Nativist Nation

Abstract

Nativist Nation Lucy E. Salyer (bio) Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2019. 432 pp. Images, Notes, and index. $32.00. Amanda Frost, You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers. Boston: Beacon Press, 2021. 248 pp. Images, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.95. Julia Rose Kraut, Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. 352 pp. Notes and index. $37.00. The 2016 presidential election brought Donald Trump and his shrill, anti-immigrant rhetoric to the White House, providing a bully pulpit and a megaphone for nativist forces that had been clamoring for more draconian policies. Trump unleashed vitriolic attacks on immigrants and foreign-born Americans of all statuses and nationalities but reserved special antipathy for Black and Brown immigrants. Trump promised to “take the shackles off” immigration agents and to “build the wall”—both physical and legal barriers—to stem what he called an “invasion” by “bad” people. Deeds followed words. Moving remarkably swiftly, Trump issued the controversial travel ban (a.k.a. “Muslim Ban”) within a week of his inauguration and adopted an aggressive deportation campaign to expel undocumented immigrants. Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy led to record-high detention rates and the separation of migrant children from their parents, some of whom have still not been reunited. By the time Trump left the White House in 2021, his administration had enacted an astounding 472 administrative changes “that dismantled and reconstructed many elements of the U.S. immigration system.”1 The 2016 election sparked diverse reactions: many onlookers were startled and appalled by the nastiness and the outright racism of Trump’s attacks while his supporters thronged to his message, as he dared say boldly and loudly what many conservatives felt. Erika Lee, in her new book America for Americans, expresses her own “constant astonishment and dark humor” as well as her “righteous anger and helplessness” in response to Trump’s campaign (p. 5). [End Page 368] Many critics believed that Trump’s anti-immigrant sentiment broke with the United States’ cherished image as a “nation of immigrants,” reviving outdated and disreputable views that had fallen out of favor decades ago. But as these three books—Lee’s America for Americans, Amanda Frost’s You Are Not American, and Julia Rose Kraut’s Threat of Dissent—reveal, Trump’s “Make America Safe Again” and “America First” slogans echoed a long line of cries throughout the nation’s history, demanding “America for Americans.”2 In sum, we’ve been here before. Lee, Frost, and Kraut all construct their studies around the same fundamental paradox: Is the United States a “nation of immigrants” or a nation against immigrants? On the one hand, Lee notes that the U.S. has received more than 80 million immigrants over the past 200 years and “historically led the world in resettling refugees.” It remains the “world’s largest immigrant-receiving country in the world.” Lawful permanent residents, observes Frost, benefit from liberal naturalization laws allowing them to become citizens 5 years after their arrival. Frost also remarks that the Constitution raises a broad umbrella over a diverse society, the First Amendment “protecting the rights of ethnic, religious, ideological, and racial minorities to live as they prefer.”3 On the other hand, the United States has continually defined itself in opposition to “foreigners,” employing a variety of methods to cull and separate those deemed a threat to “real Americans.” In one of the great opening lines of a book, Aristide Zollberg, in A Nation by Design (2006), observed that the United States has been “a nation of immigrants, to be sure, but not just any immigrants.”4 That observation, in itself, is not new. There is a rich literature on the history of anti-immigrant movements, with John Higham’s Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (1988) providing the classic account. Higham and other scholars tended to view nativist movements as episodic, arising in times of national crisis. Writing a new epilogue for the 2002 edition of his classic work, Higham conceded that...