Nativism
Nativism is a negative form of ethnocentrism characterized by opposition to perceived foreign influences, particularly from minority and immigrant groups. This ideology has a significant history in the United States, where it has often manifested as strong reactions against immigrants viewed as different or threatening to the established social order. Historically, nativist movements have influenced restrictive immigration policies, reflecting a complex ambivalence toward immigrants—who are sometimes seen as vital contributors to the economy while simultaneously feared as competitors for jobs and political power.
Three identifiable strains of nativism have emerged in the U.S.: anti-Catholic, racial, and antiradical nativism. Anti-Catholic sentiments originated from early Protestant settlers and intensified with the influx of Irish Catholic immigrants, leading to organized movements like the American Protective Association. Racial nativism arose in the late nineteenth century, promoting the notion of Anglo-Saxon superiority and discriminating against various immigrant groups based on pseudo-scientific beliefs. Antiradical nativism gained traction during periods of political upheaval, associating immigrants with socialism and potential revolution.
In contemporary times, nativism has resurfaced, particularly targeting Hispanic and Muslim populations, influenced by economic anxieties and post-9/11 attitudes. This modern nativism has led to various legislative measures aimed at restricting immigration and has been exacerbated by political rhetoric surrounding border security. Throughout its evolution, nativism has continually shaped American public policy and societal attitudes toward immigration.
Nativism
DEFINITION: Negative form of ethnocentrism that is typically expressed by opposition to what is perceived as alien contamination by members of minority and immigrant groups
SIGNIFICANCE: Throughout the history of the United States, nativism as an ideology has driven Americans to strong, frequently harsh reactions against members of groups, particularly immigrant groups, that are perceived to be different. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nativist movements were influential in the passage of restrictive immigration laws.
Since the founding of the United States, Americans as a group have frequently shown ambivalence toward immigrants. Because the country was built on immigration, it has generally welcomed new immigrants as necessary additions to the labor force and as sources of new economic growth; at the same time, immigrants have been feared and resented by many native-born Americans because of their differences from American cultural norms and because they are viewed as competition for jobs and political power. Nativists, the most outspoken critics of immigration, fear that the American way of life, and even the republic itself, is in danger from the constant stream of newcomers. Historically, nativists developed an ideology that comprised three identifiable strains:
• anti-Catholic nativism
• racial nativism
• antiradical nativism
These three strains often overlapped in the various nativist organizations that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Anti–Roman Catholic Nativism
Anti-Catholic nativism had its roots in the religious views of the earliest English settlers in the American colonies. As products of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, the early colonists viewed the pope as a foreign monarch who exercised dangerous influence through the Roman Catholic Church. The large influx of Irish Catholic immigrants during the early nineteenth century fueled an upsurge of anti-Catholic propaganda alleging that Irish Catholics were agents of the pope intent on undermining republican institutions. During the 1830s, inventor Samuel F. B. Morse wrote Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States (1834), a tract in which he called for the formation of the Anti-Popery Union to resist the papal plot. His tract became required reading in many Protestant Sunday schools. In 1834, an anti-Catholic mob burned the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Ten years later, riots erupted in Philadelphia when Irish Catholics opposed the use of the Protestant King James version of the Bible in public schools.
The American Protective Association (APA), organized in 1887, was the most visible manifestation of anti-Catholic nativism during the late nineteenth century. Its members swore they would never vote for Catholic candidates, employ Catholic workers over Protestants, or join with Catholic strikers. The APA drew strong support from workers in the midwestern and Rocky Mountain states, who feared competition from cheap Irish labor. By the late 1890s, however, as Irish and German Catholics became an important part of the electorate, the more extreme anti-Catholic sentiment dissipated. The APA itself disappeared during the 1890s.
Racial Nativism
During the late nineteenth century, a racial strain of nativism, cultivated by the self-professed guardians of Anglo-Saxon culture and ostensibly supported by scientific research, began to be directed against immigrant groups. Ever since colonial times, white settlers had viewed themselves as culturally and physically superior to Indigenous people, Africans, and African Americans. Some intellectuals adapted the research of Charles Darwin on biological evolution to argue that certain races would inevitably triumph over others because of their inherent superiority. A number of English and American intellectuals confidently trumpeted the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon “race” and its institutions, and researchers set out to “prove” their cultural assumptions by measuring the cranial volumes of skulls from members of various ethnic groups and devising crude intelligence tests. As a new wave of immigrants from Asia and southern and eastern Europe began to arrive, these newcomers were quickly labeled racially inferior.
Racial nativism reached its zenith during the early twentieth century. Influenced by the European eugenics movement, with its emphasis on breeding the right racial groups, American nativists expressed alarm over the impact of the new immigrants. Madison Grant’s widely read The Passing of the Great Race (1916) summarized many of the racial nativist arguments. Grant argued that the superior Nordic “race” was being destroyed by the influx of southern and eastern Europeans and warned that race mixing would result in an inferior hybrid race and the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization. Jewish and Italian immigrants in particular were often singled out for criticism in nativist publications because of their alleged racial inferiority.
Antiradical Nativism
Immigrants also came under attack for political reasons during the late nineteenth century. Nativist writers worried that most immigrants came from nondemocratic societies, harbored socialist or anarchist sympathies, and would foment revolution in the United States. The participation of some immigrants in the labor agitation of the period seemed to confirm these fears of alien radicalism. Antiradical nativism intensified following the 1917 Russian Revolution and the onset of an economic crisis in the United States. Although most immigrants were not socialists, immigrants nevertheless constituted a majority of the membership of the American Socialist Party. During the Red Scare of 1919–1920, when many Americans feared that a communist revolution was imminent, immigrants and radicalism became synonymous in the public mind.
Impact on Public Policy
Nativism had its most significant impact on public policy in the area of immigration restrictions designed to discriminate against Asians and southern and eastern Europeans. In 1882, the federal Chinese Exclusion Act cut off further immigration by Chinese laborers. During World War I, Congress overrode a presidential veto to enact literacy tests for all immigrants—an act that discriminated against southern and eastern Europeans, who had less access to basic education. During the 1920s, the United States adopted a system of quotas for European immigration based on national origins, imposing a maximum annual limit of 150,000 and allocating most of the slots to northern and western European countries. The national origins quota system formed the basis of US immigration law until it was abolished in 1965.
Nativism in the Twenty-First Century
In the early twenty-first century, a new wave of racial nativism began to emerge in the United States, directed primarily at Hispanic immigrants as well as Muslims or people of Arab descent. Anti-Muslim or anti-Arab nativism during this period, or at least its origins as a widespread sentiment, can generally be attributed to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by the extremist Islamist group al-Qaeda, which sparked a militant "us against them" feeling among many white Americans who considered "Arab-looking" features or overt expressions of Islam to be convenient markers of an unfamiliar "other" worthy of suspicion. The origins of anti-Hispanic nativism are more complex, but likely contributing factors include the growing visibility of the Hispanic population of the United States, which as of the 2000 Census had surpassed African Americans as the country's largest minority group, and the recessions of 2001 and 2007–9, as such economic crises exacerbate fears of outsiders taking resources (jobs, money) that nativists believe should go to members of the in-group—that is, native-born Americans—instead. This new nativist sentiment has led to the passage of a number of state laws, particularly in Mexican border states, that either overtly or covertly target Hispanic and Latino immigrants, such as the 2010 Arizona law that, among other provisions, required legal immigrants to carry proof of their immigration status at all times and empowered police to arrest, without a warrant, anyone they had "probable cause" to believe was an illegal immigrant. (Those provisions, and a third making it illegal for undocumented immigrants to seek work, were struck down by the US Supreme Court in Arizona v. United States in 2012.)
In 2016, when Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, he promised to build a wall along the US-Mexico border to thwart illegal immigrants from entering the United States. Prior to his election, 649 miles (1,044 kilometers) of border wall or fencing was reportedly in place. By the end of his four-year term, he had built another 52 miles (84 kilometers). Prior to Trump, other administrations, such as Barack Obama's and George W. Bush's administrations, also put borders and walls in place and also utilized the Department of Homeland Security in order to curb the rates of illegal border crossings. However, the nativist and xenophobic language and sentiments that Trump, his allies, and his political followers used turned a humanitarian crisis into a security crisis. Referring to immigrants as rapists and murderers fueled his supporters and made border politics a central focus in the 2020 and 2024 elections. Despite the new components of the wall, illegal crossings were rising, and the number of migrants seeking asylum and attempting to enter the country were rising as well. Trump, in his 2024 election campaign, proposed stricter regulations and harsher penalties for immigrants and doubled-down on his mission to protect American land, resources, and jobs from immigrants.
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