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White
Nationalism and Immigration Today |
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As a human rights
activist, I am convinced that examining white nationalism and its
relationship to the maintenance of racism and xenophobia should be at the
center of any attempt to explain U.S. immigration policies. While it has been
commonplace to dismiss it as an aberration of the paranoid right-wing fringe
of American life, in fact, white nationalism is disconcertingly close to
mainstream politics. At the beginning of the
21st century, U.S. immigration policies are confronting a color triangle with
three sets of opposing forces. On the one side are white nationalists who
want to tighten immigration restrictions. A second leg of the triangle is
formed by neo-liberal global elites who want to relax immigration restrictions
for skilled professionals as they tighten restrictions on the secondary labor
market. The third leg is formed by the global human rights movement which
envisions a world in which people, empowered by policies that respect their
human rights, are free to move without immigration restrictions. These three
sets of forces are in tension in determining immigration policies and a next
generation of growth for the U.S. White nationalism is the
organized expression of white supremacy. It propagates the ideas of white
supremacy while denying its racist and xenophobic roots. White supremacists
believe in biological determinism: that the white race is genetically, culturally,
and economically superior to all other races of people. White nationalism has
a vested interest in denying the privileged position of whiteness because
this would belie their claim to victimhood status, relieving whites of
responsibility for racism and xenophobia. Yet white nationalists remain
obsessed with identity borders, conflating race with nation. The central
question for them is maintaining white dominance, and non-white immigrants
threaten their power. White nationalism enters
into corridors of power via the extremist edge of the Republican Party, but
also taints every Euro-centric political formation, from the right to the
left. When white nationalists converged with Christian nationalists in the
1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, they created a new stream of
nationalism in the United States that opposed both internationalist secular
elites perceived "above" them, and multi-culturalist threats from
"below." The Immigration Act of 1965 lifted many of the race-based
immigration restrictions and allowed Asians, Latin Americans, and Africans to
come to the United States. This influx of immigrants re-energized the anti-immigrant
movement. Nativism helped to sweep Ronald Reagan into power in 1980, who used
his office to openly declare war on immigrants and refugees, whom, he claimed,
overran U.S. borders, took jobs away from Americans, and caused unemployment.
Contemporary anti-immigrant organizations representing white nationalism
sprang up during this period, including the Federation for American
Immigration Reform (FAIR), and the American Immigration Control Foundation.
These groups claim responsibility for winning California's 1994 precedent-setting
Proposition 187, barring the provision of all government services, save emergency
medical services to undocumented immigrants, and for the success of the English
Only movement. White nationalists and
white supremacists tend to choose legal, electoral strategies when
Republicans are in power, because they have influence within that party. Yet
the currency of their anti-immigrant political agenda was revealed when a
Democrat, President Clinton, signed the 1996 Immigration Act in the midst of
an economic boom, to crack down on undocumented immigrants, and approved legislation
that dramatically cut welfare benefits to immigrants. Anti-Immigration in
the Future There are ebbs and flows
in America's social relationship to white nationalism, which sometimes
tightens and sometimes eases immigration restrictions. The civil rights movement
of the 20th century forced the most sustained and comprehensive regrouping of
the white nationalist movements in the United States. White nationalism has
retreated and then reasserted its influence using both the ballot and the
bullet. And white nationalists have often set the parameters of the debate
when their sentiments correspond with — but are not simultaneous to — those
of the governing and economic elite in debates over nationalism, citizenship,
and immigration. For example, new proposals to deny citizenship to children
born in the U.S. of undocumented immigrants appeal to both groups, who
believe that the fewer rights allowed sweatshop workers and migrant farm workers,
the better. Neo-Nazis in Europe and Australia, and unrepentant pro-apartheid groups
in Southern Africa share these beliefs. While I have focused my
analysis on white nationalism, it would be incorrect toassume that their
beliefs are held only by those who are white. Xenophobia and racism have been
successfully internalized by non-whites in the U.S., as intragroup prejudices
among people of color replicate the power relations established by the white
supremacist construct. White nationalism
challenges human rights activists to create a way to confront racism and xenophobia
in the U.S. beyond individual bad attitudes. Human rights education offers a
promising strategy, although education alone is not sufficient without political,
structural and economic change. Human rights education is certainly a better strategy
than weak multi-culturalism or tolerance programs that try to teach people
basic social courtesies while ignoring or downplaying the structural
permanence of racist and xenophobic oppression. The task is to show people that
human rights are the best expression of a value system for a democratic society
free of poverty, racism and xenophobia. Only then will white nationalism
finally be defeated and the Statue of Liberty will again welcome the hungry
and the oppressed. Loretta J. Ross is
Executive Director of the National Center for Human Rights Education in Atlanta, GA. |
