All-American Nativism

by Daniel Denvir

  The right-wing populism pioneered by Buchanan in the 1990s, tying immigrants to a globalist economic threat, thrived too. Onetime business enthusiast Lou Dobbs in the early 2000s refashioned himself into a warrior for downtrodden Americans, using his popular CNN show to take simultaneous aim at greedy corporations and immigrants that were squeezing the everyday worker. Foreigners were threatening American jobs, he said, and may even be spreading frightening diseases like leprosy.167 He even suggested that “the White House” was “using amnesty to create a North American union.”168

  “The invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans,” said Dobbs, a proud populist who dined at the Four Seasons among the New York elite.169 After September 11, he affixed an American flag pin to his lapel and never looked back, decrying corporations that sent jobs abroad and the immigrants who took them at home, the Dubai-based company seeking to take over American ports, and the injustice of convicting Border Patrol agents for shooting a pot smuggler dead.170 He broadcast from FAIR’s annual “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” anti-immigrant talk radio broadcast marathon and celebrated the valor of the Minutemen border vigilantes.171

  Dobbs was the most high-profile anti-immigrant demagogue with a mainstream perch. By then, in the 2000s, a right-wing mediasphere, stitching AM talk radio, Fox News and the internet into a potent web of outrage and conspiracism, stoked fears over a changing nation and sowed distrust of any mainstream outlet that contradicted its doomsday message. CNN’s embrace of Dobbs, controversial among journalists inside the company, reflected the right-wing’s dominance of the airwaves and the mainstream’s bid to catch up. Nativism sold.

  Sensenbrenner

  The resurgent post-9/11 nativism won a gigantic victory in December of 2005, when a harsh enforcement bill authored by Wisconsin Republican representative James Sensenbrenner passed the House, largely with Republican votes. The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, popularly known as the “Sensenbrenner bill,” proposed to criminalize both unauthorized presence in the country (then and now a civil offense) and the provision of assistance to undocumented immigrants.

  Rights activists nationwide denounced the bill, a radical escalation in the war on immigrants. Millions filled the streets in a wave of historic demonstrations the following year, spurred on by unions, clergy and Spanish-language DJs. I helped organize demonstrations that year in Portland, Oregon. At the time, I was the coordinator of the Portland Central America Solidarity Committee, which had been formed in 1979 as the Portland Nicaragua Solidarity Committee to defend the Sandinista Revolution, and which fought against Reagan’s dirty wars throughout the 1980s. We worked alongside Voz, a day laborer organizing group; Portland Jobs with Justice, a coalition of the city’s progressive unions; the statewide immigrant rights group Causa; and many others.

  From an organizer’s perspective, it was unreal: the people arrived and it was our job to facilitate the sign-and-flag-waving masses. That year’s protests included enormous May Day protests, including an estimated 500,000-plus in Los Angeles. That mass mobilization pointedly reclaimed May Day as a global day for working-class protest—in the country where late nineteenth-century labor activists had given birth to the holiday and where nationalist anti-communism had then scrubbed it from the calendar and replaced it with Loyalty Day. The action, “A Day without Immigrants,” used a labor strike to assert that immigrants were at the core of the American working class and its struggle; it simultaneously mocked the fantasy of mass deportation by demonstrating precisely what the absence of immigrant labor would mean.172

  The bill and the protests against it signaled a new era. On the right, business interests had long held sway, advocating for the admission of authorized immigrant workers and against interference with their employment of undocumented workers—even as they tolerated border militarization and demagoguery about immigrant criminality. Now, the Republican Party was clearly in thrall to right-wing nativists nakedly hostile to Mexicans and to Bush’s efforts to legalize them. Among establishment liberals, the bill was too far to the right of the bipartisan anti-“illegal” consensus, anticipating a growing partisan polarization over the issue. On the left, the protests initiated the contemporary fight for immigrant rights as a mass movement.

  The nativist movement’s congressional efforts were matched by a flurry of state and local action. In 2003, Alabama, with Senator Jeff Sessions’s help, had been the second state to sign a 287(g) agreement with the federal government, deputizing state troopers to detain undocumented immigrants under draconian legislation signed by President Clinton in 1996.173 Soon thereafter, Hoover, a white-flight suburb of Birmingham, created a city “Department of Homeland Security and Immigration” as part of a crackdown on Latino day laborers.174

  In 2004, Arizona voters approved Proposition 200, dubbed “Protect Arizona Now” in a clear echo of California’s “Save Our State” Proposition 187. Like 187, it restricted access to public benefits and required state employees to report any unauthorized immigrant who dared apply. It also required that voters provide proof of citizenship to cast a ballot, which the Supreme Court later ruled could not be applied to federal elections.175 In the following years, the conservative voter suppression and anti-immigrant movement would only continue to fuse and gain steam.

  Other laws targeting unauthorized workers passed in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and Georgia, while Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina moved to bar unauthorized immigrants from public colleges and universities.176

  In 2006, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, implemented a harsh local ordinance that served as a model for other jurisdictions nationwide, barring landlords from renting to undocumented immigrants.177 It was based on a measure that nativists had failed to get on the ballot in San Bernardino, California. Though the Hazleton ordinance was ultimately struck down in court, the fight became a rallying point for the nationwide right and ultimately catapulted its mayor, Lou Barletta, into Congress. In Philadelphia, Joey Vento, the owner of the legendary Geno’s cheesesteak shop, posted a sign reading, “This Is AMERICA: WHEN ORDERING, Please ‘SPEAK ENGLISH’”—though Vento’s grandfather, an immigrant from Sicily, struggled to do so.178 Looking ahead to his presidential run, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney signed a 287(g) agreement so that state troopers could enforce immigration law.179 The next year, he cited that agreement in a campaign ad attacking John McCain.180 In Danbury, Connecticut, the mayor requested that state troopers enforce immigration laws as local police cracked down on Ecuadorian immigrants’ backyard volleyball games.181

  “Immigration is now a national phenomenon in a way that was less true a decade ago,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a core node in Tanton’s nativist network. “In places like Georgia and Alabama, which had little experience with immigration before, people are experiencing it firsthand. Immigrants are working in chicken plants, carpet mills and construction. It’s right in front of people’s faces now.”182

  Ironically, writes sociologist Douglas Massey, it was border militarization that helped precipitate the geographic dispersal of Mexican immigration (away from the traditional receiving states of Texas, California, and Illinois) because it disrupted established migration routes. Between 1992 and 1998, the portion of unauthorized migrants heading to nontraditional destinations tripled, increasing from 15 to 45 percent, as they sought out jobs in industries like meatpacking, construction and poultry processing across the Northeast, Midwest and South.183 But nativism is not bound by some law of nature to automatically emerge in response to immigrants’ arrival. It was national media (conservative and otherwise) and bipartisan national politics that had made immigration a national problem.

  Blowback

  Six days after the 9/11 attacks and less than a month before he launched the first bombing runs over Afghanistan, President Bush visited a mosque and said, “Islam is peace.”184 He insisted that “we don’t fight a war against Islam or Muslims.”18
5 Just as overt racism had threatened Cold War foreign policy aims, overt Islamophobia would complicate a global war on terror that just happened to target Muslim-majority countries in the name of liberating them. “Instead of proclaiming a ‘clash of civilizations’,” Nikhil Pal Singh writes, “the administration defaulted to the vocabulary of cold war American universalism.”186 Bush’s repeated insistence that the United States was not at war with Islam, however, suggested that many Americans thought just that. After all, the only thing that secularist-governed Iraq had in common with the 9/11 attackers or the Taliban was that a majority of Iraqis were Muslim. The war on terror, despite its pledge of altruistic democratization, identified external and internal enemies that were linked by Islam alone. Yet initially, Bush’s framing held: the percentage of Americans with a favorable view of Muslim Americans significantly increased after the attacks, with Republican favorability surging from 35 to 64 percent in just eight months.187

  As the terror war expanded while failing to secure victory, however, hostility toward Muslims rose, particularly among Republicans.188 Hostility then reached a new peak during the 2008 presidential election, which featured a Democratic nominee named Barack Hussein Obama running in the midst of a Wall Street–driven economic meltdown. The crisis shook Americans’ sense of security and their confidence in government. False rumors circulated online, including through a viral chain e-mail: Obama had attended a madrassa during his childhood years in Indonesia. Obama, maybe, was something other than what he seemed. Polls showed that 12 percent of Americans believed Obama was a Muslim, and the candidate went to great lengths to assure voters that he was not.189 His campaign rejected an offer from Representative Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, to campaign on Obama’s behalf, and Obama did not visit a single American mosque.190 And though the campaign later apologized, many in metro Detroit, the heart of Muslim America, were insulted when campaign volunteers told two women in hijab that they could not stand behind the candidate during a rally at the Joe Louis Arena.191

  Obama’s campaign characterized the charge that he was a Muslim as a “smear.”192 His opponent, John McCain, did likewise. “No, ma’am,” he replied when a woman at a Minnesota town hall accused Obama of being an Arab. “He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what the campaign’s all about. He’s not.”193 The emphatic bipartisan refutations of the charge that Obama was a Muslim or an Arab, of course, were premised upon the notion that there was something very wrong with being a Muslim or Arab. And this conflation of Arab and Muslim identity—many Arabs are not Muslims and most Muslims are not Arab—played a key role in the racialization of Muslims.194

  The rise of the Tea Party in 2010 accelerated Islamophobia’s rise—and the portion of Americans who believed that Obama was a Muslim, which rose to 18 percent and almost a third of Republicans.195 Like California’s 1990s fiscal nativism, the Tea Party was at its core a tax revolt; a movement against the redistribution of wealth to invading and dangerously fecund non-white people. This movement charged that Obama was among those foreign others, insisting that he was born outside the United States—making him, in essence, an immigrant illegally occupying the White House. In 2011, Fox News chief Roger Ailes provided Trump with a regular appearance on Fox & Friends.196 He used his time to advance the “birther” conspiracy, becoming its most high-profile popularizer and the issue—merging anti-black racism, nativism, and Islamophobia—launched what would become his presidential bid.197

  Protests against mosque construction sprang up from Tennessee to California. By 2011, nearly one-third of Americans believed that Muslims were intent on imposing Sharia law. Former representative Tom Tancredo proposed bombing the holy city of Mecca if “fundamentalist Muslims” used nuclear weapons on the United States. (In an attempt to explain himself, he added that “much more thought would need to be given to the potential ramifications.”198) In 2010, Obama called off a planned visit to the Sikh Golden Temple in India, reportedly because of concerns that he would have to cover his head with a cloth to enter.199

  But a novel polarization emerged on the ground: Republican hostility toward Muslims rose while Democratic hostility waned.200 The two parties’ social bases were radically diverging, and ordinary liberals recoiled as naked anti-Muslim politics became a conservative staple.

  Arsons and bombings targeted mosques, and recorded hate crimes against perceived Muslims surged by 50 percent in 2010 alone.201 In 2011, Representative Peter King held hearings on the “radicalization” of American Muslims.202 Federal and local law enforcement’s surveillance of Muslim communities reached scandalous proportions, including a vast NYPD spy operation that tragicomically extended to a group of Muslim college students on a whitewater-rafting trip.203 Representative Michele Bachmann warned that American judges have “usurp[ed], and put Sharia law over the Constitution” and suggested that Huma Abedin, an aide to Secretary of State Clinton, had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.204

  Paradoxically, Bush had led what many considered to be a modern-day crusade but in doing so held the far right in check by simultaneously intensifying and sublimating its violence into state-sanctioned war and police repression. This is something that Obama was unable to do: as a black man with an Arabic middle name whose father was a Kenyan migrant from a Muslim family, Obama was suspect no matter how energetically he continued to wage the war on terror across the “Muslim world.” As support for war was supplanted by mass cynicism, Islamophobia emerged as an unbridled force in domestic politics. The number of Americans who thought Obama was a Muslim only increased in the two years after his election, and the percentage of Republicans who said that Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence rose from 33 percent in 2002, to 62 percent in 2013, to 70 percent in 2016.205

  Neoconservatives declared that they brought democracy and freedom to the “Muslim world.” But the Bush administration sharply restricted the resettlement of Iraqis—including many who had at great risk worked for the American invaders—because resettling refugees would confirm that there was a refugee crisis and thus that the Iraq War had been a disaster. “Our obligation,” said former Bush UN ambassador and militarist John Bolton, “was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war.”206 After the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, by contrast, more than one million refugees and immigrants from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia came to the United States.207 In a never-ending war that could neither be decisively won nor lost, “compassionate conservatism” found its limits.

  By the end of Bush’s second term, the neoconservative dream had become a nightmare. Islamophobia, temporarily channeled into state violence in the wake of the attacks, escaped its prescribed bounds. It was no longer constrained by the ostensible tolerance and high purpose that had served an interventionist foreign policy regime until that regime had hopelessly discredited itself. It was this second wave of post-9/11 Islamophobia—the proximate consequence not of the September 11 attacks but rather of the war on terror expanding even as it sank into quagmire and disrepute—that helped catapult Trump into office.

  In the early 1990s, US victory in the Cold War undermined the moral purpose that had united a bipartisan political establishment behind NATO and the US-led international security regime, opening space for isolationists on the far right like Pat Buchanan to emerge. After September 11, neoconservatives used Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” to revivify American purpose in the world: an exceptional nation’s zealous drive to deliver democracy to a backward Orient. In the absence of a strong anti-war movement—what existed had fizzled by 2006—disillusionment with war caused people to blame Islam rather than imperialism. In 2003, 75 percent of Americans supported the war in Iraq. In April 2008, just 36 percent did.208 The failure to win the war was recast as Muslims refusing the priceless gift of freely offered American blood and treasure. The
United States was no longer seen as fighting a war for Iraqi liberation but rather a civilizational struggle against Islam. Just as they did after Vietnam, conservatives blamed defeat on liberal betrayal. The empire’s battlefield failure required scapegoats.

  Bring the war home

  “Donald J. Trump is calling for a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” Trump told supporters at a December 2015 rally. The war on terror had been sold on idealism. Its glaring failure bred a deep pessimism and even nihilism, which abetted both opposition to foreign military entanglements and hostility toward foreign-born people.

  Under Obama, the war on terror continued to spiral into a growing set of global conflicts. In 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, seized full control of the Syrian city of Raqqa, then took Mosul in Iraq, and proclaimed an Islamic caliphate, disregarding the national borders that World War I’s European victors had imposed on a defeated Ottoman Empire.209 Thanks to the war on terror, what had been a relatively small and dispersed cohort of militant Islamists was thirteen years later a spectacularly violent and thoroughly mediatized state, governing millions of people and providing a framework to violently connect local grievances from Brussels to Baghdad.210

  As of early 2015, the war on terror had killed an estimated minimum of 1.3 million people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.211 More salient for most Americans were the thousands of US troops dead, the trillions of dollars spent, and the Muslim world’s perceived lack of gratitude for American sacrifice.212 After the invasion, Bush had repeatedly told Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer that Iraq’s new leader should be “someone who’s willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq.”213 As his time in office drew to a close, Bush ruminated upon American disaffection with his war. “That’s the problem here in America. They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.”214