All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It

by Daniel Denvir

A searing critique of the big big business nativists dictating our immigration policy - and the moderate Democrats that put them in power

For three decades, establishment Democrats and Republicans have led a bipartisan assault on immigrants, pulled further and further right by a vocal and organized group of nativists, turning the southern border region into a conflict zone, and breaking up millions of families in the process.

Daniel Denvir delivers a caustic takedown of liberal triangulation on the border and shows how concessions to "enforcement first" law and order immigration politics hasn't placated the nativists. It has only inflamed them.

Establishment officials from both parties have allowed the rightwing to dictate our policy on migration, even as popular opinion clamors for a more humane and just approach. With the center collapsed, the left can demand full amnesty now, or cede the ground of national belonging to nativists and white supremacists.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, American History, United States, The United States Of America, Sociology

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 14, 2020

About the author

Daniel Denvir is a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project and host of The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine. His journalistic work covers criminal justice, the drug war, immigration, and politics, and has appeared in the New York Times, Jacobin, Vox, Nation, Guardian, and elsewhere.

Reviews

[Steffi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disclaimer: I have yuuuge intellectual crush on Daniel Denvir, the author of the book ‘All-American Nativism. How the Bi-partisan War on Immigrants explains Politics as we know it’ (Verso, 2020). He is the host of The Dig podcast which has definitely shaped by thinking over the past years and has become somewhat mind saving ever since the orange guy came to power. Some of Daniel’s intros have really stayed with me. So, I already loved the book before I read it.

Usually, I am quite disciplined and read every book within seven days but this time I made the grand mistake of reading the book over a period of two months or so and I totally lost much of the coherence and bigger picture which I can’t piece together despite having taken (crappy) notes.

Anyway, the underlying theme – as per my memory - of the book is that Trump is not so novel as we may think. Trump must be read within the framework of nativist ideology which has been around in the US since it was founded (or rather was the foundational ideology) as well as the realignments on the right and center in the 21st century, i.e. the war on terror and the global financial crisis (kind of a ‘material account of nativism’).

I wasn’t too familiar with the concept of nativism so this was interesting and it is probably very similar for all settler colonial countries, like Australia or South Africa and maybe even Israel, countries with a racist founding myth after ‘displacing’ (as not to use the G word) the actual natives. The book provides an interesting account of how nativism and capitalism developed alongside in the US and the contradictory nature of immigration in a ‘white’ US.

As is the case with many other ills that Trump took to their ‘logical conclusion’, the framing of ‘illegal immigration’ as a problem (and linking immigrating with criminal justice) really took off with Clinton’s 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act which criminalized ‘illegal migration’ and gave authority to construct barriers along the border between the United States and Mexico (it authorized the construction of a secondary layer of border fencing).

This is key – while the ‘metaphorical Wall’ is indeed novel to Trump, the actual hundreds of kilometers of fencing already existed and Obama remains the ‘deporter in chief’ – not even Trump deported as many ‘illegal migrants’ as Obama did (no other President ever deported as many people as Obama). So, on the bright side, Trump brought an end to the bipartisan consensus on ‘illegal migration’ with a significant shift among Democrats (whose base is also becoming younger and more diverse, also as a result of migration, think ‘the squad’) away from this consensus that illegal migration is criminal/a fundamental problem.

Other interesting reflections include how not so much 9/11 itself but rather the totally disastrous war on terror (also a bipartisan project with Biden and Clinton at its helm) led to a large part of the US population blame Islam rather than imperialism for this endless quagmire and terrorism it created (e.g. ISIS). Again, something Trump just took a little further and ‘literal’ with his Muslim ban.

Trump’s U-turn on initially attacking all migration (as per the nativist agenda which was really propelled to the fore by the 2009 Tea Party) following the 2018 mid-term elections towards focusing again only on ‘illegal migration’ is a reflection of the fact that, ultimately, capitalism needs migration and needs ‘deportability’ of people much more than actual deportations.

Ok, this summary was, admittedly, a little horrible. But there’s also a great The Dig podcast episode with an interview with “Dan” on this book ❤

[Isabel · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a student of U.S. immigration history, I have often felt disillusioned with our establishment politicians on both sides of the political bench. Through the lens of immigration justice, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush look largely the same, and Obama was memorably named “Deporter in Chief” by the undocumented youth movement. The extreme backlash against Trump, while heartening, was also confusing, as his policies have in fact been a ramped-up and more blatant version of what our politics have delivered on immigration for decades. Denvir sheds light on how the detention and deportation apparatus that Trump made such open use of came to be, and the significance of nativism in understanding the United States as a whole and the settler-colonial past that so clearly haunts us today. Understanding nativism as it threads through U.S. history can allow us “to rethink racism itself as a bedrock nationalist population politics that functions to control the movement and status of racialized others”. It is no coincidence, for example, that the resurgence of an anti-immigrant movement and border militarization coincided in the 1990s with the rise of mass incarceration.

This is a book about Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR), a bipartisan consensus that formed the bedrock of all immigration policy at least since Reagan, whose 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized 2.7 million immigrants while massively increasing border patrol funds and targeting immigrants with criminal records for deportation. The idea is that the legalization of already-present immigrants— “amnesty”—can be effectively paired with increased enforcement measures added to placate the rising nativist movement. But it is impossible now to imagine a Republican president moving towards legalizing undocumented immigrants because CIR has failed time and time again, making constant concessions to—and encouraging—an increasingly rabid nativist movement that nothing short of wholesale genocide will satisfy. Denvir’s focus on this movement’s rise and Democrats’ frustrating failures to recognize its true nature goes a long way towards explaining the often baffling immigration policy of the past few decades.

It has also been so unsuccessful because border enforcement and militarization—the principal effect of most CIR efforts, since the amnesty part has rarely come through—never delivers on its promises and in fact exacerbates the problems it claims to address. Border enforcement in the United States has never led directly to a decrease in illegal immigration but has rather made the process ever more deadly for the migrants involved, pushing them into dangerous routes like the Sonoran Desert. This policy, aptly named “prevention through deterrence”, has aimed only to make the process of getting to the U.S. so horrific that migrants stop attempting it. It hasn’t even succeeded in that, but it has led to a huge increase in border violence and death and the rise of markets exploiting migrant vulnerability for profit, including both the “coyote” or “smuggling” (pejorative terms) industry as well as private prison-run detention centers (not to mention the production of migrant vulnerability as an intentional strategy to produce cheap labor). Denvir ties an explanation of these self-reinforcing cycles of violence and security with a clear and thorough elaboration of the political and social trends that accompanied their rise. This is how we get to a place where the border has never been more militarized or had greater funding, yet the populist right cries out about border insecurity and an immigrant invasion.

But how did “illegal immigration” become the accepted mainstream “problem” that CIR attempted to solve? Denvir Locates the beginning of this trend in 1965 with the Hart-Celler Act, which ended the overtly racist 1924 quota laws. Those had attempted to maintain a white majority by restricting non-white people from entering the country and from becoming citizens if they did. Maybe I am simply not familiar with this, but this is the first time I’ve seen the Hart-Celler Act explicitly connected both to the nativist movement’s desire to return to the openly racist pre-1965 immigration politics AND the origin of “colorblind” CIR-type politics that exacerbated the issue. But it makes sense: Hart Celler, though praised for ending the racism of earlier immigration policy, in fact directly created illegal immigration as a legal and social possibility. Before 1965, no quotas were put on any country in the Western Hemisphere, largely due to agricultural demands for cheap labor from Mexico. Hart-Celler changed that, and low quotas for Mexico could not keep up with the actual number of Mexican nationals entering the U.S. as they always had. Migrants were suddenly coming “illegally” and were compared with great political effect to those who “came the right way”. This in turn led to the criminalization and racialization of immigrants, particularly Mexican and Latino immigrants. In a context where the Hart-Celler Act did significantly alter the demographic population of the U.S., immigrants have been scapegoated as targets of a racist backlash. Denvir’s presentation of a hugely complex topic is quite novel, and he does an excellent job of clarifying the connections between broad social trends and moments in policy.

This book is extremely well-structured, and while the first two sections (on the broad history of the nativist movement and border militarization in the U.S.) feel somewhat rushed, the second half (political analysis of the post-9/11 security state and the path to Trump) are invigorating and compelling. He ends with the argument that the political polarization on immigration currently seizing the U.S. marks “the end, not the beginning, of a political cycle”, and that in finally breaking the bipartisan consensus to throw undocumented immigrants under the bus for the sake of doomed reforms, it is a good thing. This book has inspired me to continue research and involvement on this issue at a time when inspiration is hard to come by, and for that I thank the author.

[Esteban Angeles · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a nightmare to read. The writing seemed really dry and dense and for the most part did not seem well organized. I found the last two chapters to be much better than everything that came before them. I really wanted to enjoy this book but it was really hard to get through it.

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read, only minor quibbles. I wish the connection between the 2008 recession and the rise in anti-immigration politics in the Tea Party (and nativist hate crimes against immigrants) was discussed in more detail, and I also wish the organization was chronological. I suspect I'm not the only reader who noticed a bit of repetition from one section to the next as a result of the cyclical past-to-present structure. Incredibly illuminating account nonetheless, and a moving and impassioned conclusion.

[Benjamin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I used to listen to The Dig fairly often and always enjoyed Daniel Denvir's work. I was very excited to read this book. I read a lot of it when I was sick with COVID 2 years ago but abandoned it. I finally had a day off from work and finished the back third of the book today. I don't really remember a lot from the first half of the book, but I did find the Conclusion to be very moving.

[Joseph · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dan Denvir, of podcast fame from Jacobin's "The Dig", attempts to give a historical account of the origins of Trumpian anti-immigrant politics in the U.S. Before I proceed any further into this review, I want to state upfront that I have been a listener to The Dig for a few years now; and I think Denvir and most of the Bernie-Jacobin crowd are well-intentioned people with very sincere political convictions, who have amassed quite a lot of knowledge of today's politics, and who have worked very hard to build their vision of an effective left-wing political movement. But with that said, I think this book effectively demonstrates the limitations of their organizing, which for its legitimacy relies on close ties with the bourgeois academy, and for its cohesion relies on attempting to massage a vague consensus out of every intellectual who identifies as a socialist, in the process cementing a self-congratulatory moralism with little room for critical disagreement or specificity in analysis.

The critical failure of this book is its inability to differentiate between the various historical forms of "nativism". Denvir spends much of the first half of this on digressions about immigration politics in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which largely revolved around the racial politics of colonization. To effectively complete the "Manifest Destiny" of extirpating Native Americans from their historic lands, policing the segregated Black labor force of the South, and securing favorable Asian markets (as well as directly colonizing places like the Philippines), it was necessary for there to be an immigration policy that permitted "whites" to enter the country in far larger numbers than those of other disfavored "races". This politics reached its apparent apotheosis in the National Origins legislation on immigration in the 1920s. Working-class immigrants from the nations of Europe made out well from this arrangement, and American capitalists benefited from a large and cohesive "white" population prepared to wield economic power and violence against their colonial subjects.

I don't dispute this account of racial "population politics" for its own historical period, and I think anyone who does would be wrong and willfully blind. The problem is that Denvir appears to project the dynamics and goals of colonial racism onto the post-colonial period. The whole pivot of this book is the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, a fairly obscure piece of legislation with dramatic consequences. Hart-Celler ended the explicit racial quota system of the National Origins framework, instead basing admission to the country on "color-blind" factors such as demands for skilled labor, familial relations with U.S. citizens, and refugee status. You might call this the immigration-law equivalent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In addition to dramatically increasing the racial diversity of US immigrants, the law also established quotas which limited the number of immigrants from the Western hemisphere. Immigrants from Mexico, whose numbers had increased due to higher labor demand during and after World War II, suddenly found themselves in a newly precarious legal position.

Soon after, in the 1970s, Latino immigrants increasingly faced a racist reaction from whites, who responded to their presence in much the same way they responded to Black people moving into their neighborhoods (see Kevin Kruse's "White Flight", or Matt Lassitter's "The Silent Majority"). Latinos using neighborhood schools and other services was regarded as a form of theft, and whites (and the white press) attacked this threat through the new language of "legality" -- what was wrong with these immigrants was not the color of their skin, but rather their (suspected) violation of US sovereignty through unauthorized border crossing.

According to Denvir, the attacks on immigrants were mere "scapegoating", in which whites, afflicted with unbreakable racial prejudice even after discrimination was outlawed, improperly blamed "racialized others" for the economic stagnation setting in through the '70s. "Color-blind" immigration law was simply weaponized as a vehicle for these old prejudices, and this new "fiscal nativism" focused on state services was only a new cloak for the old nativism of the 19th century, with language adapted to suit the times.

Yet surely this is not a tenable analysis. The dismantling of racial segregation meant that whites could no longer simply improve their economic prospects by denying investments to "others". The right of all foreign nationals to enter the country was firmly enshrined into law; and the denial of entry to large masses of people who wanted it reflected not greater restrictions on certain countries but rather greater impoverishment and immiseration within them. Moreover, the "competition for scarce resources" narrative falls apart when it is considered that immigrants from the Global South typically work and live in places that whites generally have the wealth to refuse.

Surely Denvir recognizes all this, which is why he seems to oscillate between dismissing postcolonial white "nativism" as an irrational historical artifact created by psychological deficiencies, and condemning whites for hoarding access to privileges. Missing from his narrative is a broader look at the structures of accumulation and empire under neoliberal capitalism, in which certain forms of state regulation (ranging from residential zoning within countries, to IMF structural adjustment policies at the international level) have led to scarcer credit in postcolonial regions of the globe and a net transfer of wealth from former colonies to their former metropoles (in particular, the United States).

Certain details also led me to question Denvir's narrative that it was mainly whites who propelled the politics of "legality" forward. 1994's Proposition 187 in California, which denied access to public services to undocumented immigrants, received significant (though not overwhelming) support from Black and Asian voters. I don't buy that these voters had the same kind of material interest in "nativism" as whites, but perhaps their active participation tells us something about the ways in which various "postcolonial" capitalist classes under neoliberalism have entered into competition with each other for the favor and resources of the dominant capitalists -- with a unique spin in the context of domestic US politics. Denvir unfortunately does not even touch upon these dynamics.

Another problem throughout this book is that as soon as the post-1965 period is hit, Denvir will pivot from focusing on mainstream political actors who are actively setting national policy over to a focus on fringe figures like John Tanton, Pat Buchanan, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio who are openly advocating for things like white nationalism, segregation, and vigilantism. Denvir emphasizes that these people have, at various times, received varying levels of support from the mainstream center-right, but he acts like they were the ones in the driver's seat throughout the neoliberal period instead of being selectively used for a more mainstream conservative agenda that needed them as figureheads but rejected their more extreme and impracticable ideas.

The pattern that seems to set in throughout the post-65 period is that immigration policy pursues two distinct but intertwined goals: granting "legal" status to undocumented people who have entered the country, and increasing the size and powers of the border enforcement apparatus. This is the pattern set by the Reagan administration in its Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, and followed by mainstream national Democrats and Republicans for decades to come. Denvir's take is that this sates the business demand for cheap labor while providing just enough red meat to keep the "nativist" whites happy (until, that is, they become especially restive under Bush and refuse any legalization whatsoever).

This leaves me with some open questions, which Denvir does not answer: if business simply wants cheap labor, then why not just raise the immigration caps at the front end instead of legalizing on the back end? And, again, is it really tenable to suggest that the demand for greater immigration enforcement is necessarily a "white" demand, given its well-established bipartisan support including from many "people of color"? Answering these questions might require probing deeper into the class and imperial relations behind these policies, and the struggles between the conflicting interests within them. Denvir is unable to do this, because for him "nativism" is the be-all and end-all. His book suffers greatly from this handicap, as will any political movement that is informed by its analysis.

[Jacob Christian Stergos · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a big fan of Dan Denvir’s work on The Dig podcast, so I was pretty excited to read his first book. Turns out, he is as good at synthesizing broad historical trajectories with sharp elucidations of often obscure details in his own writing as he is on his show.

I think the biggest thing this book has going for it is its structure, organized around Scarcity, Security, Empire, and Reaction, in which Denvir gets to fold and interweave the disparate, chronologically diffuse threads of American immigration politics together skillfully, often covering the same time periods from different historical perspectives. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the flood of information in historical books like these, but this circuitous method actually allows Denvir to get across his main themes, with key details arising multiple times, and this helps clarify his arguments. It’s an ingenious approach to a very multi-faceted history, and the cumulative effect is that of a revelation, rather than a lecture.

I think this is a uniquely well-written history, and the fact that it is well-written allows it to communicate more than just stockpiles of information, but a really informative and helpful message that is urgently relevant. Read it!

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

i did not expect this to be a holiday page-turner, but there ya go. while he documents the democrats’ maddening attempts at appeasing nativists (futile, ‘cause the latter are extremist fantasists & you can’t bargain with that shit), he also builds toward a really lovely thesis on borders, and on drawing the right lines as we fight to make our immigration policy more humane and realistic.

* i also underlined half of it, as it quickly became research for rewriting the novel i wrote (partly about the u.s.-mexico border, mainly about political factions) 10 years ago. chilling to see the rifts & trends i was only starting to see then (as a door-to-door canvasser in 2004 california) being laid out in thorough, meticulously researched political theory.

[J. Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid debut book by Daniel Denvir. The language is clean and simple, not academic but dry. I do think it shows a continuity and I would love to see how Denvir expands the ideas in his future books. Denvir makes a simple argument and carries it through several decades to reach his conclusions. There is no answer to what those futures are. But he does layout the path of where we are heading unless we change.

I would recommend this book.

[Amador Salazar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has everything you need to explain the US and the way it juggles frontera people. This book chronicles exactly why — to me — you find the border voting for Trump. No party has solutions that benefit climate refugees and people on the geographic edges of our country.

All the right wing and border patrol apparatus continues to grow and serve as a jobs program for forgotten people. Vital read to combat the growing nationalist fervor in this country.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I anticipated the book to focus on the last thirty some-odd years of immigration politics however it actually covered the last 200. This isn't a bad thing however. It was a bit dry as others mentioned but it was informative.

[Grace Sotis · Rating 5 out of 5]

denvir’s writings seamlessly tie together america’s longstanding nationalism with modern-day trumpism. amazing read for anyone looking to get into the history of immigration politics and american xenophobia.

[Elliot Imes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really well-written, well-argued book about America’s forever war against immigration. Today is nothing new.

[Nick DeFiesta · Rating 4 out of 5]

too detailed in some parts, too rushed in others, but overall a comprehensive look back at how we got to today in immigration politics

[Cole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Essential but dry. The latter parts really pick up but the earlier sections feel like a textbook. But I learned a lot!

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent

[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent