Nativism (politics)

Template:Legal status Nativism is the butt hairs on my butt. or is the political position of demanding a favored status for certain established inhabitants of a nation as compared to claims of newcomers or immigrants. Nativism typically means opposition to immigration and support of efforts to lower the political or legal status of specific ethnic or cultural groups because the groups are considered hostile or alien to the natural culture, and assumptions that they cannot be assimilated.

According to Fetzer, (2000) opposition to immigration is common in many countries because of issues of national, cultural or religious identity. The phenomenon has been studied especially in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, as well as Europe in recent years. Thus nativism has become a general term for 'opposition to immigration' based on fears that the immigrants will distort or spoil existing cultural values. This may be expressed through criticism of multiculturalism.

In situations where the nativistic movement exists inside of dominant culture it tends to be associated with xenophobic and assimilationist projects. At the other end of the spectrum, in situations where immigrants greatly outnumber the original inhabitants or where contact forces economic and cultural change, nativistic movements can allow cultural survival. Among North American Indians important nativist movements include Neolin (the "Delaware Prophet", 1762), Tenskwatawa (the Shawnee prophet, 1808), and Wovoka (the Ghost Dance movement, 1889). They displayed anti-white racism, teaching that whites were morally inferior to the Indians and their ways must be rejected. Thus Tenskwatawa taught that the Americans were "children of the Evil Spirit."

In scholarly studies "nativism" is a standard technical term. However, in public political discourse "nativist" is a term of opprobrium usually used by the opposition, and rarely by nativists themselves (they call themselves "patriots."). Anti-immigration is a more neutral term that may be used to characterize opponents of immigration.

By country

Nativism in the United States

Heroes of the Fiery Cross 1928, published by the Pillar of Fire Church

In the United States, anti-immigration views have a long history. For a while Benjamin Franklin was hostile to Germans in colonial Pennsylvania. President John Adams in 1798 signed the Alien and Sedition Acts which limited the ability of immigrants, especially radicals from France and Ireland, to gain full political rights, and they became a major political issue in the 1800 election.

Nativism gained its name from the "Native American" parties. In this context "Native" does not mean indigenous or American Indian but rather those descended from the inhabitants of the original Thirteen Colonies. It impacted politics in the mid-19th century because of the large inflows of immigrants from cultures that were somewhat different from the existing American culture. Thus, nativists objected primarily to Irish Roman Catholics because of their loyalty to the Pope and also because of their supposed rejection of republicanism as an American ideal.

Nativist movements included the Know Nothing or American Party of the 1850s, the Immigration Restriction League of the 1890s, the anti-Asian movements in the West, resulting in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the "Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907" by which Japan's government stopped emigration to the U.S. Labor unions were strong supporters of Chinese exclusion and limits on immigration, because of fears that they would lower wages and make it harder to organize unions.

Anti-Catholic nativism in the 19th century

Guardians of Liberty 1943 by Bishop Alma White

Nativist outbursts occurred in the Northeast from the 1830s to the 1850s, primarily in response to a surge of Irish Catholic immigration. In 1836, Samuel F. B. Morse ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of New York City on a Nativist ticket, receiving 1,496 votes. In New York City, an Order of United Americans was founded as a nativist fraternity, following the Philadelphia Nativist Riots of the preceding spring and summer, in December, 1844.

In 1849–50 Charles B. Allen founded a nativist society called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner in New York City. In order to join the Order, a man had to be twenty-one, a Protestant, a believer in God, and willing to obey without question the dictates of the order. Members of the Order became known as the Know Nothings (a label applied to them because if asked they said they "know nothing about" the secret society).

The Nativists went public in 1854 when they formed the 'American Party', which was especially hostile to the immigration of Irish Catholics and campaigned for laws to require longer wait time between immigration and naturalization. (The laws never passed.) It was at this time that the term "nativist" first appears, opponents denounced them as "bigoted nativists." Former President Millard Fillmore ran on the American Party ticket for the Presidency in 1856. The American Party also included many ex-Whigs who ignored nativism, and included (in the South) a few Catholics whose families had long lived in America. Conversely, much of the opposition to Catholics came from Protestant Irish immigrants and German Lutheran immigrants who were not native at all and can hardly be called "nativists."

This form of nationalism is often identified with xenophobia and anti-Catholic sentiment (anti-Papism). In Charlestown, Massachusetts, a nativist mob attacked and burned down a Catholic convent in 1834 (no one was injured). In the 1840s, small scale riots between Catholics and nativists took place in several American cities. In Philadelphia in 1844, for example, a series of nativist assaults on Catholic churches and community centers resulted in the loss of lives and the professionalization of the police force. In Louisville, Kentucky, election-day rioters killed at least 22 people in attacks on German and Irish Catholics on Aug. 6, 1855, in what became known as "Bloody Monday." Nativist sentiment experienced a revival in the 1890s, led by Protestant Irish immigrants hostile to Catholic immigration.

Anti-German nativism

From the 1840s to 1920 German Americans were distrusted because of their separatist social structure, their love of beer, their German-language schools, their attachment to their native tongue over English, and their neutrality in World War I.

The Bennett Law caused a political uproar in Wisconsin in 1890, as the state government passed a law that threatened to close down hundreds of German-language elementary schools. Catholic and Lutheran Germans rallied to defeat the incumbent Republican Governor, William D. Hoard, the leader of the nativists. Hoard attacked German-American culture and religion:

"We must fight alienism and selfish ecclesiasticism.... The parents, the pastors and the church have entered into a conspiracy to darken the understanding of the children, who are denied by cupidity and bigotry the privilege of even the free schools of the state."

Hoard, a Republican, was defeated by the Democrats. A similar campaign in Illinois regarding the "Edwards Law" led to a Republican defeat there in 1890.

In 1917-1918, a wave of nativist sentiment led to the suppression of German cultural activities in the United States, Canada and Australia. There was little violence, but many places and streets had their names changed (The city of "Berlin" in Ontario was renamed "Kitchener" after a British hero), churches switched to English for their services, and German Americans were forced to buy war bonds to show their patriotism. In Australia thousands of Germans were put into internment camps.

(See also: World War I Anti-German Sentiment)

Anti-Chinese nativism

In the 1870s Irish American immigrants attacked Chinese immigrants in the western states, driving them out of smaller towns. Denis Kearney led a mass movement in San Francisco in 1877 that threatened to harm railroad owners if they hired any people who were Chinese. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first of many nativist acts of Congress to limit the flow of immigrants into the U.S. The Chinese responded with false claims of American birth, enabling thousands to immigrate to California. The exclusion of the Chinese caused the western railroads to begin importing Mexican railroad workers in greater numbers ("traqueros").

20th century

In the 1890-1920 era nativists and labor unions campaigned for immigration restriction. A favorite plan was the literacy test to exclude workers who could not read or write their own foreign language. Congress passed literacy tests, but presidents—responding to business needs for workers—vetoed them . Senator Henry Cabot Lodge argued need for literacy tests and its implication on the new immigrants:

It is found, in the first place, that the illiteracy test will bear most heavily upon the Italians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and Asiatics, and very lightly, or not at all, upon English-speaking emigrants, or Germans, Scandinavians, and French. In other words, the races most affected by the illiteracy test are those whose emigration to this country has begun within the last twenty years and swelled rapidly to enormous proportions, races with which the English speaking people have never hitherto assimilatated, and who are most alien to the great body of the people of the United States.

Responding to these demands, opponents of the literacy test called for the establishment of an immigration commission to focus on immigration as a whole. The United States Immigration Commission, also known as the Dillingham Commission, was created and tasked with studying immigration and its effect on the United States. The findings of the commission further influenced immigration policy and upheld the concerns of the nativist movement.

Following World War I nativists in the twenties focused their attention on Catholics, Jews, and southeastern Europeans and realigned their beliefs behind racial and religious nativism. The racial concern of the anti-immigration movement was linked closely to the eugenics movement that was sweeping the United States in the twenties. Led by Madison Grant's book, The Passing of the Great Race nativists grew more concerned with the racial purity of the United States. In his book, Grant argued that the American racial stock was being diluted by the influx of new immigrants from the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the Polish ghettos. The Passing of the Great Race reached wide popularity among Americans and influenced immigration policy in the twenties. In the 1920s a wide national consensus sharply restricted the overall inflow of immigrants, especially those from southern and eastern Europe. The second Ku Klux Klan, which flourished in the U.S. in the 1920s, used strong nativist rhetoric, but the Catholics led a counterattack.

After intense lobbying from the nativist movement the United States Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act in 1921. This bill was the first to place numerical quotas on immigration. It capped the inflow of immigrations to 357,803 for those arriving outside of the western hemisphere. However, this bill was only temporary as Congress began debating a more permanent bill.

The Emergency Quota Act was followed with the Immigration Act of 1924, a more permanent resolution. This law reduced the number of immigrants able to arrive from 357,803, the number established in the Emergency Quota Act, to 164,687. Though this bill did not fully restrict immigration, it considerably curbed the flow of immigration into the United States. During the late twenties an average of 270,000 immigrants were allowed to arrive mainly because of the exemption of Canada and Latin American countries.

Fear of low-skilled immigrants flooding the labor market was an issue in the 1920s (focused on immigrants from Italy and Poland), and in the first decade of the 21st century (focused on immigrants from Mexico and Central America).

An immigration reductionism movement formed in the 1970s and continues to the present day. Prominent members often press for massive, sometimes total, reductions in immigration levels.

American nativist sentiment experienced a resurgence in the late 20th century, this time directed at illegal aliens, largely Mexican resulting in the passage of new penalties against illegal immigration in 1996.

Illegal immigration, principally from across the United States–Mexico border, is the more pressing concern for most immigration reductionists. Authors such as Samuel Huntington have also seen recent Hispanic immigration as creating a national identity crisis and presenting insurmountable problems for US social institutions.

Language

American nativists have promoted English and distrusted German and Spanish usage. English Only proponents in the late 19th century proposed an English Language Amendment (ELA), a Constitutional amendment making English the official language of the United States, but have won little political support.

Nativism in Canada

Main article: Nationalism in Canada

Nativism was common in Canada (though the term originated in the U.S.). It took several forms. Hostility to the Chinese and other Asians was intense, and involved provincial laws that hindered immigration of Chinese and Japanese and blocked their economic mobility. In 1942 Japanese Canadians were forced into detention camps.

Throughout the 19th century, well into the 20th, the Orange Order in Canada attacked and tried to politically defeat the Irish Catholics. The Ku Klux Klan spread in the mid-1920s from the U.S. to parts of Canada, especially Saskatchewan, where it helped topple the Liberal government. The Klan creed was, historian Martin Robin argues, in the mainstream of Protestant Canadian sentiment, for it was based on "Protestantism, separation of Church and State, pure patriotism, restrictive and selective immigration, one national public school, one flag and one language--English."

In World War I, Canadian naturalized citizens of German or Austrian origins were stripped of their right to vote, and tens of thousands of Ukrainians (who were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) were rounded up and put in internment camps.

Hostility of native-born Canadians to competition from English immigrants in the early 20th century was expressed in signs that read, "No English Need Apply!" The resentment came because the immigrants identified more with England than with Canada. Still today, there are many Canadians with long Canadian heritages who have mixed feelings over recent immigration.

In the British Empire, traditions of anti-Catholicism in Britain led to fears that Catholics were a threat to the national (British) values. In Canada, the Orange Order (of Irish Protestants) campaigned vigorously against the Catholics throughout the 19th century, often with violent confrontations. Both sides were immigrants from Ireland and neither side claimed loyalty to Canada. The Orange Order was much less influential in the U.S., especially after a major riot in New York City in 1871.

Canada was wracked by conflicts between the Anglophones and Francophones over language; the Irish Catholics were on the same side as the Protestant nativists in opposing the expansion of French culture.

Nativism in Australia

Australia was intensely hostile to Chinese immigrants (thousands of whom came to the gold fields), and tried to block their entry until well after World War II. When the nation of Australia formed in 1901, the national policy became "White Australia", and quickly most of the Pacific Islanders were deported, while the remainder were forced out of the sugar fields where they had worked for decades.

During World War I, Australia put German citizens in internment camps.

Hostility of native-born white Australians toward British and Irish immigrants in the late 19th century was manifested in a new party, the "Australian Natives' Association."

Since early 2000, hostilities against asylum seekers who are at times referred to as illegal immigrants, have increased.

Nativism in Taiwan

Nativism flourished in Taiwan in the 1970s as a reaction against the influx of mainland Chinese to the island after the Kuomintang's defeat in 1949. Nativists felt that the political influence of mainland Chinese was disproportionately large. The term is especially found in the field of literature, where nativist literature was more traditionally minded than the modernist literature written largely by mainland Chinese.

Nativism in Europe

London was notorious for its xenophobia in the 16th century, and conditions worsened in the 1580s. Many immigrants became disillusioned by routine threats of violence and molestation, attempts at expulsion of foreigners, and the great difficulty in acquiring English citizenship. Dutch cities proved more hospitable, and many left London permanently.

Regarding the Irish in 20th-century Great Britain, Lucassen (2005) argues the deep religious divide between the Protestants and Catholics was at the core of the ongoing estrangement of the Irish in British society. For the Poles in the mining districts of western Germany before 1914, it was nationalism (on both the German and the Polish sides), which kept Polish workers, who had established an associational structure approaching institutional completeness (churches, voluntary associations, press, even unions), separate from the host German society. Lucassen found that religiosity and nationalism were more fundamental in generating nativism and inter-group hostility than the labor antagonism.

Once Italian workers in France had understood the benefit of unionism and French unions were willing to overcome their fear of Italians as scabs, integration was open for most Italian immigrants. The French state, which was always more of an immigration state than Prussia, Germany or Great Britain, fostered and supported family-based immigration and thus helped Italians on their immigration trajectory with minimal nativism. (Lucassen 2005)

Many observers see the post-1950s wave of immigration in Europe was fundamentally different from the pre-1914 patterns. They debate the role of cultural differences, ghettos, race, Muslim fundamentalism, poor education and poverty play in creating nativism among the hosts and a caste-type underclass, more similar to white-black tensions in the US (Lucassen 2005) Algerian migration to France has generated nativism, characterized by the prominence of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his National Front. (Lucassen 2005)

Anti-immigration arguments

Main article: Opposition to immigration

Anti-immigration sentiment is typically justified with one or more of the following arguments and claims about immigrants:

• Government expense: Government expenses may exceed tax revenue relating to new immigrants.
• Language: Isolate themselves in their own communities and refuse to learn the local language.
• Employment: Acquire jobs which would have otherwise been available to native citizens, suppressing wages.
• Patriotism: Damage a sense of community and nationality.
• Environment: Increase the consumption of scarce resources; their move from low to high pollution economy increases pollution
• Welfare: Make heavy use of social welfare systems.
• Overpopulation: May overpopulate countries.
• Culture: Can swamp a native population and replace its culture with their own.
• Housing: Increase in housing costs: migrant families can reduce vacancies and cause rent increases.

The claim that immigrants can "swamp" a local population is related to birth rate relative to nationals. Historically, this has occurred only with immigrants whose societies were more technologically advanced than the native populations. Examples include the immigration of Europeans to North America, the Han Chinese migration in western China, and the Bantu migrations in Africa. The opposite has also occurred, where small groups managed to dominate and culturally change much larger groups. Such cases include the Romans, Asian Bulgarians and Slavic populations dominating the natives of Thrace, the Mongols in China and India, and the Germanic peoples during the migration period such as the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks, etc. over native Romanized populations, as well as the Turks in Anatolia. Usually, conquering Germanic barbarian forces were in the beginning foederati assisting the Romans.

Contemporary opponents of immigration blame it for such problems as unemployment, crime (especially through gangs), harm to the environment, and overwhelming social services such as hospitals, police.

See also

• Anti-Catholicism
• Criticism of multiculturalism
• Hyphenated American
• Illegal immigration to the United States
• Immigration to the United States
• Immigration reduction
• Immigration reform
• Korenizatsiya
• List of organizations designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups
• National conservatism
• Political demography
• Rivers of Blood speech
• Xenophobia

References and bibliography

Comparative

• Alexseev, Mikhail A. Immigration Phobia and the Security Dilemma: Russia, Europe, and the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2005). 294 pp.
• Art, David. Inside the Radical Right: The Development of Anti-Immigrant Parties in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press; 2011) 288 pages; examines anti-immigration activists and political candidates in 11 countries.
• Jensen, Richard. "Comparative Nativism: The United States, Canada and Australia, 1880s-1910s," Canadian Journal for Social Research (2010) vol 3#1 pp 45–55

United States

• Allerfeldt, Kristofer. Race, Radicalism, Religion, and Restriction: Immigration in the Pacific Northwest, 1890-1924. Praeger, 2003. 235 pp.
• Anbinder, Tyler. "Nativism and prejudice against immigrants," in A companion to American immigration, ed. by Reed Ueda (2006) pp 177–201 online excerpt
• Barkan, Elliott R. "Return of the Nativists? California Public Opinion and Immigration in the 1980s and 1990s." Social Science History 2003 27(2): 229-283. Issn: 0145-5532 Fulltext: in Project MUSE,
• Franchot, Jenny. Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (1994),
• Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955), the standard scholarly history
• Hueston, Robert Francis. The Catholic Press and Nativism, 1840-1860 (1976)
• Hughey, Matthew W. 'Show Me Your Papers! Obama’s Birth and the Whiteness of Belonging.' Qualitative Sociology 35(2): 163-181 (2012)
• Luebke, Frederick C. Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I (1974)
• Schrag Peter. Not Fit For Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America (University of California Press; 2010) 256 pages;

Canada

• Houston, Cecil J. and Smyth, William J. The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical Geography of the Orange Order in Canada. U. of Toronto Press, 1980.
• McLaughlin, Robert. "Irish Nationalism and Orange Unionism in Canada: A Reappraisal," Éire-Ireland 41.3&4 (2007) 80-109
• Mclean, Lorna. "'To Become Part of Us': Ethnicity, Race, Literacy and the Canadian Immigration Act of 1919". Canadian Ethnic Studies 2004 36(2): 1-28. ISSN 0008-3496
• Miller, J. R. Equal Rights: The Jesuits’ Estates Act Controversy (1979). in late 19c Canada
• Palmer, Howard. Patterns of Prejudice: A History of Nativism in Alberta (1992)
• Robin, Martion. Shades of Right: Nativist and Fascist Politics in Canada, 1920-1940 (University of Toronto Press, 1992);
• See, S.W. Riots in New Brunswick: Orange Nativism and Social Violence in the 1840s (Univ of Toronto Press, 1993 - ).
• Ward, W. Peter. White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy toward Orientals in British Columbia (1978)

Other countries

• Betz, Hans-Georg. "Against the 'Green Totalitarianism': Anti-Islamic Nativism in Contemporary Radical Right- Wing Populism in Western Europe," in Christina Schori Liang, ed. Europe for the Europeans (2007)
• Ceuppens, Bambi. "Allochthons, Colonizers, and Scroungers: Exclusionary Populism in Belgium," African Studies Review, Volume 49, Number 2, September 2006, pp. 147–186 doi:10.1353/arw.2006.0102 "Allochthons" means giving welfare benefits only to those groups that are considered to "truly belong"
• Chinn, Jeff, and Robert Kaiser, eds. Russians as the New Minority: Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Soviet Successor States (1996)
• Finzsch, Norbert, and Dietmar Schirmer, eds. Identity and Intolerance: Nationalism, Racism, and Xenophobia in Germany and the United States (2002)
• Groenfeldt, D. "The future of indigenous values: cultural relativism in the face of economic development", Futures, Volume 35, Issue 9, November 2003, Pages 917-929
• Lucassen, Leo. The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850. University of Illinois Press, 2005. 280 pp; ISBN 0-252-07294-4. Examines Irish immigrants in Britain, Polish immigrants in Germany, Italian immigrants in France (before 1940), and (since 1950), Caribbeans in Britain, Turks in Germany, and Algerians in France
• Liang, Christina Schori, ed. Europe for the Europeans (2007)
• McNally, Mark. Proving the way: conflict and practice in the history of Japanese nativism (2005)
• Mamdani, M. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda (2001)
• Rose, Richard. "The End of Consensus in Austria and Switzerland," Journal of Democracy, Volume 11, Number 2, April 2000, pp. 26–40
• Wertheimer, Jack. Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (1991)

External links

• Dennis Kearney
• Henry A. Rhodes, "Nativist and Racist Movements in the U.S. and their Aftermath"
• Dennis Kearney, President, and H. L. Knight, Secretary, "Appeal from California. The Chinese Invasion. Workingmen’s Address," Indianapolis Times, 28 February 1878.
• "A Nation or Notion", by Patrick J. Buchanan, op-ed, Oct. 4, 2006. A conservative defense of nativism.
• PoliticosLatinos.com Videos of 2008 US Presidential Election Candidates' Positions regarding Immigration
• "Anti - Immigration Groups and the Masks of False Diversity". False Diversity in Anti-Immigration organizations.
• A Defense of Nativism, Conservative Heritage Times.