Understanding Global Migration by James F. Hollifield

Author:James F. Hollifield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The rapid succession of nativist, anti-immigrant policies should come as no surprise. In his announcement to seek the Republican nomination for president on June 16, 2015 Trump characterized immigrants from Mexico as “rapists” and a threat to the nation’s security, reflecting the views of many Americans in his political base—mostly white, non-college-educated voters—but also the majority of college-educated white women and men.100 What Trump managed to do in a very short time was to zero in on the need for America to seal itself off from Europe’s refugee crisis by accepting even fewer refugees, and at the same time terminate the Temporary Protection Status for Central Americans already in the US, some for decades, who faced deportation. These and other policies can be viewed in the context of anti-immigrant backlash politics that began in earnest in the 1990s, but also owed to the fateful role of Cold War US foreign policy in the case of Northern Triangle and other countries. (“We are here because you were there”).101

A democracy that guarantees the constitutional rights of all its citizens (equal protection of the laws), but abridges them for noncitizens and nonwhite citizens on spurious legal and constitutional grounds (e.g., slavery, Alien and Sedition Acts, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, race-based migration laws, Japanese internment, mass incarceration of African Americans and Latinos, state and federal laws against LGBTQ marriage, voter suppression, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim policies, and ongoing police murders of unarmed Black men and women), is certifiably illiberal (although considerably less so than Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Pakistan). As many political theorists have pointed out, beginning with Alexis de Tocqueville over 150 years ago, rule by the majority can easily lead to the “tyranny of the majority,” which explains how slavery and later Jim Crow laws endured for over two centuries until the civil rights acts of the 1960s. Or how raced-based citizenship and immigration laws endured for over 150 years, from the Naturalization Act of 1790 to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The cherished belief in the virtues and liberal values embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—the hallmark of American national identity—is challenged by the blunt facts of history.

A similar argument can be made for many European democracies that have enacted liberal immigration and refugee policies since World War II, only to reverse course in this century in response to the growing political pressure of ethno-nationalist parties, such as Alternative für Deutschland, Front National (now National Rally) in France, Freedom Party in Netherlands, U.K. Independence Party, Danish Peoples Party, and the League in Italy. In the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany, for example, many third-and higher-generation Africans, Muslims, and Turks are rarely accepted as truly Dutch, Danish, or German because their race, religion, and culture mark them as lesser citizens. Rapidly changing demographics due to migration and low fertility rates of whites have fueled fears that “Europe is committing suicide,” as British journalist Douglas Murray put it in the first sentence of his book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017).

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