Nativism in American politics long predates the Clinton Administration. But it did not begin as a blanket rejection of immigration. Nativism’s historical precursor was instead a racially selective pro-migration program: the project of settler colonialism demanded that certain types of European migrants “advanc[e] compactly as we multiply” across the North American continent, as Thomas Jefferson wrote. Enslaved Africans, of course, were transported by force. It was the sort of demographic regime of ethnic cleansing and replacement that governs other settler-colonial projects — including the one still unfolding today in Palestine.
As Indigenous people were killed, dispossessed, and displaced across an expanding United States, settlers came to identify as natives — and, in turn, as nativists. Calls inevitably arose to exclude would-be immigrants who didn’t fit the white-settler racial ideal. Since the early 19th century, the racist demand for immigration exclusion — anti-Irish, anti-Chinese, anti-Japanese, anti-Jewish, anti-Italian, anti-Filipino, anti-Mexican, anti-Latino, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim — has been a key motif in American history.
Today’s nativist politics owes much to that lineage, but also to more contemporary inputs: overpopulation hysteria beginning in the late 1960s; the eruption of anxiety about border security since the 1970s, when a stagflated economy spawned the initial neoliberal counterrevolution; and, in the 1990s, the hardening of vehement anti–Mexican migrant sentiment into a bedrock of Republican and conservative-movement politics, which promptly began pulling Democrats to the right.
Starting in the early 2000s, against this rising tide, responsible liberals and conservatives sought a solution to please all sides: “comprehensive immigration reform.” Time and again, Democrats and self-styled Republican moderates proposed increased border security as a part of larger packages that would also legalize undocumented immigrants and supply American business with guest workers. These negotiations became major priorities for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who each spent significant political capital trying to pass legislation. Yet they failed every time, stymied by conservative nativists who, riled by Fox News and talk radio, insisted on border security alone, with no accommodation for undocumented immigrants.
In response, Democrats and Republicans serially capitulated to the right, strengthening enforcement with no pro-immigrant measures attached — all in order to prove their “seriousness.” Since 1992, the Border Patrol ranks have grown by nearly 400 percent, from 4,139 agents to roughly 20,000 today. The number of miles of border fencing — Trump’s “wall” in all but name — grew from just 14 in 1990 to 654 at the time of Trump’s inauguration. Democrats have likewise expanded and accelerated the federal deportation pipeline by linking it to the gargantuan US criminal justice system. Both Clinton’s Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Secure Communities program, piloted under Bush but rolled out under Obama, made cops, courts, prisons, and jails a powerful force in immigration incarceration and deportation. All in exchange for nothing.