All-American Nativism

by Daniel Denvir

  Gratitude, of course, was not what most Iraqis felt. It was this violently narcissistic amnesia that made it possible for Trump vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence to charge in 2016 that it was Obama’s troop drawdown in Iraq that allowed ISIS to be “literally conjured up out of the desert,” portraying the president as some sort of genie.215 And it was what allowed Trump to declare that Obama had founded ISIS. Literally. “No, I meant he’s the founder of ISIS,” Trump said, when an interviewer assumed he had meant it metaphorically. “I do. He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award. I give her, too, by the way, Hillary Clinton.”216

  In 2015, a series of spectacular attacks resulted in the massacre of staff at the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, and later of scores of civilians at multiple sites across Paris. (The Charlie Hebdo attack was claimed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the subsequent attacks were claimed by ISIS.) After the Hebdo attack, Trump and others on the right fixated on Obama’s refusal to say the words “radical Islamic terrorism,” terminology that he believed counterproductively antagonized ordinary Muslims.217 Obama’s diplomatic language, critics believed, was a sign of politically correct cowardice—or even complicity. For many Americans, the origins of the war on terror and Islamist militancy remained hazy, buried amid the World Trade Center’s rubble. Osama bin Laden’s actual 1996 declaration of war or his 2002 letter to the American people, which exhaustively detailed grievances against US imperialism, was rarely reported or read and remained largely unknown.218 What many did know was that Americans had sacrificed “blood and treasure” for Muslims who wanted to kill them—and liberals like Obama bafflingly refused to acknowledge that reality and act upon it. By 2016, Americans believed that 17 percent of people in the United States were Muslims, when in fact they numbered 219 just 1 percent.219

  “I think Islam hates us,” Trump said in 2016, speaking to the popular amnesia.220 What’s most new about Trump isn’t that the federal government is perpetuating Islamophobia but rather that it is doing so in nakedly racist terms rather than in the lofty rhetoric of global policing and democracy promotion. “Islamophobia is,” as Khaled Beydoun writes, “a systemic, fluid, and deeply politicized dialectic between the state and its polity: a dialectic whereby the former shapes, reshapes, and confirms popular views or attitudes about Islam and Muslim subjects inside and outside of America’s borders.”221 Trump made the official and popular versions of Islamophobia one and the same.

  Trump’s zero-sum vision of global affairs prevailed because foreign policy mandarins’ grand strategies proved disastrous on their own terms. “I’ve always said—shouldn’t be there, but if we’re going to get out, take the oil,” said Trump in September 2016.222 The gaping chasm between neoconservative promise and reality nurtured a pervasive cynicism about foreign military interventions and foreign-born people alike. The economic crisis and the government’s Wall Street–coddling response compounded the sense that government was not protecting “our people.”

  Trump’s America First foreign and immigration policy promised to make a white America secure against both domestic invasion and foreign entanglement yet strong enough to take on the world economically and militarily. But it was Trump’s predecessors who primed Americans to believe that the nation was under siege from Muslims and Latinos. To many, Trump’s extremist politics seemed like solutions to the very “problems” that the establishment had for decades made a reality. Trump exploited Latino and terrorist threats created by others, further merging them into a unitary menace.

  Exporting violence

  In April 2017, Attorney General Sessions made a stop on his immigrants-are-killing-Americans tour in Long Island to present the Trump administration’s case that open borders had abetted the rise of the gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, members of which were charged with brutal murders in the area.223 He declared that “transnational criminal organizations … enrich themselves by pedaling poison in our communities, trafficking children for sexual exploitation and inflicting horrific violence.” The solution? “Securing our border and restoring a lawful system of immigration.”224

  After taking office, Trump falsely proclaimed that his government was “actually liberating towns” from MS-13 and that he had deported half of the gang’s US-based membership.225 He blamed “weak illegal immigration policies” under Obama for allowing the gang to spread, calling it “a serious problem” that “we never did anything about.”226 But Obama and Trump’s immigration policies were more alike than either of their supporters might understand. Obama had called for the deportation of “felons, not families”and claimed to target “violent offenders and people convicted of crimes,” all while deporting hundreds of thousands each year.227 Obama unsurprisingly gave the impression that huge numbers of immigrants were indeed criminals and posed a unique security threat. His policies helped Trump make sense.

  For Trump, MS-13 had become an obsession ever since he came across a story about the gang in Newsday in November 2016: “‘EXTREMELY VIOLENT’ GANG FACTION” blared the headline he brandished in front of the writer composing his Time Person of the Year profile.228 “They’re coming from Central America. They’re tougher than any people you’ve ever met,” Trump said. “They’re killing and raping everybody out there. They’re illegal. And they are finished.”229 For Trump’s purposes, MS-13 was a Latin American ISIS.

  The origins of MS-13, however, are in the United States: the gang was formed in Los Angeles among refugees from Reagan’s dirty war in El Salvador. Only after gang members were deported back to El Salvador as part of the bipartisan crackdown on “criminal aliens” did MS-13 and other gangs take root in Central America, where they rapidly created a new social order atop societies wrecked by conflict and underdevelopment. The violence and government repression unleashed a new movement of refugees heading north. The United States, twice over, created MS-13—and then an influx of refugees to be demonized by Trump. Reagan’s dirty wars had not only defeated the left across Central America but laid the groundwork for reactionary security politics well into the future.

  The tragic upshot is that, thanks to flashy headlines about international gang violence, many are primed to support the same sort of policies that created this spiraling crisis in the first place: those of deporting Central Americans, refugees and alleged gang members alike, while funding the law-and-order crackdowns and promoting the business-friendly economic reforms in the region that only make things worse.230 The United States is not importing problems from Central America. Rather, it is exporting violence, time and again, to Central America.

  It’s part and parcel of the larger mystifications that undergird US nativism in general: that we can have violent military interventions without the people touched by the violence ever making their way to this country; and that we can maintain an incredibly unequal global economic order without seeing labor moving to the places where it is demanded. Despite establishment professions of innocence, it was a promised salve to these contradictions that made Trump’s Fortress America so appealing to so many.

  4

  REACTION

  Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids. We’ll prioritize, just like law enforcement does every day.

  —President Barack Obama, November 20, 2014.1

  On December 12, 2006, the Bush administration orchestrated the largest workplace raid in US history,2 rounding up nearly 1,300 immigrants at Swift and Company meatpacking plants in six states.3 The government prosecuted and sentenced many to federal prison for identity theft; as unauthorized immigrants often must, they had to use fraudulent Social Security numbers to secure employment.

  A year prior, the House passed Representative Sensenbrenner’s bill to criminalize the very presence of undocumented immigrants and anyone who might “assist” them, sparking historic protests. It was never addressed in the Senate, and the Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) b
ill was never taken up in the House.4 The Sensenbrenner bill was too extreme. Like Prop 187, it marked a fracture in the bipartisan consensus behind the war on “illegal immigrants.” It also signaled that politics had changed in a way that establishment reformers have disastrously failed to understand ever since: conservatives in Congress had become radicalized nativists who would never vote to support “comprehensive immigration reform.” CIR was meant to include measures to please all: “a path to citizenship,” border militarization, and a guest worker program. But for much of the Republican Party it was simply “amnesty”: the mass pardoning of criminals. No concession would do.

  Perversely, Bush’s crackdown aimed to convince legislators like Sensenbrenner to support CIR. It was common sense because most everyone in Washington save for the nativist right believed that it was the exclusive and pragmatic way that the immigration “problem” would be “solved.” “I’ve made no secret about the fact we need a comprehensive program,” said DHS secretary Michael Chertoff at the time.5 An enforcement crackdown “clarifies the choices we have … The choices are clear, and the consequences of the choices are clear.” The Bush administration was using undocumented workers as leverage to win CIR, treating them like hostages. It was a doomed strategy; the right wing he needed to convince were happy to see the hostages shot.

  The widely shared belief was that CIR’s three-legged stool could win the necessary bipartisan consensus between various interests. It followed the model set out by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), the historic legislation signed into law by Reagan. In principle, CIR was supported by a broad consensus of Democrats, establishment Republicans, and business, labor, and DC-based immigration reform groups. There was disagreement on specifics, including between unions and business on guest worker programs. These were the sorts of differences, however, that had for decades been overcome through ordinary bipartisan negotiation: crafting bills that reflected a coalition of divergent interests to win broad bipartisan support from legislators who represented those interests.

  But the enterprise was premised on a failure of or resistance to understanding. The right-wing radicalization of the Republican Party was changing politics in part because vitriolic opposition to immigration was changing the Republican Party. Even though Reagan and Republicans of the Gingrich Revolution were radicals, they were radicals who governed on behalf of the institutionalized power of business and the wealthy. And still, many establishment Republicans, albeit with increasing timidity, continued to support CIR, first under Bush and then under Obama. They did so for different reasons: on economic grounds, out of religious principle, or to win over Latino voters. But the extremist politics that allowed Republicans to maintain a mass base had also nurtured a more hardline nativism, which refused to do the new Republican establishment’s bidding. The populist right did not care, in other words, that Grover Norquist or the US Chamber of Commerce wanted CIR.

  When right-wing members joined the left to shoot down the first attempt at a bank bailout in September 2008, it shocked observers (and global markets).6 People were shocked again when the Tea Party took over Republican politics in 2010. And again when Trump was elected. But they shouldn’t have been. The successful right-wing Republican campaigns to defeat “amnesty” throughout the Bush administration were the early but often ignored evidence that the populist right was immovably opposed to bipartisan compromise. The system was undergoing what political scientists call “asymmetric polarization,” but the center didn’t realize it. Bush’s experience with CIR should have made it clear that the old rules were no longer in place. One of Obama’s greatest failings—on immigration and more generally—was that he refused to recognize this reality even as it became abundantly clear. Indeed, it was this failure to understand the significance of right-wing defeats of “amnesty” that helped make a Trump victory seem impossible until the moment that he won.

  Bush and then Obama tried to pass CIR through Congress, only to be repeatedly frustrated by the nativist right. From the vantage point of Trump’s presidency, the two are often remembered as pro-immigration moderates. But that conventional story line is an ex post facto distortion. It elides both presidents’ roles in dramatically escalating the persecution of undocumented immigrants and militarizing the border—and, in doing so, facilitating radicalization on the right. During the CIR years, the establishment helped shift immigration politics to the hard right, just as Republicans and New Democrats had done throughout the 1990s. Establishment politicians didn’t just offer to trade enforcement for legalization; Bush and Obama repeatedly pursued stand-alone enforcement measures as a goodwill gesture to win support for a CIR that would never come.

  The year 2005 marked the beginning of a decade-long fight between the establishment and the nativist right that culminated in Trump’s election.

  Incomprehensible reform

  After the Sensenbrenner bill’s 2005 passage and amid the 2006 mass protest movement against it, the Senate considered a CIR bill. Bush used a primetime television address to bolster the effort, announcing the deployment of thousands of National Guard troops to the border as a stopgap measure until he could increase the size of the Border Patrol. “We do not yet have full control of the border, and I am determined to change that,” he declared.7

  Bush had made similar pledges and ratified the notion that the border was out of control before. On March 29, 2005, the administration announced that it would send five hundred additional Border Patrol agents to Arizona.8 The announcement took place just three days before the Minuteman Project vigilante group was set to begin a mass citizens’ patrol of the state’s border with Mexico. “President Bush called the Minuteman Project a bunch of vigilantes—but if it’s the case that this did start because of the Minuteman Project, then the project is a success,” said Minuteman spokesperson Bill Bennett.9 Later that year, Minuteman activists selected Houston10 and Herndon, Virginia,11 as sites for the launch of Operation Spotlight to target day laborers—among the most visible and marginalized undocumented immigrants and the subject of increasing persecution nationwide.

  Border militarization created the Minutemen. It pushed migration routes away from California and into Arizona; this created a spectacle of lawlessness that was consistently amplified by political leaders pledging to secure an out-of-control border. And it was also yet another instance of blowback from the nation’s never-ending wars, a cycle of foreign intervention and domestic radicalization dramatically escalated by Bush’s terror war. Many Minutemen were Vietnam and Iraq vets, retired white men continuing a long war.12 “I don’t want this country to end up like they did, dead on that battlefield,” said Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist. “Too many immigrants will divide our country. We are not going to have a civil war now, but we could.”13

  It was, more basically, a chance to make the country great again by redeeming a lost war. “This gives me the opportunity to get the 1945 homecoming that I didn’t get in 1968,” said one Minuteman leader who lost his left eye in Vietnam. “In my hometown, people are very, very supportive. They tell me ‘Good job. Way to go!’” Vets were, he said, “trying to rectify what had become a love-hate relationship with the country.”14

  Representative J. D. Hayworth, a right-wing Arizona Republican, said that the mobilization demonstrated that “the federal government can do something about illegal immigration other than to raise a white flag and surrender to the invasion on our Southern border.”15 But Bush was not surrendering at all; instead, he was waging a war of a far larger magnitude. In October 2006, he signed the Secure Fence Act, winning votes from many establishment Democrats. The law led to the construction of hundreds of miles of border fencing—and gave incumbents a border security victory to campaign on in the midterms. Meanwhile, the administration implemented Operation Streamline, facilitating the criminal prosecution and deportation of migrants who had illegally entered the country. Customs and Border Protection increasingly utilized a provision called “expedited removal,
” which made it easier to deport recently arrived migrants by limiting judicial review. It had been authorized by Clinton’s Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) but used only in a limited fashion in the past.16 ICE initiated its campaign of jobsite raids, causing the number of workplace criminal and civil arrests to surge from fiscal years 2006 through 2008.17 ICE also launched Operation Return to Sender, a crackdown resulting in nearly nineteen thousand ICE arrests in under one year’s time.18

  In a 2016 interview, Chertoff confirmed to me that DHS intended the workplace raids “to establish credibility with respect to enforcement, which would then enable reforms in a more comprehensive way.” When that effort fell apart in 2006 and again in 2007, the crackdown continued. “It was pretty clear there wasn’t going to be legislation, but we still felt it was important to establish that, one way or the other, the government was going to apply the law,” said Chertoff. “And we’re not going to back down on enforcement. Because there had been a sense that somehow enforcement in the past had been relaxed because of political pressure.”

  What Chertoff refers to as “a sense that somehow” is in effect what the theorist Antonio Gramsci called hegemony: border militarization politics had made it the conventional wisdom that the border was “insecure.” As linguist George Lakoff and Sam Ferguson write, this fueled the anti-immigrant politics that border militarization was intended to tame. The narrow framing of the “immigration” debate “has shaped its politics, defining what count as ‘problems’ and constraining the debate to a narrow set of issues … and hence constrains the solutions needed to address that problem.” Politicians and the media define the “problem” of “illegal immigration” by “the illegal act of crossing the border without papers,” and so “the logical response to the ‘wave’ of ‘illegal immigration’ becomes ‘border security.’”19 The framing had deep roots in the early days of immigration restriction. Beginning with the Dillingham Commission, policymakers had represented immigration as a “problem” to which the federal government could provide a “solution.”20 This technocratic approach, however, couldn’t function within the new nativist politics that exploded in the 1990s and then, in the early twenty-first century, took over the Republican Party.