All-American Nativism

by Daniel Denvir

  Senator Simpson opposed an early form of the bill and had initially persuaded President Bush to as well. But opposition was steamrolled by business and ethnic advocacy groups. One internal administration memo, in a powerful reflection of a bygone conservatism, fretted that Bush would become publicly identified with “restrictionists” if he didn’t support the law.106 The legislation also, however, authorized the hiring of one thousand Border Patrol agents, replicating in miniature what had become the conventional wisdom of protecting the political space for authorized immigration by cracking down on “illegals.”

  In 1982, Simpson had warned that if immigration reform didn’t pass Congress there would be growing calls “for more enforcement, more border patrol personnel, more immigration investigators.” He continued:

  We shall see a change in public attitudes toward immigrants and refugees. We shall see public support for our fine immigration and refugee programs eroding as American citizens perceive that their short-term interests are being threatened by the continued uncontrolled numbers of legal and illegal immigrants competing for jobs and scarce resources.

  We might well then see all of the latent nativism, xenophobia, racism and scapegoating come fully to the surface and begin to tragically and profoundly influence public policy. We can expect increased public pressure for stricter enforcement of the existing immigration laws; increased raids upon the workplaces; the prospect of continued long-term detention, and the possibility of mass deportations.107

  Simpson’s predictions of growing nativism proved prescient, though not for the reasons he supposed. Enforcement escalations indeed became commonplace. But they would only lead to calls for yet more dramatic enforcement and the very extreme xenophobia he had warned against.

  The next major attempt to fix these impossible contradictions was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), with its promise that integrated markets would improve Mexicans’ living standards to the point where they would no longer feel compelled to migrate north. NAFTA’s globalizing framework, of course, neither stopped migration nor mollified its nativist critics. It inflamed them, creating the specter of a New World Order that moved both labor and capital across borders at corporate whim while undermining American wages, neighborhoods, security, and sovereignty. As IRCA failed to deter unauthorized immigration and the NAFTA debate ripped through both major parties, radicalized nativists moved toward the center of American politics.

  Hardworking, hardly working

  In the early 1990s, an anti-immigrant insurgency took root in California, the center of the movement to bar Chinese immigration more than a century earlier. A major economic slump had taken hold, thanks in part to declining defense industry jobs after the Cold War drew to a close. Chinese people had moved into the San Gabriel Valley, and Latinos into the San Fernando Valley, as area aerospace manufacturers spun into sharp decline.108 Immigrants joined black Americans in the racist white imaginary as lazy and unworthy welfare dependents.

  As jobs became scarcer, the number of immigrants, authorized and not, was growing. In 1990, an estimated 3.5 million undocumented immigrants lived in the United States, more than 40 percent of them in California.109 “Illegal immigration is the hottest issue in the state,” said Republican assemblyman Bill Morrow, who represented a wealthy district encompassing portions of Orange and San Diego Counties, in 1993. “We’ve got to say to the Federal Government, ‘If you don’t close the border, we will.’”110

  In a familiar contradiction, immigrants were seen as both competing for scarce jobs and refusing to work at all, mooching off the state. Citizens identified as “taxpayers” were forced by a hostile government to fund the dangerous fecundity of non-white layabouts. One Republican legislator from an LA suburb circulated a ditty composed by a constituent to that effect:

  Everything is mucho good.

  Soon we own the neighborhood.

  We have a hobby—it’s called breeding.

  Welfare pay for baby feeding.111

  Latina childbearing was a dominant theme, deeply enmeshed with the era’s demonization of poor black mothers. It tied the government’s fiscal irresponsibility to the encouragement of irrepressible and irresponsible reproduction. To many in Southern California, Mexicans illegally invaded by crossing the border, and then illegitimately expanded their numbers by having children who would consume benefits funded by, and thus rightly belonging to, hardworking taxpayers.112

  California was sold to turn of the twentieth century Anglos as an “Eden for the Saxon Homeseeker” and organized on profoundly racist principles from the inception of colonization. Spanish rule brutally reduced the indigenous population, which fell from 310,000 in 1769, to 150,000 in 1850, when California became a US state; Americans continued this trend, overseeing a fall to fewer than 20,000 by 1900.113 In 1950s Los Angeles, media and police stoked a panic that “wolf packs” and “rat packs” of Mexican American youth were “invading white communities to peddle drugs and commit violence,” using the same cars that had enabled California’s low-density utopia to trespass the racial boundaries that defined its social order. Criminal others, as historian Matthew Lassiter writes, made “pretty white females into heroin addict-victims who invariably descended into the living death of prostitution across the urban color line.” Racist criminalization recapitulated the events of a decade prior, when Mexican American youth dressed in Zoot Suits were portrayed as delinquents and assaulted by masses of rioting servicemen.114 The state of California officially endorsed residential segregation as the best way to prevent delinquency.115 Border enforcement, whether within American cities or along international boundaries, functioned and continues to function to protect the spatial organization of race and class hierarchy.

  But by no means was a nativist revolt in California inevitable. In 1979, a poll had found that residents of the Southwest were much less likely than those in the Northeast to believe that undocumented workers took jobs from Americans, something that one expert credited to the concentration of immigrants in areas with the lowest unemployment rates.116 Anti-immigrant sentiment was by no means dominant.

  California lieutenant governor Mike Curb, a Republican, told members of the Republican National Committee in 1979 that “undocumented workers are not committing crime, they are coming here to work. Very few of them are on welfare, very few of them are violating our laws, most of them are extremely good citizens. We should begin to treat them with respect. We should treat any worker who is putting in an honest day’s work with respect.”117 Imagine a Republican politician saying that in 2020.

  Early 1990s California is the first chapter of a story about how such sentiments became politically impossible in the Republican Party. California proved for nativists that mass non-white immigration led to crime, the growth of a racialized underclass unassimilable to American culture, and, critically, excessive expenditures by hardworking taxpayers on behalf of an indolent minority shamelessly reproducing without the means to pay the costs of their offspring.

  The nativist revolt culminated in voters’ 1994 passage of Proposition 187, an act of spectacular cruelty that among other things denied public services to suspected undocumented immigrants—even schools—and required public officials to report those immigrants to the INS. The stated goal was to deter new undocumented immigrants from arriving by driving those already present out of bedrock services.118

  The measure began by asserting that the people of California “are suffering economic hardship caused by the presence of illegal aliens in this state” and from “personal injury and damage caused by [their] criminal conduct.”119 The measure, originating in the right-wing suburban stronghold of Orange County, simultaneously conjured up a law-abiding and taxpaying victimized citizenry (the suffering people) and those who were to blame: criminal and moocher aliens. White injury was premised on white innocence, which in turn relied on ignorance: absent was the history of Mexican migration and its criminalization; also missing was a good explanation for why all these Ang
los even lived in a state and cities with Spanish-language names, places that had in fact previously belonged to multiple indigenous peoples before European genocide.120

  Two of the key Prop 187 organizers, former border agent Bill King and soon-to-be leading nativist Barbara Coe, summed up the kaleidoscopic dynamic of immigrant threat and white victimhood in a 1992 ad they had placed in the National Review. The ad sought out people who had “been victims of crimes either financial (welfare, unemployment, food stamps, etc.), educational (overcrowding, forced bilingual classes, etc.) or physical (rape, robbery, assault, infectious disease, etc.) committed by illegal aliens.”121

  Proposition 184, affirming a draconian new “Three Strikes” sentencing law, was on the same ballot, and likewise passed in a landslide. As scholar Daniel Martinez HoSang writes, both measures “depicted an angry and vulnerable populace drawing the line against an incorrigible criminal class that lay beyond the pale of society.”122 So many threats had been rolled into one alien menace. Unsurprisingly, FAIR was involved. One of its lobbyists, former INS commissioner Alan C. Nelson, helped write 187 alongside the agency’s former western regional chief, Harold W. Ezell. FAIR then spent thousands on pro-187 ads after the propositions’ opponents attacked 187’s ties to FAIR, highlighting its receipt of hundreds of thousands of dollars from the eugenicist Pioneer Fund.123

  This was the moment that the movement’s most right-wing demands entered mainstream conservative politics—and thus mainstream politics as a whole—in full force. And though the law’s full implementation was quickly blocked in court, it nonetheless terrorized immigrants. Prop 187 supporters pointed to the fear the law had unleashed in immigrant communities—to celebrate its success. “A number of people have pulled children out of school for no apparent reason. All these things add up to illegal aliens leaving the state of California,” crowed Ron Prince, an Orange County accountant who served as co-chairman of Save Our State, which was the name of the organization backing the measure and also a shorthand for the measure itself.124

  Republican governor Pete Wilson made 187 and the defense of “Californians who work hard, pay taxes, and obey the laws” a centerpiece of his reelection campaign, and rode anti-“illegal” politics to victory.125 Wilson made it clear that “illegal immigration” could be a partisan issue that Republicans would seek to own. As Clinton moved his party right, that also meant it was a wedge issue that centrist Democrats would try to co-opt in a bid to outflank them.

  Indeed, it was Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat and former San Francisco mayor, who led the way in connecting immigration to the economic slump and making “illegal immigrants” a top political issue.126 It was Feinstein who inspired Governor Wilson “to become more aggressive,” according to a Los Angeles Times analysis at the time. “She has provided ‘cover’ for politicians of both parties, lending respectability to a sensitive area where it is easy to be branded a demagogue and a bigot.” Feinstein suggested that political correctness had made others too afraid to “speak out.”127

  Feinstein, who had narrowly lost the 1990 gubernatorial election to Wilson, claimed that her “moderate approach” was necessary “to avoid a serious backlash against all immigrants,” articulating establishment politics that would define the coming decades: crackdowns on bad “illegal immigrants” to protect good “legal immigrants” and to defuse extreme right-wing measures.128

  One Wilson election ad similarly invoked the specter of bad immigrants tarnishing the good. Against images of the Statue of Liberty and a naturalization ceremony, he declared: “There’s a right way, and there’s a wrong way. To reward the wrong way is not the American way.”129 The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 had purportedly replaced a racist system with a fair and liberal one. In the “colorblind” era that followed, “illegal immigrants” could be portrayed as violating the citizenship compact and meriting just punishment.130 Prop 187 was simultaneously right-wing and liberal, racist and capacious: it passed by eighteen percentage points with 63 percent of the white vote, but also nearly half of black and Asian votes and nearly a quarter of Latinos.131 A racist law could be presented as racially neutral opposition to illegality.

  Feinstein and the rest of the liberal establishment did oppose 187—but on terms that entirely conceded its premise. The establishment campaign, Taxpayers Against 187, targeted white suburbanites with the case that the war on “illegal immigration” was necessary but that right-wingers were waging it ineffectively. “Something must be done to stop the flow of illegal immigrants coming across the border,” their official statement read. “Illegal Immigration is a REAL problem, but Proposition 187 is NOT A REAL SOLUTION.” The campaign warned that 187 wouldn’t actually deport anyone and that undocumented students expelled from school could become criminals.132

  Grassroots activists who mounted their own immigrant-centered campaign as part of a mass movement of protests and student walkouts were appalled. Prop 187 was unbeatable. So, instead of attempting to co-op nativist language, they built the immigrant power that would over the following decades help transform California politics and relegate the state’s Republicans to the margins.133

  Meanwhile, Feinstein released an ad attacking her opponent in the Senate race on border security, boasting that she “led the fight to stop illegal immigration.”134 In September, less than two months before the vote, Attorney General Janet Reno announced Operation Gatekeeper, a massive federal crackdown on the San Diego border area, declaring: “The days when the border served as a revolving door for illegal immigrants are over.”135 Feinstein and Reno’s approach encapsulates a central argument of this book: the liberal and mainstream establishment attempted to outflank their right-wing opponents by co-opting their message, but in doing so they simply amplified the nativists’ politics and advanced their policies. Democrats worked with the right to convince voters that immigration was a problem. They voted “yes” on 187 because it was a tough solution.

  Balanced-budget nativism

  In the late nineteenth century, “the alleged racial inferiority of immigrants became the explanation for depressed wages, labor strife, and the emerging ‘sweatshop system,’” just as their un-Americanness explained left-wing radicalism, writes sociologist Kitty Calavita.136 In the 1990s, a fiscal frame was front and center, and “this scapegoating of immigrants as the cause of the crisis found a ready audience among the white middle-class who disproportionately make up the electorate.”137 Assessing the history of anti-immigrant politics then requires not only accounting for why nativism waxes and wanes in intensity at particular moments—the quantity of nativism—but also its quality. “If immigrants serve as scapegoats for social crises, it stands to reason that the specific content of anti-immigrant nativism will shift to encompass the prevailing malaise.”138

  And so it did. The movement that took off in California was the product of intertwined fiscal and social conservative accounts of long economic and social crises. The nativist resurgence of the 1990s was heavily focused on “immigrants as a tax burden, a focus that is unusual, if not unique in the history of U.S. nativism,” Calavita writes. It was a larger piece of the “balanced-budget conservatism” that accompanied “workers’ stagnant wages and increasing insecurity, and the dismantling of the welfare state.”139

  The argument that immigrants were exploiting social services to which they had no right offered conservatives a less offensive way to make the familiar argument that hardworking taxpayers were funding programs for a poor and often non-white underclass that did not deserve them. Indeed, the foundation for fiscal nativism had been set years prior. Historian Mike Davis writes that, in 1964, suburban opposition to black people in their neighborhoods spurred the success of Proposition 14, which aimed to thwart integrated housing; then, in the late 1970s, suburban parents mobilized against busing to integrate schools; and in 1978, California kicked off a nationwide tax revolt after middle-class white suburbanites led the successful campaign for Proposition 13, which restricted property t
axes in the name of defending the home and the families who occupied it from a redistributive state that was transferring their wealth to the undeserving poor.140

  Felicitously, victories won by California’s suburbanite right, a movement that went national with Nixon and Reagan, created new crises for that movement to exploit. HoSang explains: “The large-scale cutbacks in public services that fueled so much of the animosity driving Proposition 187, nearly all of which could be traced to the wave of property tax–slashing measures in the late 1970s and early 1980s as well as to the increase in state prison spending, became almost singularly understood as a result of the impact of undocumented immigration.”141 The upshot was that the crisis would be met by white reaction more than working-class resistance.

  To say that xenophobia is shaped by the politics of economic life does not mean that economically precarious whites are its exclusive source, as the muddled debate over the causes of Trump’s election suggest. Quite to the contrary: the New Deal order had quietly subsidized white middle-class suburbia by financing homes in segregated neighborhoods where children attended segregated schools and also built the highways that led to them. But these subsidies were often invisible to their recipients, and so the New Deal perversely laid the material foundation for the reaction against it: middle-class white suburbanites living in racially exclusive suburbs who believed that their status was solely the product of their own hard work, and who fought to protect the world they had built from undeserving others. Nowhere was this more true than in the Sun Belt, where defense spending dramatically remade the economy and spurred a population boom.142