The roots of contemporary nativism are to be found not only in our country’s earliest moments of xenophobia, but in the reaction against internal migration as well. The Trump era, Denvir suggests, owes as much to middle-class whites’ racist response to the Great Migration and black freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s as it does to the nineteenth century Know-Nothings and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Resistance to black movement into previously white neighborhoods, schools, and jobs, he writes, “laid the groundwork for mass incarceration, a system emerging in the 1970s to take a people on the move and fix them in place.” “It also created a model for resisting immigration,” he adds, “a template of white identity politics organized for territorial defense against the fiscal, criminal, and demographic threats posed by racial others.”
Detention and deportation are functions of the same system of mass incarceration that developed in response to militancy and unrest among black and brown workers in the 1960s and 1970s—and as a bulwark of nascent neoliberalism. These policies were mutually reinforcing. Like prison expansion, border policing is “a way for a government that failed to ensure social and economic welfare to use repression as a means to present itself as an energetic protector of the public good,” Denvir argues. “The state didn’t shrink but rather changed, deploying its repressive powers to safeguard the law-abiding, taxpaying citizen from those who broke the citizenship contract through criminality or through receiving stigmatized forms of state aid.”
While All-American Nativism contains plenty of scorn for the “tough on crime” Democrats of the 1990s who dismantled the welfare state as they expanded the police state, Denvir’s contempt for liberal hypocrisy is at its most searing in his account of President Obama’s immigration policies. The passages that deal with Arizona’s notorious SB 1070, the Obama administration’s lawsuit against it, and the concurrent federal enforcement program, Secure Communities, practically shimmer with frustration and rage.
When Obama’s Justice Department sued Arizona in 2010 over the controversial immigration law—which, among other things, required immigrants to carry documentation of their legal status with them at all times and encouraged police to engage in racial profiling—they did so not on the grounds that it violated civil rights. Instead, the suit contended that the state was overstepping its bounds by involving itself in immigration enforcement: that was the federal government’s sovereign responsibility, not Arizona’s. (The Supreme Court agreed: in 2012, it struck down much of SB 1070, which was dismantled further following a settlement with civil rights groups in 2016.) “The problem,” Denvir writes, “was that SB 1070—declared odious by Obama and a broad swath of mainstream opinion—substantively resembled Obama’s policies, so much so that they argued that federal policies made the Arizona law redundant.”