More bluntly, Senator Ted Kennedy pledged that “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.”80 Both Johnson and Kennedy were wrong: the geographic origins of immigration changed dramatically and, as a result, so did anti-immigrant politics. Before Hart-Celler, the vast majority of immigrants came from Europe. In the years after its implementation, more than half came from Latin America and a quarter from Asia.81 Critically, however, the law also coincided with the end of the Bracero Mexican guest worker program, and for the first time imposed a cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. The sudden restriction on Mexican immigration was exacerbated in 1976, when country-specific caps were made universal, allotting Mexicans the same low number of slots as Uruguayans or Belgians.82 It inserted a time bomb into the very heart of American immigration policy and politics: Mexicans would continue to come but would be received as criminals.
With Hart-Celler, the country celebrated its commitment to being a “nation of immigrants,” an idea that had been popularized by a martyred John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president. The United States, however, was never that nation. A novel popular mythology with strong amnesiac properties, it relocated the nation’s origin story from the settlers at Plymouth Rock to “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” at Ellis Island, as historian Matthew Frye Jacobson writes.83 The celebration was overwhelmingly for a nation of “white ethnic” immigrants who “came the right way,” obscuring the fact that migration policy had for much of American history been a white supremacist demographic project and absolving a white nation of the moral stain of Native genocide and African slavery.84
White ethnics had for four decades been not only restricted from immigration but excluded from full membership in whiteness. The 1965 reform accelerated an expansion of whiteness that included them at its core—a model of white virtue contrasted against black people who failed to strive their way out of the ghetto, and against Mexicans who snuck past the Border Patrol instead of undergoing inspection in New York Harbor.85 This “nation of immigrants” belonged neither to the Native people rendered invisible in this “empty land,” nor to the black people who had been forced to North America in chains, nor to the Mexicans who began to cross the southern border without authorization in enormous numbers because there was no other way.
The white right
In 1979, U.S. News and World Report warned of an illegal “invasion,” contending that “the traditions of Mexican Americans remain undiluted, refreshed daily by an influx of illegal immigrants from another country.” In 1983, Time sounded the alarm of “a staggering influx of foreign settlers,” people “feeling as much like a migrant as an immigrant, not an illegal alien but a reconquistador.”86 There were even fears, as the Los Angeles Times put it in 1979, that “hundreds of thousands of Third World immigrants entering California and the rest of the United States are bringing with them a panoply of communicable diseases that could, according to health experts, move the country back toward nineteenth-century standards of public health.”87
The white reaction to the black Great Migration and freedom struggle resisted black movement into previously white neighborhoods, schools, and jobs. It laid the groundwork for mass incarceration, a system emerging in the 1970s to take a people on the move and fix them in place. It also created a model for resisting immigration: a template of white identity politics organized for territorial defense against the fiscal, criminal, and demographic threats posed by racial others. It was this mass political moment that a new, violent white power movement tapped into. Its racist ideology eschewed liberal niceties, putting immigration and fertility at the center of its adherents’ belief in an apocalyptic plan to replace the white race. The movement, which took root in the 1970s among radicalized Vietnam War veterans, declared that a “Jewish Zionist Occupational Government” conspired to destroy the white race through abortion, interracial marriage, birth control, and immigration.88
In 1977, white power activists launched the “Klan Border Watch,” an armed patrol on the Mexican border. “We will be here as long as it takes to meet the response of the illegal alien problem,” said David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan’s young Grand Dragon.89
In 1981, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan took advantage of a local backlash against refugee shrimpers whose resettlement along the Texas Gulf coast prompted worries over competition from white fishermen. Robed and armed Klansmen patrolled the Galveston Bay with a human effigy hanging from the rigging.90 Two Vietnamese were acquitted on self-defense grounds after a white fisherman was shot and killed in a dispute over crab traps; Vietnamese boats were burned; Vietnamese shrimpers were threatened and harassed.
For the far right, the campaign against hundreds of thousands of resettled Indochinese refugees was the continuation of a war on communism in Vietnam that government surrender had left unfinished. That many refugees fought alongside or supported the United States did not matter. Political threats, like economic ones, were racialized; in fact, that’s how race was made, again and again.
In 1980, 125,000 Cuban asylum seekers arrived in Florida during the Mariel boatlift, which included some released prisoners.91 “It seems to me the evidence is clear and overwhelming that Castro is emptying out his prisons and his mental institutions,” said Colorado’s nativist Democratic governor Richard Lamm, demanding that no Cubans be resettled in his state.92 But Cuban asylum seekers—people fleeing a communist nation—were ultimately accommodated because doing so fit Cold War foreign policy aims. By contrast, their black Haitian counterparts were targeted for detention and exclusion. Indeed, the persecution of Haitians fleeing the Duvalier dictatorship, carried out by the Carter and then the Reagan administration, created the immigration detention system that we know today.93
The Refugee Act of 1980 had for the first time made US law consistent with international law: it codified the right to protection from persecution as a universal one rather than as merely a blunt tool for Cold War foreign policy that provided shelter to those fleeing countries governed by US adversaries.94 But Reagan, whose dirty wars across Central America were waged in the name of securing the US southern border against communism and refugees alike, continued to deploy it as just that. Rallying support for the Contra war in Nicaragua, Reagan declared that if the Sandinista government were left unchecked, it would expand into “a sea of red, eventually lapping at our own borders.”95 Failure to wage war, he warned, would lead to a flood of refugees heading to the United States: “If the Communists consolidate their power, their campaign of violence throughout Central America will go into high gear, bringing new dangers and sending hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming toward our 2,000-mile long southern border.”96
Reagan, of course, helped instead to cause a massive refugee exodus fleeing US-backed violence. As hundreds of thousands fled murderous US-allied anti-communist governments in El Salvador and Guatemala, Reagan denied them asylum—accusing them of being unworthy “economic migrants.” Reagan’s actions, protecting murderous right-wing regimes by denying refuge to the people fleeing them, also sparked a sanctuary movement that, in tandem with left-wing solidarity organizations, became one of the largest social movements of the era.97 The campaign, a new “underground railroad,” used houses of worship to protect refugees and resisted intense US government repression. It also created an immigrant and refugee defense network that outlasted the dirty wars, and a model for the new sanctuary movement that would reemerge to fight deportations under Obama and then Trump.
Meanwhile, the white power movement was fighting Reagan’s wars with official support that “ranged from inconsistent prosecution to tacit non-action to overt approval,” as historian Kathleen Belew writes.98 Across Central America, far-right US mercenaries trained military forces, including the Salvadoran military’s Atlacatl Battalion, which had massacred nearly one thousand civilians in the village of El Mozote. At the southern border, the mercenary organization Civilian Materiel Assistance mounted an armed foray that went two and a half miles into Mexico in 198
6. They set traps for migrants, shot at them, and stopped and detained sixteen at gunpoint. Instead of prosecuting the mercenaries, the United States deported their migrant captives.99 Ironically, the far right decried the militarization of domestic security—precisely what their desired war on immigrants would help accomplish.100
As the Cold War drew to a close, the two-way contest that had defined its politics collapsed into a unipolar world order. For many Americans, however, the victory seemed empty and even foreboding. It was the beginning of a now familiar state of affairs: an empire in crisis, conjuring up new enemies in a futile quest to give meaning to a rudderless national identity.
Delivering his 1991 State of the Union Address, as American troops led the First Gulf War’s coalition against Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait, George H.W. Bush declared it the first of a new kind of war and of “a new world order” under enlightened American leadership.101 Bush announced that the United States had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”102 But for many on the right, the more substantive threat seemed to be the one posed by the American government itself—a pawn, conspiracists charged, of that “New World Order.” Taking Bush’s concept and redefining it as nefarious, the right declared that the United States had ceded its sovereignty to the forces of globalism. Their fight would be to secure the border with Mexico.
The language of race
After the civil rights revolution, a colorblind liberal ethos rendered mainstream racism into racially neutral language. Language, a proxy for culture that was itself a proxy for race, would be at its center. The latest immigrants, nativists contended, would or could not assimilate. A campaign to protect the English language by making it the country’s official language—something that in legal terms the United States has never had—was a palatable surrogate for ethnonationalism. The fear that English was so imperiled was, like much nativist politics, a fantastical projection: English had long since become the indisputable lingua franca, not just of the United States, but the entire world.
The contemporary English-only movement was born in 1983 when nativist movement godfather John Tanton founded the group U.S. English, whose advisory board included luminaries like Arnold Schwarzenegger, neoconservative sociologist Nathan Glazer, and Walter Cronkite. Legislation to amend the Constitution to make English the official language was repeatedly introduced beginning in 1981, when US senator S. I. Hayakawa, a California Republican who helped Tanton found the group, first introduced it.103 The group also called for an end to bilingual ballots, which would necessitate repealing the Voting Rights Act provision requiring them in areas with significant non-English-speaking populations—one of many cases when anti-immigrant politics entailed attacks on victories won by historic freedom struggles.104
“White ethnic” European heritage was widely celebrated. But the invocation of black and Latino cultural difference, whether regarding Ebonics or bilingual education, elicited scorn and suspicion. Right-wing leader Howard Phillips described bilingual education as “a semantically appealing cover slogan for liberal activists who wish to emphasize those things which divide Americans … rather than those which unite us.” White ethnics were celebrated for surviving the melting pot. Latino and Asian immigrants were portrayed as refusing to melt.105
“Experts,” as a Christian Science Monitor story put it, worried that a near-majority of immigrants speaking one language—Spanish—might lead to “a bilingual, bicultural strain that could tear at a national cohesion based, in large part, on English as a common language.”106 The focus was on immigrants’ failure to assimilate rather than the nation’s refusal to integrate; cultural and racial difference, rather than racism, was blamed for undermining national unity.
U.S. English had a more unabashedly right-wing counterpart, English First, run by Larry Pratt. A former anti-communist mercenary in Central America, Pratt was the executive director of the more-right-wing-than-the-NRA Gun Owners of America, and would later be an agitator within the 1990s white power militia movement as well as Pat Buchanan’s campaign co-chair.107 English First complained that “tragically, many immigrants these days refuse to learn English” and warned that “the next American president could well be elected by people who can’t read or speak English!”108
Official English legislation was taken up in most states and passed in many—including in California, where a large majority of voters backed Proposition 63 in 1986 after a campaign that received nearly all its funding from U.S. English–related sources.109 Afterward, Filipino nurses in Pomona, east of the city of Los Angeles, reported being told that they could not speak to each other in Tagalog, even on breaks.110 The city also passed an ordinance, later struck down in court, requiring that at least 50 percent of store signs be in English. In the San Gabriel Valley suburb of Monterey Park, officials objected to a donation of Chinese-language books to the public library. To the south in Huntington Park, a municipal court clerk was barred from speaking Spanish.
Prop 63’s direct impact was largely symbolic—at least in the short term. In the 1980s, Tanton had failed in a major effort to build a membership base in Southern California. Official English provided a means to inject xenophobia into the discourse by portraying their agenda as in part a liberal one concerned with immigrants’ ability to meaningfully participate in society; a campaign to free immigrants from “linguistic ghettos” by turning up the melting pot’s heat was a pretext to build support for immigration restriction.111 As historian Carly Goodman notes, official English was politically successful because it appealed to “the idea of multi-ethnic inclusion, and therefore fulfilled rather than fought the nation of immigrants mythology.” It evoked “cultural threat without being explicitly linked to race or immigration.”112 That simultaneous appeal to both overt racists and those committed to assimilating immigrants, however, fell apart when Tanton was exposed as a white nationalist.
The year that California voters approved Prop 63, Tanton penned a memo to movement leaders warning of a “Latin onslaught.” Citing the settler dictum coined by nineteenth-century Argentine intellectual Juan Bautista Alberdi—“to govern is to populate”—he asked, “Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile?” When Tanton’s memo was exposed in 1988 in a widely publicized scandal, U.S. English president Linda Chavez, a Hispanic Reagan administration alumnus whose public profile had helped make the organization safe for moderates, resigned.113
The nativist movement, however, would only become more overtly right-wing. And while overpopulation had disappeared as a major concern, anti-immigrant politics remained fixated on the threat posed by Latina reproduction—and increasingly, not in environmentalist language but in civilizational terms that resonated with the conservative base. As Tanton wrote to a major donor, he was concerned “about the decline of folks who look like you and me,” and argued to Garrett Hardin that “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”114 Throughout the 1990s, these arguments gained remarkable mainstream legitimacy.
Reconquista
In the 1990s, Pat Buchanan warned that “our Western heritage” would be “dumped onto some landfill called multiculturalism.” He warned of “demands for Quebec-like status for Southern California,” a possibility echoed by Stanford historian David M. Kennedy in The Atlantic.115 The issue for Buchanan was cultural. And by cultural, he meant racial. “I think God made all people good, but if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?” he asked.116 Buchanan didn’t buy Clinton’s war on undocumented immigrants, accusing him of leading a “revolution to overturn our ethnic and racial balances.”117
In California, Prop 187 leader Barbara Coe said that she converted to hard-core xenophobia after visiting a social services center in Orange County, viscerally repulsed by the presence of peopl
e not speaking English. “I walked into this monstrous room full of people, babies and little children all over the place, and I realized nobody was speaking English,” said Coe. “I was overwhelmed with this feeling: ‘Where am I? What’s happened here?’”118 Glenn Spencer said that he founded his pro-187 group Voice of Citizens Together (initially called Valley Citizens Together and later also known as American Patrol and American Border Patrol) after he witnessed rioting Mexicans in 1992 Los Angeles “tearing down” his “old neighborhood.” Spencer would ultimately take his fight to the borderlands in Arizona. But he first became radicalized in the affluent San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Sherman Oaks, which had led the region’s suburbanite revolts against school busing and property taxes.119 For California suburbanites, “illegal immigration” was only the latest assault on their fragile utopia. Mexico, Spencer warned, “is purposefully sending drugs into our nation to destroy us. It is sending its people to occupy our land. It is involved in ‘Reconquista,’ the retaking of the American Southwest.”120
Spencer concluded that Mexican immigration was a war on white people. It was a parable of demographic threat that shaped the organized nativist movement and ordinary nativist sentiment alike. It was, writes anthropologist Leo Chavez, fueled by a fixation on Latina reproduction: “Their fertility,” the theory goes, “is out of control, which fuels both demographic changes and the alleged reconquista.”121 Congress, after the passage of Prop 187 and Republican Revolution, was listening. In 1995, House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Congressional Task Force on Immigration Reform called for denying birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants—a direct assault on the Fourteenth Amendment, a pinnacle of Reconstruction-era black struggle.122
The “reconquista” conspiracy was amplified by talk radio, an ascendant conservative mass media that bypassed traditional arbiters of political debate. California taxpayers, said talk radio host J. Paul Emerson in 1995, should have the right to “be a bounty hunter … go out there and shoot illegal immigrants who come across the border, and … shoot killers, robbers and rapers and drag them down to the police station and collect a reward.”123
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