Anti-immigrant bias has long been exploited for political gain. In colonial America, “swarthy” German immigrants were the targets of animus from British settlers. Later, the distinctively vicious Know-Nothing or American Party, beat and shot German and Irish Catholic Americans—who were believed to be criminal and papist elements infiltrating the country—at polling places during elections. But it was the anti-Asian movement, along with the oppression of Indigenous and Black Americans, that helped unify previously fractured European immigrant groups, binding them together in a cross-class identity of whiteness and inventing the entirely new and racialized concept of the “illegal immigrant.”
Major events like the Chinese massacre of 1871 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 are often presented as isolated instances. But they were just the peaks in a century-long pattern of organized white terror that presaged this past year’s cataclysm of anti-Asian menacing and violence as well as Donald Trump’s virulently anti-immigrant 2016 presidential campaign. While Asian exclusion was broadly popular, politicians and labor leaders employed it for the specific purpose of winning over working-class whites and elevating their status in the American racial hierarchy; in the process, they helped redefine white European settlers as “native” compared with invasive Asians, appropriating Indigenous Americans’ historical stature along with their land. And while this strategy was a distinctly regional one at first, ruthlessly operationalized in the West, its adherents were successful in forcing it into mainstream national politics.
The Western strategy, as I call it, was a distinct but reinforcing immigrant corollary to the Southern strategy (both the ethos of the post-Reconstruction South and, later, the explicit program of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon). It was crystallized in California, Washington, and Oregon as they entered statehood and as Jim Crow laws swept the South. If the Southern strategy pursued pure political power in its first iteration and later brought about party realignment by stoking white racial animus toward Black people, aided by propaganda of Black criminality and inferiority and abetted by policies of segregation, degradation, and voter suppression, the Western strategy achieved bipartisan agreement by whipping up resentment toward Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian immigrants, aided by propaganda of foreign invaders who could never be assimilated and abetted by policies of race-based exclusion.
This tool kit of fear-mongering propaganda, threats of violent removal, and exclusionary policy prescriptions—readily mobilized against any unlucky chosen immigrant group as a way to drum up white votes—has endured. It was one that Trump cannily wielded for his inaugural run in 2015: The real-estate mogul had been fairly pro-immigrant until 2014, when his political advisors identified what would become a central campaign message after listening to what one described as “thousands of hours of talk radio” and finding that the Republican base was rabid about “illegal” immigration