Anti-immigrant agitation in a nation of immigrants

In recent days, Donald Trump and his Republican running mate, JD Vance, have doubled down on their false and defamatory claims about legally admitted Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, thus churning up widespread fears, bomb threats and school evacuations. Claiming that these migrants were destroying the American “way of life,” Trump promised that, if elected, he would order massive deportations. This statement echoed his astonishing promise, made during the 2024 campaign and previously, to seize and deport 15 to 20 million immigrants.

Nativist agitation has a long, sordid history in the United States. In the 1850s, large numbers of American Protestants rallied behind the “Know Nothing” movement and its political offshoot, the American Party, ventures centered primarily on opposing the influence of immigrant Catholics. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, hostility toward Chinese immigrants and, later, Japanese immigrants led to lynchings, riots and legislation that barred virtually all immigration from the two Asian nations.

During the early twentieth century, American xenophobia focused on the alleged dangers provided by the “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe, predominantly Catholics and Jews. Such people, it was claimed, had a higher propensity for moral depravity, feeble-mindedness and crime, and were polluting the “Nordic race.” As a result, many “old stock” Americans championed changes in immigration law to sharply reduce the number of these allegedly inferior people entering the country. Adopted in legislation during the 1920s, a new, highly discriminatory national origins quota system did, indeed, largely restrict their ability to enter the United States, leaving millions to perish in Europe after the onset of the Nazi terror.

Of course, many Americans, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, welcomed the arrival of people from foreign lands. And, in line with their views, U.S. immigration law was significantly liberalized in 1965.

We should also recognize that the United States was hardly unique in undergoing surges of anti-immigrant nativism. Indeed, over the centuries, recent arrivals in many countries experienced rampant xenophobia — including “Paki-bashing” in Britain and violence against Turkish immigrants in Germany. Recently, in fact, intense opposition to immigration and immigrants provided a key factor behind British public support for Brexit and the startling rise of previously marginal, hyper-nationalist parties in Europe.

What has inspired this hostility to people coming from other lands?

Many individuals, it seems, feel uneasy when confronted with the unfamiliar. Thus, they sometimes find differences in skin color, religion, language, or culture to be disturbing. Although some people can — and often do — find these things a welcome addition to their lives or, at least, interesting, others become uncomfortable. In these circumstances, immigrants are easily added to other disdained minority groups as victims of widespread misinformation, mistrust and prejudice.

Unfortunately, this unease with human differences provides a ready-made opportunity for political exploitation. As many a demagogue or unscrupulous politician has learned, fear and hatred of the “other” can be effective in stirring up a mob or winning an election.

Although nativism has been mobilized by political parties and movements of varying political persuasions, it has appeared most frequently on the Right. Fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s focused heavily on the supposed glories of their nation and the ostensible biological inferiority of people from other lands. This xenophobia provided a rightwing ideological component in numerous countries, including the U.S., where groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Silver Shirts, the Nazi Party and the America First movement lauded a mythical “Americanism” and assailed the foreign-born.

More recently, too, anti-immigrant sentiment has played a central role in Europe’s parties of the Far Right, such as France’s National Front (now the National Rally), Alternative for Germany, the Swiss People’s Party, Hungary’s Fidesz, the Party of Freedom of the Netherlands, the Brothers of Italy and numerous others of their stripe. Meanwhile, in the U.S., anti-immigrant sentiment has thrived in the increasingly right-wing Republican Party. Trump’s adoption of an anti-immigrant approach as a central theme of his MAGA movement, like his promise of building a wall between Mexico and the U.S., is no accident, but part of a political strategy to ride xenophobia to power.

A key reason that nativism has become a staple of the Right is that, with the advent of democratic institutions in many nations, the Right has faced a difficult situation. Before the commoners gained the vote, their opportunities for effectively challenging economic and social inequality were limited. But, armed with the ballot, masses of people had the power to elect governments that would implement more equitable policies, such as sharing the wealth. This could be accomplished in a variety of ways, including taking control of giant corporations and estates, heavily taxing vast fortunes, raising workers’ pay, reducing the workday and lengthening vacations, building inexpensive housing, and establishing free education and healthcare. Worst of all, from the standpoint of the Right, such leveling measures, advanced by a burgeoning Left, had significant popular appeal.

Faced with this dilemma, the economically and socially privileged and their political parties on the Right recognized that, to defeat the drive for the expansion of economic and social equality, it would be useful to fan the flames of popular prejudices, including hostility to immigrants, as this would divide the mass base of the Left and put it on the defensive. Consequently, they gravitated toward this divide-and-conquer strategy — a strategy that sometimes worked.

Will it work again in the 2024 U.S. presidential and congressional elections? With the poll numbers so close, it’s hard to say.

Meanwhile, though, it’s worth noting how ironic it is that, in the U.S. —a nation populated almost entirely by immigrants and their descendants — anti-immigrant sentiment, whipped up by Trump and Vance, has once again come to the forefront of American politics.

Lawrence Wittner, Ph.D, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is professor of history emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of “Confronting the Bomb” (Stanford University Press).