All-American Nativism

by Daniel Denvir

  The New Deal state created not only racially exclusive suburbs but also a new identity for the people who inhabited them: “homeowner, taxpayer, and schoolparent status,” as Lassiter writes.143 The result, writes Davis, was that “affluent homeowners, organized by notional community designations or tract names, engaged in defense of home values and neighborhood exclusivity,” became “the most powerful ‘social movement’ in contemporary Southern California.”144

  American capitalism had created an iconic and proudly self-made white bourgeois family that simultaneously depended upon and disparaged low-paid immigrant workers who performed their cooking, cleaning, landscaping, and childrearing. The New Deal order’s “Fordist family wage,” as scholar Melinda Cooper writes, “not only functioned as a mechanism for the normalization of gender and sexual relationships, but it also stood at the heart of the mid-century organization of labor, race, and class.”145 That system broke down, and women entered the paid workforce in massive numbers, exciting a panic over sexual abuse of children who had been placed in daycares, and over Satanic cults.146 In the 1990s, middle-class Californians confronted the uncanny reality that a way of life for which they gave only themselves credit was premised upon the labor of people whose presence they found uncomfortable and with whom sharing citizenship seemed impossible.

  Nativism and the sex panic grew from the same soil; indeed, nativism was itself a form of sex panic. The defense of “family values,” of course, had become central to conservative politics. And while some religious right leaders have no doubt supported immigrants on Biblical grounds, many ordinary adherents have not; protecting their families, it seemed, required banning and expelling all sorts of other families whose difference constituted a threat to their future.

  New world order

  Even as 187 was almost entirely blocked in court, Arizona, California, Florida, New Jersey, New York, and Texas sued the federal government to recuperate immigration-related costs, including for incarceration.147 Governor Wilson fought on by attempting to deny prenatal care to undocumented women—a telling priority.148

  Californians, on the same ballots upon which they voted to pass 187, helped Newt Gingrich’s Republicans win unified control of Congress for the first time since 1952. Simpson, who had led the fight for IRCA, took the chair of the Senate Immigration Subcommittee and restrictionist representative Lamar Smith took over its House counterpart. Both were dedicated to restricting legal immigration, cracking down on “illegal immigration,” and denying welfare to immigrants.149 Ron Prince, co-chair of the pro-Prop 187 organization Save Our State, called the California measure a bid “to get the attention of our government.”150 They got the message.

  “Never before has this level of action been taken toward reforming immigration and never this early in a Congressional session,” Dan Stein, FAIR’s leader, gloated. “Immigration, thanks to the success of Proposition 187 and growing popular opinion as reflected in all major opinion polls, has Congress’s attention.”151

  Among the decade’s anti-immigrant laws was a retrenchment in public benefits targeting poor people in general and permanent residents in particular: Clinton and congressional Republicans’ so-called welfare “reform” law of 1996, an extension of the same balanced-budget racism that fueled Prop 187. It is seldom remembered that the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act included major restrictions on authorized immigrants’ access to public benefits (though Clinton did criticize these provisions as tarnishing an otherwise “extraordinarily important bill”).152 The bill cut cash assistance to poor families who had for years been racialized and portrayed as black, Latino, and pathologically dependent on government. Ironically, a judge struck down provisions of Prop 187 that denied state benefits not because they violated immigrant rights but because the federal welfare reform law preempted them.153

  Republicans at a national level learned a lesson from California: the war on “illegal immigrants” could mobilize more white voters to the right. It offered a new way for a party remade in reaction to black civil rights to highlight fears over what Time had in 1990 called the “browning of America”—to run a new version of the same play that had brought the GOP such success through the 1970s and 1980s. The nativist movement’s long-term goal, however, was the much larger task of reducing overall immigration—which meant sharply restricting legal arrivals as well.154 But attacking legal immigration would mostly prove to be impossible: it was protected by powerful bipartisan forces and, since 1965, had become deeply embedded in American institutions and politics.

  The 187 campaign’s simultaneous demonization of undocumented immigrants and public benefits was well suited to a conservative politics that mobilized a cross-class coalition of whites behind social and fiscal conservatism. But another central debate of that era, over NAFTA, evinced a coalitional fracture: the business-aligned factions of both parties advocated corporate globalization amid populist revolts on both the right and left.

  In fact, Prop 187 attracted a huge number of volunteers from one of the largest anti-NAFTA forces of the era: United We Stand America, founded by independent presidential candidate Ross Perot.155 Immigration was a major issue for many of Perot’s supporters.156 But not explicitly for Perot. He trained most of his fire on NAFTA, which he warned would create “a giant sucking sound” of American jobs disappearing into Mexico. Opposition to globalization was often an inchoate mix of feelings about the movement of capital and people, over national sovereignty, and identity. Perotism marked the midway point of a political transition, allowing a heterogeneous mass of disaffected people to express their grievances.157

  Perot’s 1992 independent campaign for president won an astonishing 19 percent of the vote—including tallying 24 percent in Orange County. Perot’s politics included an idiosyncratic assortment of positions reflecting a homespun philosophy that he used his vast personal wealth to promote in lengthy and popular infomercials. He called for campaign finance reform, direct democracy, and balancing the budget through tax hikes and spending cuts. He also criticized excessive CEO pay, the First Gulf War, and America losing the game of nation-based global competition.

  In retrospect, Perot’s success was the product of a moment when anti-globalization sentiment was still early in the process of ideological consolidation, which unfolded within a two-party system led by avowedly pro-globalization politicians. Perot, whose share of the vote was cut by more than half in 1996 when he ran on his Reform Party ticket, failed to define a systematic ideology that would outlive his extraordinarily bright moment in the national spotlight. By contrast, Pat Buchanan, an alumnus of the Nixon and Reagan administrations, became the prophet for a politics that would ultimately transform the Republican Party by way of Donald Trump. “His message is not mine,” Perot said. “We don’t want to build a wall around America.”158 It turned out that Perot didn’t speak for many of his voters. Buchanan did.

  In 1992, Buchanan ran an insurgent and racist primary campaign against President George H. W. Bush opposing the globalization of both labor and capital, and homosexuality. He did well enough to secure the keynote address at the Republican National Convention. Buchanan delivered an infamously homophobic and sexist speech that terrified many swing voters, warning of a “cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”159

  In 1995, Buchanan received an ecstatic reception at Perot’s United We Stand America conference, where he demanded to know, “What are we doing to our own people? What are we doing to our own country?”160 In the 1996 primary, Buchanan pledged to “bring back the Perot voters and the lost Reagan Democrats back to the GOP.”161 Meanwhile, Perot that same year fought off a serious challenge for his own Reform Party’s presidential nomination from hard-core nativist Richard Lamm, the former Democratic governor of Colorado, who insisted that “we must place as a first priority our own huddled masses.”162

  During the 1990s, Buchanan crafted a nascent coalition around social conse
rvatism, libertarian opposition to the slice of government spending directed specifically at a racialized minority portrayed as the nonworking poor, and an economic nationalism that placed white, blue-collar workers at its center. He simultaneously appealed to whites’ European heritage and their status as workers threatened by globalist business, warning of the “anti-NAFTA rage of the populist right.” It “is about more than trade,” he wrote. “NAFTA is the chosen field upon which the defiant forces of a new patriotism have elected to fight America’s foreign policy elite for control of the national destiny.” For Buchanan, NAFTA was just one skirmish in a battle against a New World Order, foreign aid, foreign military entanglements, feminism, the United Nations and illegal immigration. NAFTA was, he wrote, “part of a skeletal structure for world government.”163 As Frank Guan notes, however, “it was his defense of workers in American manufacturing and his opposition to foreign wars, not his racial bigotry and moral puritanism that estranged the aspiring demagogue from the party he had served.”164

  Establishment Republicans attempted to stitch racism and neoliberalism into a majority coalition. Buchanan exploited the fact that white working-class voters, motivated to defect from the New Deal coalition over economically entangled racial animus, had never signed on to the nakedly anti-labor policies advanced by the business side of the Republican coalition. It was one thing to oppose school busing and neighborhood integration, or cut benefits to poor people, characterizing them as non-white and nonproductive. It was another to attack white workers, and it drove support toward the right-wing insurgent.

  Buchanan combined opposition to free trade and illegal immigration into a right-wing nationalist agenda, the potency of which would only be realized by many with the election of Trump. At the time, the New Democrats and their Republican opponents sought to disentangle three closely entwined issues—“illegal immigration,” legal immigration, and economic globalization—playing nativism to their advantage by focusing it on “illegals” and thereby protecting both neoliberalism and legal immigration.

  “We can’t afford to lose control of our own borders at a time when we are not adequately providing for the jobs, health care, and the education of our own people,” said Bill Clinton, directing voters to place their blame on criminalized migrant workers instead of on the capital whose mobility he was protecting through a sophisticated global legal framework.165

  Instead of addressing the economic stresses that underlay Americans’ sense of insecurity in the world, politicians projected them onto the border. Without a strong left, and with union resistance curbed by Clintonism, opposition to corporate globalization was increasingly (though by no means entirely) captured by the right-wing anti-globalist position that saw mobile labor and capital as twin evils. The Soviet Union’s collapse supposedly heralded the triumph of American capitalism and the end of history as we knew it. But for many Americans, what was supposed to be an epochal victory marked a great sense of doubt, a story of which they were no longer certain to be the author and protagonist.

  Clinton deftly framed Republicans as extremists even as he co-opted less extreme variants of their positions. As far as short-term electoral matters were concerned, it at least didn’t appear to hurt given that Clinton won reelection in 1996. Republican demagoguery also drove a boom in naturalizations as eligible immigrants who had previously declined to do so became citizens in huge numbers to defend themselves against the nativist onslaught.166 And Clinton won an even greater share of Latino and Asian voters than he had in 1992 (though overall voter turnout reached near-historic lows).167

  In any case, the New Democrats’ short-term political victory reinforced the perception that immigrants posed a danger, that public benefits incentivized sloth and overbreeding among a racialized underclass, and that muscular repression on the borders and in the interior would be necessary to contain the threats. Unsurprisingly, then, the long-term advantage would accrue to the right, which was better positioned to link the immigrant threat to crime, welfare, globalization, and terrorism—and to package it all into a potent white and nationalist force.

  2

  SECURITY

  Our nation was built by immigrants … But we won’t tolerate immigration by people whose first act is to break the law as they enter our country.

  —President Bill Clinton, weekly radio address, May 19951

  In 1981, the Hesburgh Commission declared that “undocumented migration flouts U.S. immigration law [and that] its most devastating impact may be the disregard it breeds for other U.S. laws.”2 In the 1990s, politicians increasingly portrayed “illegal immigration” as an intrinsic source of criminality, as President Bill Clinton and his Republican antagonists sought to out-tough each other. It was a war on crime that demonized an immigrant threat, spurring border militarization and mass incarceration alike—all while deepening the connections between the criminal justice system and immigration enforcement, which traditionally was a largely civil matter.

  “Every day, illegal aliens show up in court who are charged,” said Clinton in a 1995 radio address. “Some are guilty and surely some are innocent. Some go to jail and some don’t. But they’re all illegal aliens, and whether they’re innocent or guilty of the crimes they were charged with in court, they’re still here illegally, and they should be sent out of the country.”3

  Amid high murder rates and long-term economic restructuring, Clinton not only fueled anti-crime sentiment but also helped ensure that crime had a black and Latino face. He described ungoverned streets and an insecure border as the sources of a violent and narcotic threat, and proposed policing, imprisonment, and deportation as solutions. Critically, Clinton cracked down both on “criminal aliens” who committed crimes and on “illegal immigrants” as a whole by insisting that all were by definition criminals: “people whose first act is to break the law as they enter our country,” as he put it.

  The histories of building walls along the border to keep foreigners out and erecting cages to contain those who live here already are inextricably entangled. As historian Kelly Lytle Hernández shows, they long have been so. Dominant politics, portraying a combined domestic and foreign criminal threat, built and legitimated a massive machinery of repression that operated through the Border Patrol, immigration agents from INS (later ICE), civil detention centers, local police, federal law enforcement, and a system of local, state, and federal jails and prisons. By the end of Obama’s first term, immigration enforcement and criminal justice institutions would be almost seamlessly linked. The result was a deportation machine unprecedented in both efficiency and size.

  The government response to September 11 under George W. Bush affixed these systems of domestic and border repression to the national security state and the military’s war on terror—a war in and against Muslim-majority nations abroad that ultimately boomeranged into a politics of mass Islamophobia at home (which I discuss at length in the next chapter). This chapter’s story begins at the border with Mexico, where the criminalization of human migration and the war on drugs became pretexts for a spectacular increase in the size of the Border Patrol and the construction of hundreds of miles of fencing. It ends by explaining how the wars on drugs and “illegal immigrants” failed to prevent the entry of either, leading to demands for yet more escalation rather than a reexamination of whether the wars should be waged at all.

  In recent decades, the border has become more an idea than a place. Since the 1970s, it has served as a lens through which Americans see their myriad, growing fears. At the same time, politicians have weaponized the border to serve political ends. Nativism is a recurrent feature of American history. But it was only in recent decades that the sort of border that Donald Trump would make use of came into existence. It was the politics and policies of those who came before him—including Clinton, Bush, and Obama—that paved the way for criminal violence and terrorism to displace economic insecurity as nativism’s central focus.

  Creating the crisis

  The continent
al United States has two land borders. But when people talk about “the border,” they typically refer to the one shared with Mexico. That border has existed as a geographic place cutting across a certain set of longitudes and latitudes, with slight adjustment, since the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the 1853–54 Gadsden Purchase rendered the US conquest of roughly half of Mexico’s territory a legal reality.

  Through the nineteenth century, the nation’s land borders marked the limits of an expanding settler empire’s contiguous territory. They were not a source of anxiety about immigration. In a sense, they were the opposite: they were a frontier, marking the territorial boundary of an empire-in-waiting that only white settlement could make a reality. Even in the early twentieth century, when the federal government first instituted light patrols, it was to catch barred Chinese who might slip in—not Mexicans.4 Congress first created the Border Patrol in 1924 just two days after it passed the Immigration Act of 1924, a law that imposed racist national origins quotas targeting eastern and southern Europeans and extended the bar on Asian immigration to formally exclude nearly the entire region.5

  Mexicans were not barred, but many crossed without authorization anyway, preferring to avoid securing a passport and paying an expensive visa fee and head tax that were first instituted in 1917.6 The Border Patrol targeted barred Chinese and restricted Europeans and also liquor smugglers.7 Yet it became more than anything a force for social control over Mexican “illegals,” regulating and disciplining the Mexican labor supply, not attempting to end it. For white working-class agents, it was also about “community, manhood, whiteness, class, respect, belonging, brotherhood, and violence,” writes Hernández. “Border Patrol officers in the Texas-Mexico borderlands thus broadly policed Mexicano mobility instead of enforcing the political boundary between the United States and Mexico.”8 It was only the “fears of invasion and subterfuge” surrounding World War II that “transformed the U.S. Border Patrol from a series of small and locally oriented outposts into a national police force with the resources to pursue immigration control on a much larger scale.”9 And it was only with the wartime creation of the Bracero program that, at the Mexican government’s prodding, more agents were assigned to the border with Mexico than the one with Canada, leading the number of Mexicans returned south to skyrocket.10