Even though Democrats had made it clear that they would provide Wall money in exchange for protecting DREAMers,11 Trump seemed committed to a full nativist program. In his 2018 State of the Union, he laid out in detail a radical proposal to sharply limit legal immigration, build the Wall, and hire more ICE agents. All in exchange not for the major legalization of more than 10 million that was at issue under Bush and Obama but merely for protecting roughly 1.8 million DREAMers, many of whom so urgently needed protection because Trump’s attempt to eliminate DACA (a move blocked by federal judges and heading to the Supreme Court at the time of this writing) had put them at risk of deportation.12 Bush and Obama had responded with stand-alone enforcement escalations against undocumented immigrants after comprehensive immigration reform “grand bargain” proposals repeatedly failed. Trump rejected the bipartisan war on “illegal immigrants” and tried to replace it with a war on all immigration.
Ahead of the midterms, however, Trump reverted: the full nativist agenda receded, and scaremongering over the caravan of Central American asylum seekers and demands for the Wall took its place. Democrats then retook the House. The Wall delivered short-term political gains that consign Republicans to a strategic dead-end in their long-running battle to defend white America. Yet they cannot choose otherwise: the Republican base is diminishing but it’s the only base they’ve got. Republicans can’t pivot toward the center without committing suicide.
By late 2018, the full nativist agenda had mostly disappeared. Trump shut down the government, refusing to sign any budget that did not include $5 billion for the Wall, all the while falsely insisting that Mexico was indeed paying for it through a renegotiated NAFTA. True to form, Democrats instead offered $1.375 billion to fund border barriers that were somehow not the Wall.13 Trump ended the shutdown, took those funds, and then signed an emergency declaration to raid the military budget to build the Wall anyway.14 As of August 2019, the Supreme Court has greenlighted construction pending a lawsuit challenging the president’s end run around Congress’s power of the purse.15 Trump will continue to rally his base: Build the Wall.
Trump, however, had initially blinked and sought to avoid a shutdown. In response Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and even Steve Doocy on Trump’s beloved Fox & Friends attacked the television president. And harshly. “The chant wasn’t ‘SIGN A BILL WITH B.S. PROMISES ABOUT ‘BORDER SECURITY’ AT SOME POINT IN THE FUTURE, GUARANTEED TO FAIL!’” Coulter tweeted. “It was ‘BUILD A WALL!’” If he failed to build the Wall, Coulter said, Trump’s would be “a joke presidency that scammed the American people.”16
FAIR, which developed a particularly close-knit relationship with right-wing media, joined the call.17 But other Tanton-network leaders didn’t care so much about the Wall. In fact, they worried about it.18 “Note that better control over illegal immigration—walls, mass deportations, whatever—isn’t going to fix this,” Krikorian wrote in the National Review. “Most immigration is legal immigration, and that’s where change is most needed”; otherwise, demographic change means “conservatism will be toast.”19 The shutdown over the Wall, NumbersUSA research director Eric Ruark lamented, “really isn’t an immigration fight” at all.20 What concerned Krikorian was that Trump might trade something that organized nativists care about (like stopping the DREAM Act) in exchange for his Wall fetish.21
Krikorian’s fears were soon realized. In Trump’s 2019 State of the Union Address, the president declared that he wants “people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever but they have to come in legally.”22 Trump, after flirting with legal immigration cuts, had returned to the “nation of immigrants” model: a war on “illegal immigrants” to protect the ones who come the right way.* “If the White House follows through on this it’s going to blow up in his face,” Krikorian said. “The president has said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and his base would stay with him, and that’s probably true. But this is one thing that he won’t be able to get away with.” But what Krikorian thought was a secondary consideration at best. Nativist organizations didn’t control nativist politics and never did. The right-wing media does. The day before launching his reelection campaign in June 2019, Trump played to the only audience that mattered, pledging not cuts to legal immigration but to begin mass deportations.
Trump’s right-wing presidency was seemingly not what nativist movement founders at first had in mind. In the 1980s, the Tanton network tried to build a nonpartisan coalition for anti-immigrant politics, winning support from Warren Buffett, Eugene McCarthy, and Walter Cronkite along with often friendly mainstream press coverage of restrictionism.23 But the network’s leaders ultimately found that mass nativist politics could be most powerfully mobilized through a right fired up to stop government from providing “amnesty” to “illegals.” In doing so, they revolted against the bipartisan centrists who administered the long war on “illegal immigrants” but ultimately sought comprehensive reform. Ironically, however, nativists and the establishment both helped to narrowly and fanatically define the problem as one of migrant illegality. Today, the base isn’t motivated by arcane legal immigration policy; in fact, many point to their support for people who come the right way as evidence that they’re not racist. As Sheriff Joe Arpaio put it: “My mother and father came from Italy legally.”24
The Tanton agenda has been supplanted by ambient, culture-war dysphoria. Coulter and Fox News don’t prioritize wonkish restriction but rather right-wing mobilization, ratings, book sales, and a cornucopia of garish personal brands. The Wall, perhaps the most powerful synthesis of popular anti-immigrant sentiment ever, has become remarkably disconnected from actual immigration policy. The border has long since been more an idea than a place: militarization more than anything has moved the sites of unauthorized border crossings rather than stopped them, and many undocumented immigrants simply overstay their visas. Trump has eroded what little realism still adhered. The Wall is the now-indispensable tool for mobilizing white fear and grievance into an electoral force, scaring just enough ancient reactionaries out of their Fox News–facing recliners and into the polls to eke out popular-vote losing, electoral college victories.
The Wall is more than a monument to popular xenophobia. It’s a symbol of Fortress America, the promise of total protection against not only a coming so-called majority-minority country but also terrorism and the ravages of corporate globalization. It is the smashed neocon dreams of the war on terror and dashed neoliberal promise of flat-world prosperity coming home to roost in the Garrison State. It is the Great Migration undone and the Civil War ended differently. It is the seizure of northern Mexico without Mexicans, the vast wealth produced by American capitalism without the people doing its most degraded labor. It’s a country founded on Native genocide where the genocidaires’ descendants native status goes unquestioned. It is the very impossibility of these fantasies that has always imbued them with such violence.
As Greg Grandin writes, the Wall is “a tombstone” to America’s founding and recently deceased frontier myth, which can no longer even pretend to deliver on its promise of “perennial rebirth.” “Instead of peace, there is endless war. Instead of prosperity we have intractable inequality. Instead of a critical, resilient and open-minded citizenry, a conspiratorial nihilism, rejecting reason and dreading change, has taken hold,” Grandin writes. “Trumpism is extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring. There is no ‘divine, messianic’ crusade that can harness and redirect passions outward. Expansion, in any form, can no longer satisfy interests, reconcile contradictions, dilute the factions, or redirect the anger.”25
The Wall is a structure of political feeling. It is a sadistic, gleeful performance of transgression against political correctness, a proud insistence on the very idea that Mexicans are “rapists” and “criminals.” These are notions that draw much of their emotive force from the offense they cause to liberal propriety—even though it was liberal leaders who energetically helped to criminalize immigr
ants for decades. The Wall has come to stand in for Trump himself and thus for the entirety of the politics of white, nationalist grievance that he singularly embodies. By contrast, boring policy measures that might actually preserve a white majority are drowned out by soliloquies sung to a giant real estate development project. “We want that stuff too—but we also want a wall,” said Coulter. “The chant at every campaign rally wasn’t, ‘Enforce E-Verify!’”26 When it comes to nativism’s popular appeal, what matters most is performance, not policy.
Polarization is good
With Trump in office, things can seem absurdly bleak. But after Republicans lost the House, it became clear that Trump’s first two years were for nativists a critical opportunity to reshape the contours of the American demos.* And they blew it: Republicans had total control of government yet legislative cuts to legal immigration went nowhere. Meanwhile, Democratic voters are moving sharply left in the face of accelerating Republican extremism. The percentage of Americans calling for a decrease in legal immigration has plummeted since the early 2000s—particularly but not exclusively among Democrats. Indeed, since 2006 Democratic voters have swung from a strong plurality supporting legal immigration cuts to a stronger plurality backing increased legal immigration.27
In promoting attacks on “illegal immigration” and militarizing the border, establishment politicians from both major parties inflamed popular anti-immigrant sentiment. But they helped move the Overton window so far right that it snapped loose of its bipartisan frame, prompting vociferous resistance on the left. The war on “illegal immigrants” was based on a bipartisan consensus. It is becoming very partisan. That’s good.
As nativists well know, immigration means that we the people is increasingly made up of people who don’t look like Trump and his base. And they correctly worry that immigration is driving a large-scale demographic transformation that could ultimately doom the conservative movement—a prospect that the most honestly racist figures on the far-right call “white genocide.” Non-white people disproportionately vote Democrat—a trend gravely exacerbated by unconstrained Republican racism that has alienated even wealthy and economically conservative non-white people. Demographics aren’t destiny. But thanks to the foundational role that racism plays in American capitalism, they do mean quite a bit.
In August 2019, Trump finally implemented an aggressive attack on legal immigration, expanding the definition of what makes an immigrant “likely to become a public charge” and thus excludable from the country.28 The rule further empowers immigration officers to deny entry to poor and working-class immigrants, particularly from Latin America, or to deny immigrants already in the country a green card. The rule radically expands a provision of US immigration law dating back to the Immigration Act of 1882 and, before that, to New York and Massachusetts’s enforcement targeting Irish paupers. The Migration Policy Institute predicts that the rule “could cause a significant share of the nearly 23 million noncitizens and U.S. citizens in immigrant families using public benefits to disenroll.”29 And visa denials under Trump had already skyrocketed before the new rule was in place.30
It is unclear how profoundly the rule will reshape either the size or the class, national, and racial makeup of legal immigration. But regardless, the new rule is a reflection of Trump’s inability to secure cuts or changes to legal immigration in Congress. The rule will very likely be rolled back under even a milquetoast Democratic president. The same holds true with Trump’s deep cuts to refugee admissions, and the draconian proposal pushed by some in his orbit to cut admissions to zero. Trump is effectively terrorizing migrants in the present but failing to secure the enduring legislative change that would outlast his presidency.
There is no majority constituency today for enacting such legislation—nor any viable institutional vehicle for it. Whatever opportunity existed to leverage a white-grievance-fueled presidency toward a full nativist program has faded even as the right clings to power thanks to the system’s profoundly anti-democratic features. The left is nowhere near winning. But it is at long last emerging as a real force in clear conflict with both the Trumpist right and the center that facilitated its rise.
For Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Obama, Biden, Feinstein, Schumer, and a host of other Democrats, a measure of nativism was useful. Quite a bit more than that has proven necessary for Republicans. But too much nativism is a problem: no rational capitalist favors shutting out exploitable migrant labor. As Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire, political stances that seem rooted in principle are in reality founded—if often in indirect, unconscious, and obscure ways—in “material conditions of existence.” This is no doubt the case here.
The United States has undergone decades of enforcement escalation, fashioning a useful scapegoat for neoliberalism and empire while maintaining a segmented labor market. But business frequently lost too, most spectacularly with the repeated defeat of comprehensive immigration reform. Business wants the undocumented to be legalized and guest workers who provide the benefits of undocumented labor without the risk. But what perhaps best reflects—but by no means exclusively reflects—the power of business is what hasn’t happened: deep legislative cuts to authorized immigration have been consistently off the table for more than two decades. This has been the case since the 1996 legislation to slash legal immigration was defeated in favor of a law to persecute undocumented immigrants and “criminal aliens.” The immigration debate has taken on a bizarre and contradictory life of its own. The unspeakability of cuts to authorized immigration, and the failure to impose effective employer sanctions and employment verification systems reveal that immigration policy was still tethered, narrowly but firmly, to the interests of capital. With Trump, full nativism is spoken. But substantial immigration reductions still cannot pass Congress.
A full examination of the complex role of business, the rich, and their various factions during the past two decades of immigration politics is yet to be written. Some of its basic contours, however, are clear. For one, the capitalist class has become recklessly polyphonic. Lumpen-billionaires like the Mercer family and the Koch brothers have spent vast amounts to promote their ideologically distinct priorities rather than those of the collective.31 The Tanton network is a case in point: it received more than $150 million since 2005 from the Colcom Foundation, founded by the late Mellon heir Cordelia Scaife May.32 Ironically, independent right-wing oligarchs who pursue idiosyncratic agendas now rival the Chamber of Commerce for influence thanks to the policy achievements of groups like the Chamber of Commerce, which helped those oligarchs make and keep their billions. But does establishment big business even care about immigration anymore?
Political scientist Margaret Peters argues that productivity gains and globalization’s facilitation of an overseas supply of low-wage labor has led to a lessening of business’s need for immigrant workers, resulting in more restriction.33 The evidence for this, however, is mixed. On the one hand, business has not won a major legislative expansion of immigration since 1990. But it has also not suffered a major defeat. What’s clear is that business can tolerate border security theatrics and the demonization of “criminal aliens,” and is content to exploit undocumented workers. As anthropologist Nicholas De Genova writes, “It is deportability, and not deportation per se, that has historically rendered undocumented migrant labor a distinctly disposable commodity.”34 Business opposes dramatic cuts to authorized immigration, effective employer sanctions, and mandatory employee verification. Business prefers legalization, but that doesn’t rival priorities like tax cuts and deregulation; if it did, business would abandon the Republican Party. The roles played in immigration politics by business interests with various and often bipartisan attachments require further research, which will in turn help to clarify the woefully under-studied sociology of ruling class power more generally.
Meanwhile, business’s hold on the Democratic Party has come under intense assault. The war on “illegal immigrants” that accelerated in the 199
0s is facilitating a realignment of left-of-center politics in favor of a diverse, immigrant-inclusive working class in opposition to war, neoliberal oligarchy, and hard borders. The post–Cold War dominance of carceral neoliberalism had made such a popular coalition impossible; the exhaustion of that model signaled by the 2008 crisis has made it astonishingly credible. Record deportations and a radicalizing racist right triggered a revolt among the Democratic Party’s young and increasingly diverse base. That base has along with much of American public opinion moved to perhaps the most staunchly pro-immigrant position in American history—and, in doing so, toward a radically inclusive vision of the American working class. Amid a post-Recession boom in labor militancy, that portends trouble for the entire political establishment and the racist and oligarchic order it protects.
Trump’s election set that trajectory into overdrive, rendering opinions on immigration a basic proxy for one’s partisan allegiance. Border militarization that once garnered bipartisan support is now the polarizing Wall. Obama’s brutal migrant detention centers have under Trump been labeled “concentration camps.” The number of Republicans who believe that the United States risks losing its national identity if the country welcomes immigrants from the world over has increased since Trump’s election.35 At the same time, Democrats have become more hostile to enforcement. In 2010, 47 percent of Democrats said that they equally prioritized a pathway to legalizing undocumented immigrants and “better border security and stronger enforcement of immigration laws,” while just 29 percent prioritized a pathway to legalization alone. By 2018, the number prioritizing legalization alone skyrocketed to 51 percent.36 As the war on immigrants kicked into high gear in 1994, just 32 percent of Democrats and 30 percent of Republicans agreed that immigrants strengthened the country. By 2016, the share of Democrats who said so had surged to 78 percent.37
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