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Chapter Fourteen: Are Anti-Immigrant Statements Racist or Nativist? What Difference Does It Make?
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f o u r t e e n Are Anti-Immigrant Statements Racist or Nativist? What Difference Does It Make? R e n é G a l i n d o a n d J a m i Vi g i l The topic of immigration continues to receive considerable attention as the press media reports on demographic shifts, proposed immigration laws and policies, and accounts of popular reaction to immigrants including reports of anti-immigrant statements. A key question in the press media reports of anti-immigrant statements has been whether or not the statements were racist. However, these press media accounts have generally side-stepped the question of whether or not the statements were nativist. Given that immigrants are the targets of anti- immigrant statements, failure to mention nativism by the press media is notable. The focus on racism and the absence of nativism in press media accounts is telling and reflects a historical amnesia of the recurring patterns of nativism across previous eras of anti-immigrant sentiment in the history of the United States (Perea 1997). Behdad (2002, 117) noted this historical amnesia in the following two questions: What is it about nativism and xenophobia that liberal America wants to forget? 363 364 ■ Galindo and Vigil And what role does the forgetting of nativism play in the construction of national consciousness in the United States? An additional question raised in this study of press media accounts of anti-immigrant statements is whether the term “racism” has come to replace the term “nativism ” in the post–civil rights era. The answers to these three questions hold important consequences since interpreting anti-immigrant incidents as either racist or nativist leads to very different policy and social justice outcomes (Sanchez 1997). These two concepts, racism and nativism, although always a part of the American social and political landscape, were each especially prevalent in the public discourse during two distinct and separate historical periods. Racism in the current era was made a pressing issue in racial/ ethnic societal relations by the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Nativism , like racism, also has a very long-standing history in America, being the prominent societal response to mass immigration during different periods of immigration such as the Americanization period of the first two decades of the twentieth century (Higham 1955). The dramatic immigration growth of the last two decades of the twentieth century and accompanying anti-immigrant sentiment have provided an occasion for the reemergence of nativism as a major force in America, and it is increasingly appearing as anti-immigrant animus and restrictionist policies (Perea 1997). Cases of anti-immigrant statements during a period of renewed nativism provide an opportunity to examine the dynamics of the nativism that is directed against Latinos. Unlike the European immigrants who were the targets of nativism at the turn of the twentieth century, the nativism of the current era is directed against a group of immigrants who are predominantly people of color from Latin America and other non-European countries. The ethnic/racial backgrounds of these immigrants , which differ from the European immigrants, highlight the complexity of the nativism directed against them, which involves an intersection of both racism and defensive nationalism. In spite of the different histories of Latino immigrants and African Americans, antiimmigrant statements and other forms of nativism directed at Latinos are understood by the press media through the black and white dichotomy developed from the African American historical experience Are Anti-Immigrant Statements Racist or Nativist? ■ 365 (Sanchez 1997). This tendency to view discrimination in terms of Blacks and Whites to the exclusion of Browns and other people of color is termed “racial dualism” (Cameron 1997). Such a view ignores the racist policies and the history of discrimination that is unique to Latinos . For example, Mexican-origin Latinos in the Southwest offer a unique history of the intersection of racism and nativism due to both their historic presence in the United States and their recent immigration . As long-term residents, they have faced discriminatory policies such as segregation, and as recent immigrants they have been targeted by restrictionistic policies such as Arizona’s Proposition 200. This distinct history of Latino discrimination and racialization calls for a different lens than the one offered by the black and white dichotomy (Sanchez 1997). To develop such a lens, the differences and interactions between nativism and racism in anti-immigrant incidents need to be analyzed. At a minimum, there are three important reasons for drawing distinctions between...