All-American Nativism

by Daniel Denvir

  Emerson was speaking on KSFO, that year rechristened as the San Francisco conservative talk radio station that gave a novice host, Michael Savage, his breakout show. An embittered Savage had moved to talk radio after publishers rejected his manuscript for a book entitled Immigrants and Epidemics—which argued that immigrants spread disease.124 Conservative AM talk had emerged in the 1980s, after music stations shifted to FM format and the FCC Fairness Doctrine, which had required stations to provide time for opposing views, was repealed. For years, small magazines had spoken to conservative elites. Now, talk radio targeted and helped call into being a broader public.

  But it wasn’t just the far-right fringe. In 1995, just a few years after Cold War triumph, the Senate voted 99–1 on a resolution denouncing proposed history teaching standards, calling for programs receiving government support to “have a decent respect for United States history’s roots in Western civilization.”125 And throughout the decade, mainstream publications and publishing houses eagerly courted nativist contributions. In 1994, The Atlantic published an anti-immigrant essay by Roy Beck, an editor of Tanton’s racist journal the Social Contract.126 Two years later, W. W. Norton published Beck’s anti-immigrant book.

  Meanwhile, the conservative movement was integrating nativism into the core of its culture war. This was an easy shift, given the movement’s long-standing opposition to black civil rights. As National Review founder William F. Buckley put it in his infamous 1957 editorial defending segregation: “The White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”127 National Review also had a long history of racist immigration politics—defending the principle of nationality-based restrictions on the eve of their repeal in 1965, in 1977 warning of a Mexican reconquista and insisting that the United States “gain control of its demographic fate,” and in 1990 declaring that Muslim immigrants were “brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene.”128

  In 1992, the National Review published a lengthy cover story by senior editor Peter Brimelow decrying “so-called Hispanics” as a “strange anti-nation inside the U.S.”129 In 1995, Random House published Brimelow’s unapologetically racist argument at book length: Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster. “The American nation has always had a specific ethnic core,” wrote Brimelow, “and that core has been white.” He continued: “It is simply common sense that Americans have a legitimate interest in their country’s racial balance. It is common sense that they have a right to insist that their government stop shifting it. Indeed, it seems to me that they have a right to insist that it be shifted back.”130 In a memo, John Tanton wrote that he had “encouraged Brimelow to write his book” and “provided the necessary research funds to get it done.”131

  The book, openly nostalgic for the national origins quotas, was a white nationalist anti-immigrant screed published by a major house, widely and positively reviewed in the mainstream press. In 1995, writer Jack Miles praised Brimelow in (of course) The Atlantic for having “the courage to admit that the matter can have no economic resolution and the greater courage to step forward as an apologist for the received Euro-American culture.”132 New York Times book critic Richard Bernstein gushed that it was to Brimelow’s “credit that he attacks” what he called “the strong racial element in current immigration” without flinching—“head on, unapologetically.”133 For Bernstein, Brimelow’s violation of political correctness seemed to hold a transgressive appeal. Indeed, it was Bernstein who in 1990 first popularized the term “politically correct” as a pejorative, warning in a New York Times article that universities were in thrall to “a growing intolerance, a closing of debate, a pressure to conform to a radical program or risk being accused of a commonly reiterated trio of thought crimes: sexism, racism and homophobia.”134

  In 1999, however, Brimelow would transgress even that era’s rather capacious tolerance for bigotry, founding the openly white nationalist website VDare, unsubtly named for the girl said to be the first English child born in the New World. Tanton referred to the site as “our enterprise.”135 Between 2006 and 2008, Tanton’s journal the Social Contract dedicated the entirety of two issues to VDare material. In 2009, the New York Times called VDare white supremacist and “extremist.”136 Yet Brimelow’s views had been perfectly clear in 1995.

  Though Brimelow was ultimately pushed out of National Review, openly racist anti-immigrant politics were not. In 2004, Buckley praised The Camp of the Saints, a racist French novel that depicts a flotilla of “cholera-ridden and leprous wretches” from India that, thanks to liberal guilt and fecklessness, take over France, precipitating Third World conquest of the entire West.137 Buckley mused, “What to do? Starve them? Shoot them? We don’t do that kind of thing—but what do we do when we run out of airplanes in which to send them back home?”138 Tanton’s Social Contract Press published an English language translation of the book, a text that Tanton described as “prescient”—which it was.139 The novel became a bible of the alt-right, an early warning against “white genocide” praised by Steve Bannon and white nationalist Republican representative Steve King.140

  In the 1990s, racism found mainstream respectability amid a political culture dominated by questions of welfare, crime, and immigration—all in the name of revolt against liberal elites. Allan Bloom’s 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind had lamented the denigration of the Founders as racist killers motivated by class interests, complaining that “cultural relativism” had dethroned “reason” in universities governed by an “intellectual minority” who “expected to enhance its status” by depicting “a nation of minorities and groups each following its own beliefs and inclinations.”141 Dinesh D’Souza followed in 1991 with Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, parts of which appeared in The Atlantic as a cover story.142 D’Souza deplored “the ideological claims of the minority victims’ revolution on campus,” which threatened to bring the “lurid bigotry, intolerance, and balkanization of campus life” to “society at large.” Bloom, D’Souza and others decried the liberal establishment and were praised for doing so in liberalism’s leading publications; they claimed to speak from the margins while receiving funding from “networks of conservative donors—particularly the Koch, Olin and Scaife families—who had spent the 1980s building programs that they hoped would create a new ‘counter-intelligentsia.’”143

  The problems purportedly posed by black and Latino people were the subject of high-profile debates among self-professed serious people, exemplified not only by The New Republic’s 1994 publication of an excerpt of the notoriously racist book The Bell Curve but by The Atlantic and New York Times’s friendly reviews of Alien Nation. Murray Rothbard, who led a segment of neoliberals toward alt-right libertarianism, remarked that “until literally mid-October 1994 [when The Bell Curve was published], it was shameful and taboo for anyone to talk publicly or write about, home truths which everyone, and I mean everyone, knew in their hearts and in private: that is, almost self-evident truths about race, intelligence, and heritability.”144 Some neoliberals explained inequality by way of racial proxies like culture, but others did not bother.

  Nativists tapped into the often-unstated racial anxiety at the core of post–civil rights era race and immigration politics. And nativists were right: the new immigration did pose a threat to the US order, and it was different from immigration in other periods. From settlement through the arrival of Italians, Jews and others in the late nineteenth century, European immigrants weren’t “immigrants” at all: they were emigrants who in general (but not always, as made clear by Massachusetts’s persecution of Irish paupers) automatically received the status accorded to European settlers as they arrived from the metropole to take part in a burgeoning settler-colonialist project. An overriding and explicit goal of this project was engineering white majority and supremacy. By contrast, as Rana writes, immigrants since 1965 had often been from the periphery of the global po
litical-economic order—the very sorts of groups that had forever been brutalized and excluded—traveling to its new center and metropole, the United States.145

  Nativists, in a neurotic projection, believe that immigrants will do to them what their European settler forbearers had perpetrated against indigenous America: a new settler-colonialist project to impose foreign cultures, ideologies, and institutions. Immigrants, Glenn Spencer warned, had come to “occupy and colonize us and take away our nation.”146

  In August 2019, a gunman massacred shoppers at an El Paso Walmart popular among visitors from both sides of the border. At least eight Mexican nationals were among the twenty-two killed.147 Shortly before the attack a manifesto written by the killer appeared online decrying “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” For liberals, celebrating a nation of immigrants is premised on the erasure of settler colonialism. For the far right, defending America is openly premised on securing its victories. “Some people will think this statement is hypocritical because of the nearly complete ethnic and cultural destruction brought to the Native Americans by our European ancestors,” the shooter continued, “but this just reinforces my point. The natives didn’t take the invasion of Europeans seriously, and now what’s left is just a shadow of what was.”148

  The shooter made a point of emphasizing that his “opinions … predate Trump and his campaign for president.” In truth, that is entirely plausible. Right-wing nativists have understood what liberal pablum obscures, though in grotesquely racist terms. Since 1965, immigrants have indeed posed a threat to the racist settler ideal. And as Tendayi Achiume argues, this transformation contains an anti-racist emancipatory potential: migration from a Global South pillaged for centuries by colonial powers is in fact, in many ways, an act of decolonization.149

  The inevitability of what is described as a minority-majority America was crystallized in the far-right conspiracy theory that Mexicans were engaging in a reconquista of the United States, the prefix re- betraying a recognition that the land was not “ours” to begin with. A form of this theory was ultimately embraced by the president of the United States. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” said Trump, announcing his presidential campaign. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” He would later make it clear that he literally believed that immigration was the policy of a hostile Mexican state: “The Mexican Government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States.”150

  For Trump, immigration and the great game of inter-state economic competition with countries like China are inseparable. And this is in a sense true: the drive for empire in the name of American exceptionalism has always prompted immigration, which in turn excited nativism because the presence of racialized others challenged what Americans believed made them exceptional.

  “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” Trump said in a 2017 speech in Warsaw, drawing a line from Poland’s casting off of Soviet domination to present-day xenophobia. “Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”151

  The battle for Laredo

  The September 11 attacks and the official state violence of the global war on terror marked the beginning of the new nativism’s final sequence, incorporating Islamophobia into a politics long defined by anti-Mexican racism. Initially, the attacks displaced anti-Mexican politics. Soon thereafter, however, immigration politics reemerged. Nativism was strengthened by national security state politics, and increasingly merged with it.

  In 2004, Bush renewed the push for legalization that 9/11 had suddenly and emphatically deferred. Tellingly, Bush made his case in the language of security, contending that “illegal immigrants” posed a terrorist threat because their illegal status made their identity illegible to the security state. Bringing them out of the shadows, the argument went, would make them known and thus safe.152

  The right reacted with fury. “People who are here illegally—they need to be deported,” said Representative Tom Tancredo, the far-right House nativist leader. “People who hire them need to be fined. If they keep doing it, they need to be sent to jail.”153 John Kobylt, a host of The John and Ken Show on KFI-AM in Los Angeles, said that Bush’s proposal had made immigration his callers’ central focus. “That speech, where the president announced he was for amnesty, really set us off … Our listeners savaged their congressmen with calls and e-mails, and it was running 1,000 to 1 against Bush’s proposal.”154

  Bush and other establishment politicians wanted a reform that included legal status for undocumented immigrants. But those efforts would repeatedly false-start and implode. In the meantime, establishment politicians called for increased enforcement. In August 2005, two Democratic border state governors, New Mexico’s Bill Richardson and Arizona’s Janet Napolitano, declared states of emergency to redirect more law enforcement to the border. Richardson called it “an act of desperation” that would be necessary “until Congress and the feds deal with this issue,” a clear echo of Californians’ arguments for Prop 187 a decade prior.155

  Hillary Clinton, now a senator from New York, told an interviewer in 2003: “I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants,” lamenting the sight of day laborers waiting for work in the Bronx and Westchester. Conservative commentator and former Newt Gingrich press secretary Tony Blankley praised her rhetoric as “Pat Buchanan-esque.”156 “She’s not a dumb woman,” said a spokesperson for Tancredo. “She’s got a great liberal base, and she realizes there’s no better way to draw in more conservative voters. She has really come out to the forefront on that.”157

  In a 2004 presidential debate, moderator Bob Schieffer told Bush and Democratic nominee John Kerry that he had received “more email this week on” immigration “than any other question.”158 Recall that in 2000, not a single debate featured any discussion of immigration. Bush, who had just that year proposed a legalization program, attacked Kerry for backing “amnesty.”159 Kerry responded by falsely asserting that “the borders are more leaking [sic] today than they were before 9/11” and that “we now have people from the Middle East, allegedly, coming across the border.” Bush, buoyed by conservative Christians and enjoying his last moments of wartime president luster, won reelection. And he won with a striking 44 percent of the Latino vote.160

  Once again, the right exploited a moment of public fear to reset the parameters of the debate over immigration. Establishment politicians quickly acquiesced, supporting proposals to legalize undocumented immigrants and expand guest worker programs while churning out alarmist hyperbole about border security in an effort to win credibility. Predictably, those efforts not only failed, but further stoked nativist sentiment, degrading politicians’ standing among the anti-immigrant voters whom they had hoped to appease. Buchanan, issuing a reluctant and late endorsement of Bush’s reelection, presciently warned of a coming war between Republican leadership and the far right: “I think he better wake up to the immigration invasion. I think that neoconservatism is the Aryan heresy of the American right,” Buchanan said. “It has led to massive deficits, an unwise and unnecessary war in Iraq, open borders and an invasion of this country by millions of illegal aliens this year and a trade policy that has cost us one in six manufacturing jobs in the last three years.”161

  In 2005, the undocumented population reached an estimated more than 11 million, and volunteer members of the Minuteman campaign, a new anti-immigrant border militia, took the war to protect the homeland into their own hands.162 California Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, hailed as a “supermoderate” by the New Yorker, praised them.163 “I think they’ve done a terrific job,” said Schwarzenegger, an immigrant from Austria who relied on Prop 187 champion and former governor Pete Wilson for advice
. “They’ve cut down the crossing of illegal immigrants a huge percentage. So it just shows that it works when you go and make an effort and when you work hard. It’s a doable thing.” He continued: “It’s just that our federal government is not doing their job. It’s a shame that the private citizen has to go in there and start patrolling our borders.” Schwarzenegger had been watching Fox News and was upset to see “hundreds and hundreds of illegal immigrants coming across the border.” Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein’s bold liberal retort? She criticized the governor for “praising efforts by untrained volunteers to patrol the borders. The best course,” she said, “would be to add an additional 2,000 border patrol agents.”164

  Mid-2000s nativism was still expressed mostly in anti-Mexican rather than Islamophobic terms, though Islamophobia, tapping into long-standing Orientalist stereotypes, played some role in nativism even before 9/11. Ahead of the 2000 election, FAIR accused Senator Spencer Abraham, a Republican immigration moderate of Lebanese descent, of “trying to make it easier for terrorists like Osama bin Laden to export their war of terror to any city street in America.”165 After Bush’s reelection, anti-Muslim sentiment was still in large part mobilized behind the government’s war on terror and had yet to fully emerge as an independent power on the right. But that was changing. The evolving character of nativism was perhaps best represented by Representative John Culberson, a Houston Republican, in an October 2005 “Border Security Alert.”

  “Al Qaeda terrorists and Chinese nationals are infiltrating our country virtually anywhere they choose from Brownsville to San Diego,” he warned, and “a large number of Islamic individuals have moved into homes in [the Mexican border city of] Nuevo Laredo and are being taught Spanish to assimilate with the local culture.” Fears of immigrants, old and new, were being remade into a total worldview with apocalyptic overtones. “Full scale war is underway on our southern border, and our entire way of life is at risk if we do not win the battle for Laredo.”166