Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas by David Fitzgerald and David Cook-Martin (review)

Is democracy immune to racism? For many commentators and researchers the answer is a resounding yes: racism and democracy seem – obviously and almost by nature – incompatible, the implicit understanding being that democratic values conflict with racist presuppositions and practices. Upon further reflection, however, the answer is not so obvious: for a considerable part of their history, democratic regimes readily practiced what can only be called racist policies. Liberal thinkers since Tocqueville would have us put this down to historical legacy, temporary loss of the moral compass, or fortuitous coexistence. This study demonstrates instead that not only is democracy not inherently hostile to racism but even constitutes a breeding ground: “The long-term relationship between liberalism and racism is best explained as one of ‘elective affinity’” (p. 7). Symmetrically, neither democracy nor belief in the universal nature of man accounts for the gradual disappearance of racial selection policies over the second half of the twentieth century. In fact it was the result of changes in international power balances: “Finally, we demonstrate that anti-racism is not inherently sustained by liberalism. Anti-racism is found across many different political systems, but it is especially fragile in populist and democratic environments” (p. 46).

To demonstrate this, the authors undertake a remarkably detailed exploration of all race- or ethnicity-related policies in the Americas. Their analytic framework, presented as a three-dimensional model, is based on comparisons over time and space. The first dimension, described as vertical, concerns power balances within countries as determined by struggles between different interest groups to “achieve their preferences.” Predictably, the opposition between capitalists and workers is essential here. But ethnic selection policies cannot be reduced to material national interests; a second, horizontal dimension, defined as international relations or interactions between governments, also plays a key role. Those interactions can take many forms: “leverage,” i.e., the degree of influence a given country has on others; “cultural emulation,” i.e., “policymakers in one country voluntarily modelling their policies on those of another country or institution”; and “strategic adjustment, which occurs when a given country adjusts its policies to the effects of another country’s policies. Another component that has to be taken into account in this international perspective is the host country’s relations with the relevant departure countries (and with the population from those countries already living in it). Measures for excluding a given ethnic group will be strongly resented not only by the country of emigration but also by members of that group already present in the receiving country. This mechanism is essential to understanding the decline of racial policies in the aftermath of World War II: following decolonization, many immigrants received assistance and even protection from other countries. The third and last dimension of the model is variation in intra- and inter-country power balances over time. The positions of internal groups change, as does their power relative to each other, as do other countries’ policies. Accordingly, the analysis here of relations between political systems and racial selection policies is based on dual comparisons: simultaneous between countries, and over time.

For each country in the region the authors constructed a system for coding immigration and naturalization laws from 1790 to 2010, distinguishing between negative selection (refusal to admit a group) and positive selection (favouring a group), ethnic group selection (Jews, blacks, etc.) and selection of certain nationalities. Above all, they substantiate the coding with case studies so as to differentiate “between the law on the books and the law in action” (p. 34). The considerable amount of qualitative materials collected for the six case studies – government records, legislative debates, secondary literature, etc. – reveal more discreet not to say hidden selection procedures, not authorized by any law. The authors’ detailed study of the six countries – the United States, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina – constitutes the real substance of the...