were demanded as workers but rejected as neighbors, coworkers, and citizens. And with climate change, fossil-fueled capitalism is driving yet more people to move. But the politics of scapegoating have ultimately proven unable to compensate for neoliberalism’s depredations, and Americans are increasingly more likely, not less, to see immigrants as allies rather than enemies.8 The debate is polarizing, which is a good thing because it is destroying the bipartisan basis for the war on immigrants. The repression became so extreme under Bush, Obama, and Trump that it sparked a mass social movement to resist it, and polls show that Democratic voters have swiftly moved toward supporting immigrant rights. And, critically, nativists have been unable to leverage the bipartisan war on “illegal immigrants” and its Trumpian apotheosis toward their goal of permanently slashing legal immigration. Ironically, the bipartisan war on “illegal immigrants” has made Trump and his base obsessed with the Wall to stop immigrants from “coming the wrong way.” Trump, for all his danger, has indeed heightened these contradictions: perhaps never have both socialism and immigrant rights alike received such high levels of public support in the United States.

  In my account, the history of contemporary immigration politics is at the same time the history of mass incarceration’s racist containment of the black Great Migration and freedom struggle; of the workers rendered expendable by economic restructuring; of the triumph of neoliberalism over the New Deal order; of the Democratic Party’s rightward lurch; and of a national security state and military-industrial complex that was searching for a new direction after the Cold War and that, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, recklessly expanded.

  The thesis of this book, in other words, is that nativism is a thread that connects much of the past half-century—and more—of American history. And its organization is therefore both chronological and thematic, telling a series of overlapping stories. Chapter 1 explains the rise of the contemporary nativist movement amid growing fears of ecological and economic scarcity that emerged in the 1970s. Chapter 2 details the rise of border militarization and the federal deportation pipeline, alongside the rise of mass incarceration and the post-9/11 national security state. Chapter 3 examines the explicitly racist population politics of a centuries-long history of American empire-building, from European settlement and Native genocide through the post-9/11 merger of the Mexican and Muslim threat. Chapter 4 lays out the history of immigration politics from presidents George W. Bush through Barack Obama, and shows how the establishment’s campaign for “comprehensive reform” constantly escalated security politics, perversely elevating the very far-right nativists whom they hoped to placate. I conclude by appraising Trump’s crimes to date.

  Immigration politics have been at the center of much that has gone wrong in recent decades. Immigrant liberation will be indispensable to building a better world to replace it. Securing immigrant freedom will require a new politics that transforms this country root and branch for everyone. It’s a challenge that we can only take on if it is understood clearly. The way mainstream politicians from the two major parties handled immigration after 1965—performing security while protecting free markets—ultimately made Trumpism an irresistible political force. In 2016, the curtain finally slipped away to reveal a gargantuan machinery of state that had violently repressed unauthorized immigrants for decades. Trump spoke of its purpose with chilling clarity. The movement to not only defeat Trump but to transform the rotten system that made him president will only succeed if a diverse and transnational working class unites to fight for a more lasting change.

  This holds true elsewhere, too. Though this is a book about US history, a racist and Islamophobic xenophobia is also driving an ascendant far right in Australia, our Anglo settler-colonial sibling, and in Europe, which colonized the world and now, amid economic crisis, hysterically campaigns against a supposed colonization of its own territory by Third World and Muslim peoples. The current economic order has imposed misery in the center and periphery alike, provoking migration and a xenophobic reaction that is, in reality, a phantasmic projection of Europe’s own violence against the world onto its victims. Migration politics are today conjuring ghosts of colonialism’s past.

  That is no doubt the case in the United States. This is the country where Chinese exclusion took root as Gilded Age inequality wrecked a myth that had portrayed the frontier as providing an endless bounty, itself forged amid indigenous genocide; where eugenics and the second Ku Klux Klan flourished during World War I’s first Red Scare and the recession that followed in its wake. The wars on “illegals,” crime, and welfare have been the politics that made and punished scapegoats. It’s impossible to know whether Trump is a true believer in much of anything at all aside from his own greatness, white supremacy, and the prerogative of powerful men to do as they like. But he is a master showman, and speeches at campaign rallies that appeared to be a stream of semi-conscious non-sequiturs to detractors were in reality reflections of his preternatural ability to read a crowd. The crowd wanted the Wall.

  “You know,” Trump told the New York Times, “if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of, maybe thinking about leaving, I can sort of tell the audience, I just say, ‘We will build the wall!’ and they go nuts.”9 Trump has said that “we don’t have a country anymore,” and this book seeks to explain why that resonates: how racism and nationalism are shaped by politics, economics, and history. My objective is an analysis far more systematic than commonplace accounts that blame in-born white resentment as though it’s a static ahistorical force in American politics.

  Works of social criticism often marshal forgotten histories to recast a normal-seeming reality as strange. This book does the opposite, analyzing what for decades was an all-too-normal anti-immigrant politics to explain how we ended up in such a seemingly bizarre present.

  1

  SCARCITY

  Failing to reduce the current rate of immigration, legal and illegal, clearly means that our children and our grandchildren cannot possibly have the quality of life that we ourselves have been fortunate to have enjoyed.

  —Representative Anthony C. Beilenson (D-CA), 19961

  In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson called on Americans to build a Great Society, where “an order of plenty for all of our people” would be directed to “elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.”

  The optimism soon curdled. Americans lost their sense of place in the world and found themselves in long lines at gasoline stations. The horn of plenty dried up as stagflation, a schema-shattering combination of high unemployment and inflation, took hold—setting the stage for a business reaction against organized labor and the New Deal order that had protected
it. A slow, bloody, and expensive war on Vietnam not only defeated the US military but also, alongside Richard Nixon’s hack criminality, discredited government. Even prosperity’s most taken-for-granted foundation appeared at risk: suddenly, our way of life appeared to push the earth beyond carrying capacity. In short, a future that had once seemed to offer limitless promise was abruptly and drastically circumscribed; the boundless Great Society devolved into a zero-sum game, with hostile camps competing over dwindling resources. A new era of immigration—mass, diverse and, in the case of Mexicans, criminalized—had the bad fortune of accompanying this proliferating uncertainty, conflict, and pessimism.

  For decades, the debate over immigration has centered on empirical questions over whether immigrants put downward pressure on wages for native-born workers (by and large they do not) or are a strain on public spending (it depends on what level of government).* But the dynamics of American immigration politics can’t be explained by seeking to answer these questions. What’s revelatory is why and how these debates began to shape American politics in the first place.

  The politics of immigration need to be understood in relation to the rise of mass incarceration, the crisis of empire, and white reaction against demographic change. But for the purposes of this chapter, I untangle the pervasive sense of economic scarcity that formed the core of contemporary immigration politics as it took shape in the 1970s. My concern here is not only economics narrowly construed but also the fundamental resources provided by non-human nature—the fragility of which had come into view and become the object of widespread anxiety. But making sense of this recent history first requires explaining how Americans became primed to blame racialized others for economic problems in the first place.

  Workers of the world divided

  The Naturalization Act of 1790 opened citizenship to most “any alien” who was a “free white person” and barred all those who were not—forging a deep and permanent link between citizenship, race, and the status of labor. “Free white” workers would consistently scapegoat immigrants and others for an unequal system; it was that system, in turn, that made those others other, as the invention of racial difference came to explain the status of the labor they performed. W.E.B. Du Bois described this dynamic in Black Reconstruction in America, writing that slavery caused poor whites to hate enslaved black workers and their work. Instead of identifying as workers, they dreamed of emulating planters and owning an enslaved workforce of their own. “To these Negroes [the poor white] transferred all the dislike and hatred which he had for the whole slave system,” wrote Du Bois. “The result was that the system was held stable and intact by the poor white.”2 White-supremacist naturalization law and slavery alike established who counted as a true American.

  The white man’s republic celebrated a “free labor” ideal that depended upon but also rejected menial labor, performed first by black people and then later by racialized immigrants. Assignment to menial labor became an inherited, racial trait, appearing in the false guise of a feature of biology. This also meant that sex and gender were central to white supremacy and capitalism, because it was through reproduction that race—and thus the division of labor—became a social reality.

  Racism on the basis of the free labor ideology became a ground for racist nativism. In 1850, California imposed a special tax on foreign miners and then, briefly, five years later, imposed it specifically on those ineligible for citizenship: Asians. Approximately 250,000 Chinese workers arrived between 1850 and 1882, many to mine gold in California or to labor on the transcontinental railroad, the economic backbone of an American empire stretching to the Pacific.3 After the Civil War and amid the counterrevolution against Radical Reconstruction, a recession took hold in the 1870s as the United States expanded its genocidal frontier. Anti-Chinese sentiment grew across the West, particularly in California.

  Industrial capitalism squeezed farmers and labor alike, a dilemma to which free and cheap land on an expanding frontier no longer provided an exit. So many genocidal wars against Native people had been won and yet the new system made the economic independence promised by the frontier myth plainly untenable. Westward migration no longer offered an escape valve for the masses of people lacking wealth or land.4 Xenophobia offered a temporary fix. Many businesses no doubt wanted immigrant labor.5 But anti-immigrant politics was a compromise that facilitated industrial capitalism’s ascent in the face of the increasingly militant movements of the 1870s and 1880s. One such movement, the Populist alliance of workers and farmers, posed a truly radical threat. The movement drew strength from its rejection of the racist divisions at home and abroad that fundamentally shape American capitalism. It was undermined in part by its failure to fully move beyond those divisions: the Knights of Labor voted to back Chinese exclusion, and members of the white Farmer’s Alliance failed to support Colored Farmers’ Alliance boycotts and strikes, which were met with lethal violence in the South.6 Populism’s defeat, in turn, only helped consolidate racism’s hold.7 Although elite strategies of racial division and stratification can prove to be explosive and unpredictable, it has for American capitalism been an indispensable feature.

  Cultural theorist Stuart Hall wrote that “race is the modality in which class is lived.” Whites blaming Chinese workers’ racial “servility” for the economic system that subjugated them all was a case in point. The first restrictive federal immigration law, the Page Law of 1875, targeted Chinese people precisely as a racialized labor threat, increasing criminal sanctions for transporting and contracting “coolie” workers and barring the entry of Asians suspected of being prostitutes.8

  In 1882, a ten-year ban on Chinese workers became law.9 The Chinese Exclusion Act was repeatedly renewed, and finally made permanent in 1904.10 Nativists were adamant that no other Asian laborers fill the void. In 1907, the US government succeeded in obtaining the Japanese government’s agreement not to issue passports to laborers, which prevented the immigration of Japanese workers to the United States. In 1917, an entry ban was enacted to cover people from across an expansive “Asiatic Barred Zone,” which did not include Japan or the Philippines, a colonial possession. The exclusion was cemented and expanded to Japan by the 1920s national origins quota laws, which also sharply restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Racial bars to naturalization were not fully abolished until 1952 and Asian immigration was severely limited until 1965, when President Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act, repealing the quota system.

  The labor movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was divided over mass immigration. The Knights of Labor’s model of industrial unionism extended to many immigrants but not to European contract laborers or, after internal debate, to Chinese workers. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) embraced a craft-based model, an exclusionary approach that also manifested in its support for excluding newcomers. The radical Industrial Workers of the World organized not only people from every nation but even across the US-Mexico border alongside the radical Partido Liberal Mexicano, with whom they mounted an insurrection in Baja California.11 The Socialist Party, radical labor’s most important electoral force, was riven by debates over immigration. But the SPUSA ultimately embraced restriction to the consternation of its tribune, Eugene Debs.12 The labor movement won spectacular victories when it organized the entire working class. But business retained the upper hand as workers from the world over remained divided.

  Less desirable as a citizen than as a laborer

  With Asian workers banned and European workers heavily restricted, industries in the Southwest, especially agriculture, and others as far away as Chicago demanded Mexican labor. In the early twentieth century, recruiters traveled into Mexico’s west-central states, enticing workers into a system of indentured servitude known as el enganche, or “the hook.” Those recruited to work in the United States fled the privatization and consolidation of rural land, falling wages in the cities and, eventually, a country battered by the chaos of the Mexican Revolution.13r />
  Mexicans—those who migrated and those who simply found themselves on the wrong side of the border after the Mexican-American War—were tolerated as workers but disdained as neighbors. They were subjected not only to exploitation on the job but to segregation and discrimination in housing and public accommodations, and to rampant state and vigilante violence.14 As the congressional Dillingham Commission, which laid the groundwork for the massive restriction of the 1920s, put it: Mexican workers were “providing a fairly adequate supply of labor … While not easily assimilated, this is of no great importance as long as most of them return to their native land. In the case of the Mexican, he is less desirable as a citizen than as a laborer.”15