All-American Nativism

by Daniel Denvir

  In federal courts, prosecutions of immigrants charged with illegally reentering the country and rose steadily under presidents Clinton and Bush, then skyrocketed under Obama. Prosecutions for illegally entering the country, a misdemeanor, rose as well. In 2016, people convicted of immigration-related related offenses made up 8 percent of the federal prison population, or 13,300 inmates.217 As immigration law became increasingly indistinguishable from criminal law, the court system was converted into a prosecutor-directed assembly line to prison and then deportation. As of 2016, more than half of all federal prosecutions were for these two migration “crimes.”218

  In 2009, Congress required that DHS maintain more than 33,000 detention beds, later increased to 34,000.219 By the end of 2012, DHS had detained a staggering 477,523 immigrants for the fiscal year.220 That was bad news for immigrants but great news for a system in which private prison companies have played a major role. In 2005, roughly a quarter of immigrants in DHS custody were detained by a for-profit enterprise. By 2015, private prison companies controlled 62 percent of those beds.221

  The Trump presidency sent private prison stocks soaring.222 Stocks for GEO Group and CoreCivic (formerly and more forthrightly known as Corrections Corporation of America) had fallen sharply after Obama’s Justice Department announced that it would phase out using private prisons for federal inmates, even though it left the private detention of immigrants, where private companies play a much larger role, untouched.223 Attorney General Jeff Sessions quickly reversed even that minor reform and Trump’s nativist agenda promised a boom in immigrant detention.224 “It’s really an escalation of capacity need,” GEO Group chief executive George C. Zoley told Wall Street analysts on a conference call, due to the president “redirecting the approach to border security.”225

  A central question animating this book is why Americans have become ever more committed to the notion that the border is insecure at the very time that it has become more militarized than ever. Every chapter explains one thread of the overdetermined story. This chapter told the story of how American anxiety over the vicissitudes of global capitalism, crime, and terrorism was often expressed as anger over people and drugs making their way across the border with Mexico. For many Americans, a more fundamental and visceral danger lurked behind the complex phenomena of vanishing jobs, elusive foreign enemies fighting an unconventional war, and the racial and cultural change that mass Mexican immigration signified. As Trump would later put it in a tweet, “A nation WITHOUT BORDERS is not a nation at all.”

  With Trump, the border security complex that took over American politics in the early 1990s reached its maximally disassociated conclusion: The entire country, racked by downward mobility and opioid overdose, was now a border crisis. Hundreds of miles of fencing were in place and nearly twenty thousand agents patrolled the line.226 But many Americans felt less secure than ever.

  One silver lining to Trump’s rise has been that previously normal anti-immigrant policies have become toxic from center to left. Before Trump, centrist liberals considered a wall sound public policy—and voted for it. But Trump has made the wall a monstrosity. In her race for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton suddenly found herself beset by criticism, compelled to explain to Univision’s Jorge Ramos the difference between the 2006 Secure Fence Act she had supported “and Donald Trump’s idea on building a wall with Mexico.”227 After less than two years of Trump’s presidency, the very legitimacy of deportation was up for debate, with many on the left demanding, “Abolish ICE!” (Though it was unclear what some opportunistic Democrats who embraced the call meant by it.)

  Even as enforcement won public support, the impossible pledge to secure the border under Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama legitimated the objective and raised the stakes, encouraging maximalist demands on the nativist right. Border enforcement inevitably stokes racism and xenophobia because the fences, walls, and army of agents are a monument to racist and xenophobic principles. And these principles have the structure of an infinite, unsatisfiable demand whose fulfillment only reinforces the desire for more. Trump has finally drawn a line that asks everyone: Which side are you on?

  3

  EMPIRE

  As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?

  —Federation for American Immigration Reform founder John Tanton, 19861

  When Justice Department lawyers defended Trump’s Muslim ban, their briefs neglected to mention one of its most favorable judicial precedents. It was an 1889 Supreme Court decision affirming the federal government’s right to single out Chinese people for exclusion from the United States. In Chae Chan Ping v. United States, the court ruled against a challenge to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese workers from entering the country, and its amendments of 1888, which expanded the Act by disallowing the reentry of resident Chinese immigrants who had left the country. The government, the court’s majority ruled, had an incontestable power to exclude when it “considers the presence of foreigners of a different race in this country, who will not assimilate with us, to be dangerous to its peace and security.”2

  Immigration, the court found, was fundamentally a question of racial policy, foreign policy, and national security. Who came into the country and what status they were accorded once they arrived were constant dilemmas because they posed an impossible contradiction: the nation needed racialized others on the inside but desperately wanted them out at the same time. The inexorable push for territorial expansion and demand for cheap labor, in other words, have always had to contend with the exigencies of white demographic supremacy. Chinese exclusion would be law until 1943 and would only be substantively abolished in 1965.

  From the American Revolution through the early nineteenth century, immigration was largely a matter of recruiting white migrants and coercing African ones. The story of American immigration, however, begins earlier still: not with Ellis Island but with settler colonialism, when one country gained control of foreign territory by populating it with its subjects. From Jamestown to the mid-seventeenth century, racism was not yet fully codified in law. There was not yet a sharp social distinction between indentured European and enslaved African laborers. It was only with the development of the plantation system and its institutionalization as a pillar of American political economy that whiteness became synonymous with freedom, and blackness with slavery.3 In the interest of consolidating territorial control and securing economic gains, British America required more white migrants than England alone could provide—and increasingly, the system demanded enslaved Africans. Enslaved people made up an estimated 17 percent of the 198,400 migrants who arrived from 1607 to 1699, compared with the 49 percent who were indentured servants. From 1700 through 1775, enslaved people comprised an estimated 47 percent of 585,800 total migrants. Whereas English and Welsh people made up an overwhelming majority of seventeenth-century European migrants, Germans, Irish and Scots made up three-quarters of the pre-Revolutionary eighteenth-century total, anticipating an expansive definition of whiteness that would become law after the Revolution.4 What we now consider to be immigration politics is rooted in and inseparable from what was originally considered settlement politics.

  The American Revolution is conventionally understood as a revolt against monarchical tyranny. Settlers, too, understood their rebellion in such terms: they consistently described their subjection to British rule as a form of “slavery.”5 But settler elites in no sense rejected an unequal political order. The economy, after all, was in large part powered by enslaved labor, the slave trade and dispossessed Native land. The basic dispute behind the Revolution was not over the persistence of settler colonialism—and the tyrannical uses of power it necessitated—but over whether settlers would claim the prerogative to direct its march across the continent.6

  King George, the Declaration of Independence complained, “has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States;
for that purpose, obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.” What’s more, it complained, he “has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.” The Crown had barred settlement west of the Appalachians. For settlers, any imperial conciliation with Native people was a declaration of war on the colonies.

  After winning independence in 1783, the United States proceeded to conquer vast stretches of a continent under the control of Native people, European empires, and Mexico. The United States then had to make choices about what made an American, and who had the right to become one. In a constitutional republic where citizens enjoyed civil and political freedoms, including in limited cases the right to elect representatives to rule on their behalf, it was imperative to designate the boundaries of citizenship. Government by “we the people” forced Americans to decide who the people were. The country’s first naturalization law, enacted in 1790, answered that question by opening citizenship to most any “free white person.” US citizenship was thus notably expansive, including a wide variety of Europeans beyond the confines of Anglo Protestantism. Yet in doing so, it further sharpened the color line facing those who remained on the other side of it.

  Old-stock Protestants, of course, expressed ambivalence and hostility toward non-British and Catholic immigrants. In 1798, President John Adams, a Federalist, signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, targeting immigrants perceived to be supportive of the opposition Democratic-Republican Party, and of the radicalism of revolutionary France, at a moment when war seemed probable. The Acts authorized the deportation of aliens deemed “dangerous to the peace and public safety of the United States,” increased the years of residency required for naturalization, and gave the government new censorship powers.

  But war did not come, no immigrants were deported, and in short order the Acts were mostly repealed or expired* because Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, who had a strong base among immigrant workers, won power. Because European immigrants could easily gain citizenship, many could vote—though by no means all, since all women and many poor men were barred from doing so.7 European immigrants could and did protect European immigration through exercising the franchise.8 Anti-Catholic nativism was constant. But European settlement was mostly not only tolerated but encouraged, with massive amounts of free or cheap land provided across the expanding frontier.9 White settlement and the forced relocation of enslaved Africans were necessary for holding territory and staffing factories and fields.

  But the absence of federal immigration policy against Europeans didn’t mean that the United States had open borders. While the federal government exercised power over territorial expansion, it was the states that regulated immigration until the late nineteenth century: Northeastern states, drawing on colonial-era British poor laws that allowed for excluding paupers and banishing beggars, targeted the poor; their Southern counterparts wanted to control the movement of free blacks, including sailors; many states excluded convicts. “There can be no concurrent power respecting such a subject-matter,” said Friedrich Kapp, New York City commissioner of emigration, in 1870. “Such a power is necessarily discretionary. Massachusetts fears foreign paupers; Mississippi, free negroes.” There weren’t immigration laws so much as a collection of policies governing freedom of movement into and across multiple domestic jurisdictions.10

  The United States’ territorial ambitions imposed the familiar dilemma of managing the admission of racial others while ensuring their domination. In 1848, United States victory over Mexico set into motion a process by which an estimated sixty thousand Mexicans became Mexican Americans, now “strangers in their own land.”11 The United States had annexed Texas after a rebellion by slaveholding Anglo settlers. Then president James Polk launched the nakedly racist, imperialist, and ruthless Mexican-American War. Some clamored for the United States to seize the entirety of Mexico. But those who warned against incorporating what they deemed to be unassimilable racial others prevailed.

  The result was the seizure of roughly half of Mexico’s territory. Later, even as courts crafted legal rationales to determine whether Afghans, Asian Indians, or Syrians were white and thus eligible to naturalize,12 Mexican Americans were reverse engineered as white because they were, by way of the war-ending Treaty of Guadalupe, citizens.13 But that was only in narrow legal terms: in practice, racist ideology framed Mexicans as a backward “hybrid race,” both Spanish and indigenous.14 They were met with widespread discrimination, violence, and segregation. New Mexico would not be admitted as a state until the late date of 1912 precisely because too many Mexicans and Natives resided there—and too few whites.15

  An immigration boom helped triple the US population between 1820 and 1860, when nearly one-half of New York City’s population was foreign born.16 It was commonplace for states to accord non-citizen European immigrants the right to vote. They were presumed to be what legal scholar Hiroshi Motomura calls “Americans-in-waiting,” people whose arrival would inevitably result in citizenship. Even still, in the 1850s a powerful nativist movement, the “Know Nothings,” achieved huge electoral success fulminating against the Romanist peril posed by Catholic migrants; amid an intensifying debate over slavery, nativism united North and South in nationalistic opposition to aliens.

  Nativists derided Irish immigrants as drinkers and criminals and believed they posed a manifold threat to “free labor”: they were supporters of the slaveocracy, dependent wage workers, paupers, and a base of corrupt big-city Democratic machines.17 From the 1830s through the 1880s, Massachusetts targeted Irish paupers, disproportionately women with children, deporting fifty thousand people—including citizens—to Ireland, Britain, and Canada and also to other states in the United States. “Deportation was therefore a policy intended to ensure that the United States was a nation of self-sufficient workers by eliminating foreigners who deviated from this vision,” writes historian Hidetaka Hirota.18 Government saw Catholics and paupers as security threats and used its powers to treat them as such.

  The growing sectional conflict over slavery, however, eclipsed the nativist movement’s appeal and caused it to split along sectional lines. But migration politics never went away, as the possibility of abolition also meant the possibility of black migration out of the South. Fear of the latter dominated antebellum debate over emancipation and made the colonization—forced or voluntary emigration—of black people to Africa or elsewhere a mainstream position among anti-slavery white Americans.

  Black colonization was a political fantasy, albeit a widely held one: eliminating the racialized bottom caste of American capitalism so as to create a homogeneously white republic. Abraham Lincoln remained an adherent of it well into his presidency.19 But whites across the North and West sought to stop black in-migration; Oregon came into the Union barring both slavery and the presence of black people.20 The unfeasibility of black colonization nevertheless had the consequence of marginalizing non-whites, cheapening their labor, and undermining the possibility of mass solidarity. In other words, exclusion politics, whatever their aim, functioned not just to keep people out but to bolster the power structure within. The same population politics governed policy toward indigenous people, who amid the continuation of long-running genocide were confined to reservations, their freedom of movement restricted as their territory was systematically dismantled and handed over to settlers.

  After the Union victory, free blacks and Radical Republicans for the first time expanded the bounds of citizenship beyond total white supremacy. With the Fourteenth Amendment, citizenship was opened to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” referring especially to African Americans and emancipated slaves, with some exceptions—most notably indigenous people—read into the law later on. Naturalization law, theretofore limited to whites, was also opened to “aliens of African nativity and
to persons of African descent.” But efforts to universalize naturalization were frustrated: White supremacist politics, including rising anti-Chinese sentiment in California, checked the Radical Republican agenda.21 Despite protests from race egalitarians, Republicans moved to embrace Chinese exclusion in 1876—anticipating their agreement to withdraw troops from the South a year later and the 1882 passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act.22 Famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison condemned the “demagogical, partisan rivalry between Republican and Democratic Senators as to who should the most strongly cater to the brutal, persecuting spirit which for the time being is so rampant in California.”23 The same thing could have been said in the mid-1990s.

  The nation continued its push westward, providing millions of acres of cheap land to settlers, including 96 million acres over forty years through the Homestead Act—a program that excluded Asians because they were ineligible for citizenship.24 Rather than a heroic frontier epic, writes political scientist Paul Frymer, westward expansion was a set of “laws … explicitly recognized for the way they could help manufacture racial demographics by incentivizing white Americans and Europeans to settle the West.”25 Government actively recruited across Europe, promising, in Secretary of State William H. Seward’s words, “active, industrious, and intelligent men … abundant means of support and comfortable homesteads.”26 In the South, massive violence and federal acquiescence brought an end to Reconstruction, re-imposing white supremacist government.

  White supremacists sought to defeat Reconstruction to crush black political power, frustrate populist cross-racial alliances, and protect the exploitation of black labor. Their methods included vagrancy laws, convict-lease labor, and peonage. “Southern political elites,” write political scientists Michael C. Dawson and Megan Ming Francis, “wanted to secure a subservient and captive black labor force by driving blacks who were becoming economically independent—figuratively and actually—back onto the plantation.”27 In other words, Southern elites meant to keep black people in their place, an appropriately spatial metaphor for a system that used the control of black movement to enforce economic and racial hierarchies. White reactionaries also, however, created the conditions for the next stages of black struggle: the black freedom movement and the long-feared mass migration of black people from the South.