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Nativism and Nostalgia American Style

Nancy Foner

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Cet article se concentre sur le contenu et le rôle de la nostalgie dans le nativisme contemporain aux États-Unis. Un type de nostalgie concerne les immigrants européens du début du XXe siècle, perçus comme « meilleurs » que ceux d’aujourd’hui. Un autre type de nostalgie concerne l’Amérique des années 1950, c’est-à-dire celle d’avant l’apparition d’une immigration à grande échelle intervenue après la réforme de 1965, et avant la législation sur les droits civils, la libération des femmes, l’émancipation des homosexuels et d’autres changements importants. L’accent mis sur la nostalgie d’un « âge d’or » du milieu du XXe siècle permet d’enrichir l’analyse des liens entre le nativisme d’aujourd’hui et les changements démographiques induits par l’immigration, son attrait pour un segment particulier de la population américaine et ses liens avec les discours des partis politiques.

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1When scholars write about nativism in the United States, nostalgia rarely enters the picture. Fear, hostility, and opposition, these are the attitudes, beliefs, and emotions that are usually associated with nativism in the United States. Indeed, according to American historian John Higham’s (1963: 4) classic definition, nativism is an “intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign (i.e. ‘un-American’) connections.” Xenophobia, a closely-related concept used by many contemporary historians, stresses the enduring prejudice, animosity, or bias toward foreigners throughout American history, in which they are demonized as a threat to the nation and its people (Lee 2019: 7-8). Despite often being overlooked, nostalgia, or a sentimental or wistful yearning for a period in the past, has been an element in nativism and xenophobia in the United States, and therefore deserves our attention. Adding nostalgia to the analysis of nativism and xenophobia can, I believe, contribute to understanding why they arise, the forms they take, and their consequences.

2This article is concerned with the content and role of nostalgia in the virulent nativism of early 21st century America in what one might call its Trumpian or Republican form. I look at two types of nostalgia, one for a more distant past of a century or so ago, the other for a period closer to the present. In the first type, Americans often make invidious comparisons between Hispanic, Asian, and Black immigrants today and “better” European immigrants of the late nineteenth and early 20th century. The second type of nostalgia, for an America of the 1950s, is a much more significant component of today’s nativism and xenophobia. It involves memories of a mid-20th century time after the Second World War, before the onset of large-scale contemporary immigration and before the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, gay empowerment, and other social and economic changes drastically altered the American landscape. A focus on nostalgia for a mid-20th century “golden age” can enrich the analysis of current-day nativism’s links to demographic change ushered in by mass immigration, its appeal to a particular segment of the American population, and its connections to political party mobilizations. It can help illuminate nativism as it has developed American style.

The Good Old Days: Turn of the Twentieth Century Memories

3Nostalgia related to nativism in contemporary American society is at least partly about imagined “good old days” of immigration and ideal immigrants at the turn of the 20th century. This was a time when the vast majority of the millions of immigrants arriving were from Europe, especially southern and eastern Europe. Idealized memories of these earlier immigrants are often emotional and strongly held because they refer to Americans’ own European ancestors. Beyond being an element of family lore, idealized memories of earlier immigrants sometimes seep into the media and journalistic, and even some academic, accounts as well.

4Earlier Ellis Island era immigrants are often remembered as folk heroes of a sort who worked hard, strove to become assimilated, pulled themselves up by their own Herculean efforts, had strong values, and, in the case of Russian Jews, were people of the book. Against an image of these mythical heroes and heroines, it is difficult, indeed virtually impossible, for contemporary immigrants to measure up. In this sense, the myths have exclusionary elements in that they foster a view that the incorporation difficulties of today’s immigrants and their children are unique and that recent arrivals are of a lower quality than their predecessors. And of course, the myths are, well, just myths. In other words, they are wrong (Foner 2000, 2019). Forgotten in a haze of history are realities of the immigrant past. It is often said that a major distinction between today’s immigrants and those of a hundred years ago is that then they were, in the main, White Europeans and today they are, in significant numbers, people of color. But this is to impose early 21st century understandings of racial categories on the past. While to our contemporary ear Jews and Italians sound like different nationalities or ethnicities, many Americans in the first third of the 20th century thought of them as different races, and viewed them as racially inferior to those of northern and western European origin. Eastern and southern European immigrants were widely seen as belonging to inferior “mongrel” races that would alter the essential character of the United States and pollute the nation’s Anglo-Saxon and Nordic stock, or, as patrician Madison Grant (1916) wrote in his influential book The Passing of the Great Race, sweep America toward a racial abyss. Jewish and Italian immigrants may have been recognized as Whites in terms of legal and political rights, but, as historian Matthew Frye Jacobson (1998) put it, they were both White and distinct from other Whites. They were thought to have distinct mental abilities and innate character traits, and many Americans believed that they were physically identifiable: facial features (including the “Jewish” nose) were often noted in the case of Jews, “swarthy” skin in the case of Italians.

5As for the speed of upward mobility, the move up the socioeconomic ladder for the earlier European second generation was slower than is often remembered. It usually took place in relatively modest upward steps –much like what is happening today– not in giant leaps forward. This includes the case of the Jews, who are often recalled as the great achievers of the past. “My son the doctor” may have been a cherished phrase of Jewish immigrant parents, but “my grandson the doctor” is more accurate. And some of the second generation did not move up at all, but stayed at the same occupational level as their parents (Foner and Alba 2006). For late 19th and early 20th century European immigrants, the leap into the professions typically was a third or even fourth generation phenomenon. In New York City in 1950, a quarter century after the massive influx from southern and eastern Europe had ended, only a small proportion of second generation Jews (less than a fifth), and an even smaller proportion of second generation Italians (about 5 percent) were in the professions (Cohen 1993).

6A key question is whether those who believe these myths are necessarily nativist in the sense of being intensely opposed to immigrants today. The answer is clearly no. Nevertheless, the nostalgic memories and myths can be an element in –and used to justify– nativist attitudes, positions, and policies. This includes what anthropologist Leo Chavez (2013) refers to as a Latino threat narrative that is widespread in contemporary American society. Promulgated by a substantial sector of the media as well as many politicians, this narrative falsely portrays Latinos immigrants as prone to violence and unwilling or incapable of integrating and becoming part of the national community. Mexicans in particular “have been represented as the quintessential ‘illegal aliens’ which distinguishes them from other immigrant groups. …plagued by the mark of illegality, which in much public discourse means that they are criminals and thus illegitimate members of society undeserving of social benefits, including citizenship” (ibid.: 4). According to an examination of more than 4,200 stories in newspapers in four Southern States between 2002 and 2013, immigrants were characterized negatively in about a third of the stories on immigration, with the perceived criminal tendencies of Mexican and Latino immigrants frequently mentioned (Brown, Jones and Decker 2018). In their analysis of four major mainstream newspapers, sociologists Douglas Massey and Karen Pren (2012) attribute the increase in negative rhetoric to describe Mexican immigration in the 1970s to politicians who discovered the advantages of raising fears about Latino immigrants and undocumented immigration and to the media’s realization of how much could be gained through continued use of verbal and visual images of the border under siege (Chavez 2013: 36).

7Relevant here is that nostalgia for an earlier period of European immigration is frequently part and parcel of the Latino threat narrative. “Mexican immigrants and their progeny,” the late political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote in Who Are We?, “have not assimilated into American society as other immigrants did in the past and as many other immigrants are doing now.” Ultra-conservative political columnist Patrick Buchanan, in The Death of the West, wrote that “unlike the immigrants of old… millions of [Mexicans] have no desire to learn English or become citizens.” And conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson, a fifth generation Californian from a farming family, longingly looked back in Mexifornia, to times gone by when the offspring of his community’s immigrant farmers “learned English, they intermarried, and within a generation they knew nothing of the old country and little of the old language” … whereas today “thousands reside illegally, have no lawful documentation, and assume that … [the community] must adapt to their ways, not the reverse” (cited in Chavez 2013: 42, 39, 40). Contrary to these views, a large literature makes clear that contemporary immigrants and their children, including those with origins in Latin America, are in fact integrating into American society. They are learning English as rapidly or faster now than those who arrived in earlier waves of European immigrants in the early 20th century, and large numbers today already come speaking English. More than a third of U.S.-born Mexicans in the current period are married to non-Hispanic whites (Alba and Foner 2015: 109). Considering all immigrants, the proportion of naturalized citizens is almost exactly the same as it was in 1920 (Waters and Pineau 2015).

8As for legal status, it is true that a large proportion of the roughly 11 million undocumented, more than seven in ten, are from Latin America and about half are Mexican. Yet the majority of Latin American immigrants are authorized to live and work in the United States. In any case, those making invidious comparisons between today’s undocumented and their own “legal” European ancestors of the nineteenth and early 20th century forget or are unaware that for European arrivals at that time (unlike today), as historian Mae Ngai (2006) writes, “there were so few restrictions on immigration …that there was no such thing as “illegal immigration.” Moreover, far from standing out as “undeserving criminals,” Latino immigrants, like immigrants generally, are less likely than natives to commit crimes. One study, for example, found that in 2010 educated native-born men 18-39 had an incarceration rate more than triple the 2.8 percent rate among foreign-born Mexican men and five times greater than the 1.7 percent rate among foreign-born Salvadoran and Guatemalan men (Waters and Pineau 2015: 329). Whatever the realities, however, nostalgic myths about the qualities of earlier European immigrants –and the belief that unlike contemporary newcomers, they are the kind of immigrants America wants– continue to have a strong hold among many Americans and can feed into and support nativism and xenophobia.

Make America Great Again: A Mid-Twentieth Century “Golden Age”

9If some Americans have a romanticized view of a time when southern and eastern Europeans dominated U.S. immigrant streams, many look back with nostalgia to a more recent period: the immediate post-World War II decades. When Donald Trump speaks of making America great again, it is that era he seems to have in mind, although, in fact, he has rarely specified the years he means in his many speeches and tweets on the subject. When, in an interview with the New York Times in 2016, he was asked when the country last time was actually great, he did point to the late 1940s and 1950s when, he said, “we were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war, we were pretty much doing what we had to do” (Krieg 2016).

10That the 1950s are often remembered as a golden age by many Americans reflects numerous features of that period. The United States was experiencing economic expansion and prosperity. Unemployment was low, inflation minimal. The GI Bill gave large numbers of veterans an affordable college education and loans to buy homes in the suburbs, ushering many White workers into the middle class. Productivity improved while competitors in Europe and Asia were still recovering from the ravages of the Second World War. Economic inequality in the 1950s was lower than today, and working class families experienced gains in income and education. Many adults who had grown up in poverty in the Great Depression were enjoying a greatly improved standard of living, with new cars, suburban houses, and other consumer goods available to more people than ever before. Far off in the future was the loss of “good” –well paid and secure– unionized blue-collar jobs in the wake of outsourcing, technological change, and economic restructuring. In the 1950s, working and middle-class Americans were optimistic about the years ahead. In contrast, in a recent survey, 76 percent of White working class Americans expected their children’s lives to be worse than their own (Kristof and WuDunn 2020: 16).

11To be sure, the supposed golden era of the 1950s had a dark side. Before the wave of changes that began in the 1960s, as journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn note, “African Americans lived under Jim Crow laws and family planning was banned in a majority of states for unmarried women. … A 1963 poll found that 59 percent of Americans believed that black-white marriages should be illegal, and interracial marriage was still banned in sixteen states as recently as 1967, when the Supreme Court overturned such laws in the case of Loving v. Virginia” (2020: 71). The 1950s was a decade before the passage of civil rights legislation, the empowerment of women, expansion of LGBTQ rights, and the development of a more religiously diverse and more secular American society. In 1960, fewer than 1 in 25 lawyers were women; by 2018 the figure was just over 1 in 3. In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower signed an executive order banning homosexuals from working for the federal government or any of its private contractors; in 2015, the Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage legal in all fifty states.

12As for immigration, the 1950s was a time of low inflows from abroad, both in terms of the number of new immigrant arrivals and the total population of immigrants living in the United States. On average, 250,000 immigrants arrived annually during that decade, and in 1960 the 9.7 million immigrants residing in the country made up just slightly more than 5 percent of the total population, one of the two lowest percentages of the past seventy years (see Table 1). Nearly all the immigrants living in the United States –three quarters– were from Europe, most middle-aged or older who arrived in an earlier part of the 20th century.

Table 1. Size and Share of the Foreign-Born Population in the U.S., 1950-2019

Year

Number of immigrants (millions)

Immigrant % of U.S. population

1950

10.3

6.9

1960

9.7

5.4

1970

9.6

4.7

1980

14

6.2

1990

19.7

7.9

2000

31.1

11.1

2010

40

12.9

2019

44.9

13.7

Source: Batalova, Hanna, and Levesque 2021

13America of the 1950s not only was welcoming a relatively small number of immigrants; it was also overwhelmingly White. Whites were 85 percent of the population in 1960, a time before the term non-Hispanic White was even invented as a Census category. When most Americans thought of minorities at that time, they had Blacks in mind. That was not surprising since Blacks were three quarters of the nation’s minority population (nearly all of them descendants of enslaved Africans brought to this country in chains). In 1960, Hispanics were a mere 3.5 percent of U.S. residents and Asian Americans were barely visible at less than one percent (Passel and Cohn 2008).

14More than half a century later, in 2019, the racial composition of the U.S. population had undergone a sea change, largely a result of the massive immigration that began after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act ended restrictive national origins quotas that had been in place since the 1920s and subsequent amendments further expanded the immigrant population. Indeed, about one million lawful permanent residents were admitted annually for almost all years between 2001 and 2019 –and a huge U.S.-born second generation also added ethnic and racial diversity to America (Donato and Amuedo-Durantes 2020, Foner 2022). In 2019, an unprecedented 44.9 million immigrants (or 13.7 percent of the population) lived in the United States; together with their children, they were a quarter of the nation (Batalova, Hanna, and Levesque 2021). In that year, Whites –now classified as non-Hispanic Whites in the census– had shrunk to 60 percent of the nation's population; Hispanics, at 18.5 percent, had grown to become the largest minority group, Asians were nearly 6 percent, and the composition of the Black minority had changed. Although Blacks, as a group, had increased to about 13 percent of the country (from 11 percent in 1960) almost a tenth were immigrants, the overwhelming majority from Africa and the Caribbean (see Table 2).

Table 2. Race/Ethnicity of U.S. Population (Percentage)

 

1960

2019

Non-Hispanic White

85

60*

Hispanic

3.5

18.5

Asian

.6

5.9

Black

11

13.4

*White alone, not Hispanic or Latino

Source: Passel and Cohn 2008; U.S. Census Bureau 2019

15Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” emblazoned on red MAGA hats worn by his supporters, is a not so subtle reference to an America in mid-20th century, before the impact of the large-scale post-1965 immigration began to be felt –an America that was Whiter and less racially and ethnically diverse than it is today. It was an America before immigrants, along with their children and grandchildren, had dispersed all over the country so that many cities, suburbs, and even rural areas in the West, South, and Midwest that had been virtually all White before 1960 now have substantial numbers of Hispanic and Asian residents (Foner 2022). One momentous change from a half century ago is that few neighborhoods in metropolitan regions in the country with many White residents are racially exclusive any more. In a study of twenty-four highly diverse metropolitan regions in the year 2000, three quarters of the neighborhoods mixed a significant presence of Whites with that of one or more minority groups. In nearly half of all the neighborhoods, Whites lived with substantial numbers of both Asian Americans and Hispanics, reflecting the broad impact of immigration. The change from 1980 was remarkable: of the 1210 all-White neighborhoods in these metropolitan areas in 1980 only 333 remained all White in 2000 (Logan and Zhang 2010, see also Zhang and Logan 2016).

From Dog Whistles to Open Racism and Xenophobia1

  • 1 This and the following section draw on material in my recent book (Foner 2022).

16If Trump’s mantra “Make American Again” is clearly nostalgic about an America that is no more, his discourse on immigration has been marked more by racial hostility than an explicit wistfulness about the past. Trump’s overt xenophobia and ethnic slurs took on a particular tone and meaning precisely because they followed several decades after the civil rights movement, which had ushered in a new climate and understanding about what was acceptable to say in public about race and ethnicity. By the 1970s and 1980s, as the historian Lawrence Fuchs (1990) wrote, candidates for high office and public officials could not disparage or even tolerate the disparagement of any ethnic, racial, or religious group without suffering severe and widespread condemnation. In an atmosphere of greater public tolerance, more subtle means were used to cast aspersion on racial and ethnic groups. Instead of egregious racial epithets or slurs, code words were used to refer to negative characteristics of minorities as well as dog-whistle politics, that is, sending messages about racial minorities in coded language that might appear to mean one thing to some in the general public but had a different resonance for a target audience (Lopez 2015: 4, Baker 2018, Withers 2018). In his 1980 campaign for president, Republican Ronald Reagan told stories about Cadillac-driving “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps; Reagan did not need to mention race, because he was blowing a dog whistle about African Americans. The Willie Horton ad in George Bush, Sr’s 1988 presidential campaign is another example. In attacking Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis as soft on crime for supporting his state’s “weekend pass program,” the ad played into racial stereotypes. It linked crime to Black men and stoked fears about Black crime by featuring the mug shot of convicted African American murderer, Horton, who had been able to escape during a weekend furlough and then later raped a woman and stabbed her fiancé.

  • 2 President George W. Bush, 1990, Remarks on Signing the Immigration Act; President Bill Clinton, Com (...)

17Dog whistle politics hardly disappeared under Trump. What was different was his use of unambiguous insults and smears not only against African Americans –he essentially launched his political career by promoting the racist “birther” myth that Barack Obama was not born in the United States– but also a virtual drumbeat of attacks against immigrants. Indeed, the birther myth about Obama reflects a nativist belief that someone like him, with a Kenyan father, is not “really” American. Obama’s three presidential predecessors waxed eloquent about America as a nation of immigrants, drawing on a narrative that, by the 1960s, had become widely and popularly used as a celebration of the United States. In speeches, George W. Bush referred to “immigration [as]… not just a link to America’s past; it’s also a bridge to America’s future;” Bill Clinton spoke of how “more than any other nation on Earth, America has constantly drawn strength and spirit from wave after wave of immigrants,” and Barack Obama stressed that “we are and always will be a nation of immigrants.”2 Trump painted a very different, dystopian, image.

18In framing immigrants as a threat to the United States, Trump changed the national conversation about immigration and stood out, as the journalist Thomas Edsall comments, for his “willingness –indeed his eagerness– to openly and aggressively unleash the forces of ethnic and racial hostility that Republican elites had quietly capitalized upon for decades (Edsall 2019).” Indeed, two historians argue that Trump was novel in two other ways: establishing himself as the most anti-newcomer president in all of American history and standing, as president, at the head of a nativist movement (Bon Tempo and Diner forthcoming). During the 2016 campaign and afterwards, including State of the Union addresses, Trump raised the specter of an immigrant crime rampage and repeated grisly stories of violent crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, even though statistics show immigrants having lower crime rates than the native-born. Among his better-known statements, Trump said a Hispanic judge could not be fair in the fraud case against Trump University because “he’s a Mexican.” Along with Mexican –and other Latino– immigrants, Trump targeted Muslims and Asians, too. In 2015, for example, the Trump campaign called for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States (Solis 2018). Later, during the Covid-19 epidemic, Trump insisted on referring to the “Chinese virus” as he sought to shift blame for his catastrophic failure in handling the outbreak by fanning fears of a foreign threat while also bolstering support from his base through xenophobia. In reigniting old racist and nativist tropes, Trump fueled and legitimated anti-Chinese sentiments; hate crimes were reported to spike against Asian Americans in the midst of the pandemic, following a long period between 2003 and 2017 when they had been in decline nationally (Foner 2022). Nor did Black immigrants escape his venom. He was widely reported to refer, in a White House meeting, to immigrants from Haiti and Africa as coming from “shit-hole” countries. In the summer of 2019, he attacked four minority Congresswomen –American citizens all, three born in the United States and the fourth a Somali-born Muslim– by saying they should “go back” to the countries they came from. Trump, in short, went where other politicians, and certainly previous presidents in the modern era, dared not go in their rhetoric, shifting the bounds of acceptable public discourse about immigration in the process and giving nativist and racist demagoguery the presidential seal of approval (Bouie 2019, Leonhardt and Philbrick 2018, Silva 2018).

Nostalgia, Nativism, and Racial Resentment in the Trump Era

19Trump’s strength and success as a politician, as one journalist notes, had its source both in the cult of personality he constructed and maintained as well as the agenda he represented: “a return to the America that used to be, at least in the popular imagination, before the women’s and civil rights and gay rights revolutions, before diversity, sexual harassment, and political correctness had been invented.” And before technological change and deindustrialization led to a decline in manufacturing employment, the erosion of wages by foreign competition, and the implosion of trade unionism (Edsall 2021a and 2021b). The nostalgic, as well as racist, nature of Trump’s appeals proved remarkably successful. He won the presidency in 2016 and despite losing the 2020 election, garnered 47 percent of the vote (73 million people). He has continued to dominate the Republican Party. Few Republican elected officials have been willing to defy him, and he retains the loyalty of a majority of those who voted for him in the presidential elections.

  • 3 The Republican Party now not only draws its strongest support from Whites, but also certain sectors (...)

20His supporters are not only overwhelmingly White, but Trump has had a special appeal to working-class Whites, that is, those without a college education who have been drawn to his anti-immigrant rhetoric and blatant racist messages.3 Racial resentment, it has been argued, is at the heart of Trump’s attraction and popularity; it is closely bound up with immigration’s role in fears among many Whites that their long-held privileged racial position is in peril.

21The economic and cultural threat many Whites feel from immigrants reflect their sense of marginalization in an increasingly ethnically and racially diverse country and their racial fears about the loss of Whites’ dominant status. As political scientist William Galston recently put it, many Whites have a sense of displacement in a country they once dominated and a belief that immigrants and minorities have forced them to the margins of American life (cited in Edsall 2021b). Many Whites who supported Trump, as political scientist Ashley Jardina (2019: 267) observes, feel that the benefits they have enjoyed because of their race and their status atop the racial hierarchy are in jeopardy.

22Something else seems to be involved, too, as sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s research in the arch-conservative Louisiana bayou country suggests. The working-class native Whites she met felt like strangers in their own land, squeezed not only by automation, outsourcing, and the rise of multinationals, but also, since the 1960s and 1970s, by greater competition from other groups, including Americans of color, women, and, relevant here, immigrants and refugees. The working-class Whites resented that immigrants, refugees, and beneficiaries of affirmative action were “cutting in line” and “sailing past the Statue of Liberty into a diminishing supply of good jobs” at the expense of White men and their wives (Hochschild 2016: 143, 8). Racialized economics is what John Sides and his colleagues (2018: 8) call it: “not ‘I might lose my job’ but, in essence, ‘People in my group are losing jobs to that other group.’” Instead of pure economic anxiety in the face of the loss of “good” –well paid and secure– blue-collar jobs in the wake of globalization, technological change, and economic restructuring, working-class White Trump supporters commonly express their economic anxiety, at least in part, through racial grievances: the belief that other, non-White and often immigrant, groups are making gains in America’s economy and society at their expense, receiving preferential treatment from the government and getting ahead while they are being left behind in what –to add a nativist layer– they see is rightfully “their” country (Alba and Foner 2017).

23In this context, social psychologists report empirical evidence of what they call group-status threat among many Whites, that is, the threat that they will lose their privileged and dominant position in America’s racial hierarchy. Many White Americans believe that anti-White discrimination is on the rise, a concern that according to recent research increases with exposure to information about the growth of the racial minority share of the national population (Craig and Richeson 2018). In her study of White identity politics, Jardina argues that the expanding non-White population, the feared loss of Whites' majority status, and the increasing political and economic power of people of color in the United States, have combined to bring “to the fore, for many whites, a sense of commonality, attachment, and solidarity with their racial group” and "desire to protect their group's interests” (Jardina 2019: 3-4).

24For Whites worried or alarmed by the changes wrought by immigration and racial change, the Republican Party has provided “a natural home” (Abrajano and Hajnal 2015: 27). They find the more pro-immigrant stance of the Democratic Party, and its celebration of ethnic and racial diversity and immigration, disturbing and are distressed by the growing number of high-ranking Democratic ethnic and racial minority elected officials, the most prominent, of course, Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, who represented a powerful symbolic threat to Whites’ political power (Jardina 2019: 222-228). To many conservative and non-college-educated Whites, the Republican Party is a kind of safe haven. Whereas many working class White voters have felt abandoned by a Democratic Party that seems to them to favor African Americans and immigrants, many Republican candidates for office in recent years –who are overwhelmingly White– have stood against affirmative action and a path to citizenship for the undocumented and have used appeals to White resentment of ethnic and racial minorities to win over sympathetic voters and lure Democrats into their camp (Abramowitz 2018: 140, Sides et al. 2018: 90-93). In this regard, it should not come as a surprise that only a minority of Republicans (38 percent) in a 2019 Pew Research Center survey agreed that immigrants strengthen the country compared to the great majority of Democrats (83 percent), and that half of the Republicans saw immigrants as burdening the country by taking jobs, housing, and health care (Jones 2019).

25Donald Trump took the appeal to White resentment to a new –explicit and overt– level, whipping up fears about immigration and alleged White victimization, initially to win over Republicans in the 2016 primary campaign to become the party nominee; then to broaden his support in the general election against Hillary Clinton; and still later, throughout his presidency, when his popularity remained low with the general public, to solidify backing from his core constituency, a base of religiously and socially conservative and less educated Whites.

26In a kind of feedback loop, the positive, indeed enthusiastic, response of his core supporters to campaign promises for a more restrictive and punitive immigration system –including most famously building a “giant wall” with Mexico– led to further emphasis on these policies to energize and mobilize his following. As political scientist Zoltan Hajnal (2021: 33) has recently put it, the willingness of Trump and other Republican leaders to embrace an anti-immigrant narrative has rewarded the Party with a larger slice of the White vote and widespread electoral victories from the local to the national level: “Donald Trump more than anyone else knows this. As he told the New York Times Editorial Board, ‘I just say, We will build the wall! and they go nuts.’”

27No sooner had Trump taken office then he placed a travel ban on individuals from several Muslim majority countries. Within the same year he ended the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program established by Obama’s executive order, which enabled around 800,000 eligible undocumented young adults who had arrived in the U.S. as children to receive work permits and protection from deportation. The program was only kept alive by court rulings during Trump’s presidency. His administration’s “zero tolerance” policy that involved separating Central American parents and children seeking asylum at the southern border was part of a goal to reduce Latino immigration and show his strongest supporters he was being tough in pursuing it even as the policy was harshly criticized by much of the public and the media. Although immigration was less central in Trump’s 2020 campaign, in which he focused more on “law and order” issues and opposing Black Lives Matter racial justice protests, he continued to use anti-immigrant rhetoric to fire up his base in rallies, social media ads, and tweets. As before, he twisted facts and told outright lies about immigrants as well as native minorities to tap into and further stir up fears of White voters and capture their support.

28Nativism, in short, was a key element of Trump’s electoral and governing strategy and continues to feature prominently in the tactics of Republican politicians since he has left office. In an extension of Trumpism in April 2021, far-right wing Fox News host Tucker Carlson went so far as to promote “white replacement theory” on his top-rated nightly television program –that nonwhite immigrants are being imported by the Democratic Party to replace White people and White voters– a claim picked up in the House of Representatives by a Republican Congressman from Pennsylvania. Nostalgia for a bygone, idealized, postwar White America was, and remains, a key ingredient in nativistic appeals by Trump and his Republican acolytes to core supporters for whom “Make America Great Again” still has a strong resonance.

Conclusion: Nativism and Nostalgia American Style

29The United States is known as a nation of immigrants, but as historian Erika Lee (2019) has written, it is also a nation of xenophobia: fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants have been a defining feature of the United States from the colonial era to the Trump era. But if nativism is as old as the United States itself, it has appeared in different forms and with different consequences throughout the country’s history. In line with the emphasis in this special issue, each episode of nativism has involved nostalgia about a different past (or pasts), giving nativism of each era a particular flavor and shaping how it has been mobilized for political ends over time.

30A hundred years ago, nativists railed against Jewish and Italian immigrants who were seen as racial inferiors polluting the nation’s superior Anglo-Saxon and Nordic stock; today a major focus of nativist fears is that the influx of non-Whites from the Global South will lead to the end of White majority America, with Whites outnumbered and dominated by Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics. In the early 20th century, there was nostalgia for a time before the arrival of millions of Jewish and Italian immigrants, who were seen as threatening White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) dominance; today, there is often nostalgia for these very same Jewish and Italian immigrants of the past, who are now remembered as the type of ‘good immigrants” America wants. Even more important, there is nostalgia for an America of sixty or seventy years ago –sometimes referred to as the Eisenhower years, when he was president from 1953-1961. This was a time when Whites of European origin, whatever their religion or national origin, far outnumbered racial minorities and were more secure in their political, economic, and cultural privilege.

31If the nostalgia of nativists changed in the past hundred years, it is likely that it will change again in the future, although just how it will do so, needless to say, is hard to predict. One possibility is that nativism itself will become less potent politically as ethnic and racial boundaries are redrawn and a new more inclusive societal majority emerges, including many Asians, Hispanics, and mixed-race individuals along with Whites (Alba 2020). Yet to the extent that nativism arises in future decades –and some form is likely, given that we can expect substantial immigration to continue for many years to come– those attracted to its message may look back with nostalgia to the era of Trump’s presidency as a time when a president could ignore political correctness and “tell it like it is,” openly disparage and malign immigrants and African Americans, and actively seek to reduce immigrant inflows. Whatever the future holds, one thing is clear: nostalgia is an inherent aspect of nativism, and examining it in the United States, as well as other national settings, can help us to better understand its roots, shape, and impact.

32 

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Notes

1 This and the following section draw on material in my recent book (Foner 2022).

2 President George W. Bush, 1990, Remarks on Signing the Immigration Act; President Bill Clinton, Commencement Address at Portland State University, 1998; President Barack Obama, Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Immigration, 2014.

3 The Republican Party now not only draws its strongest support from Whites, but also certain sectors of the White population, including those without a college degree, evangelical Protestants and other religious conservatives. In 2019, according to a Pew Research Center survey (2020), White registered voters who had a high school diploma or less were 31 percentage points more likely to identify with or lean toward the Republican than Democratic Party (62 percent versus 31 percent); White voters with some college education but no four year degree were 18 points more Republican (56 percent versus 38 percent). Meanwhile, many better-educated White voters have shifted toward the Democratic Party.

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Nancy Foner, « Nativism and Nostalgia American Style »Appartenances & Altérités [En ligne], 2 | 2022, mis en ligne le 01 mars 2022, consulté le 15 novembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/alterites/283 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/alterites.283

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Nancy Foner

Hunter College and Graduate Center, City University of New York

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