BOOKS: Erika Lee’s Introduction to U.S. Xenophobia

 

Because nearly everyone in the U.S. is an immigrant of some generation or other, I find it mystifying that so many individuals believe the ideology that immigrants are dangerous, job-stealing, fraudulent, money-sucking creatures. The immigrants chosen for this sweeping and simplistic label game changes over time.

This is not a purely American pastime, of course, but as we move into a “250 Years” celebration of a selective sliver of history on these lands, I find myself seeking answers about what our lineage as a nation is. I am starting a book quest and sharing what I am learning.

The Immigration Bias

As a descendant of mostly Irish Catholic immigrants from the mid-1800s, I know that once upon a time “my kind” were reviled — before other newcomers arrived to be the latest scapegoats of minimal thinking.

Our current President of anti-immigrant furor is himself the child of an immigrant (Donald Trump’s mother was born in Scotland), is married to an immigrant, and is the grandson of Bavarian immigrants. This is not an unusual pathway for many people today who call themselves Americans. So, why are we where we are today?

My book exploration begins by revisiting the introduction to Erika Lee’s “American for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States” (Basic Books, 2019), which informs the following summary.

At times we have proudly declared the U.S. as a “nation of immigrants.” More than 80 million immigrants have arrived to the U.S. over the past 200 years, including 3 million refugees since 1980. Yet Lee writes that Americans have been wary of almost every group of foreigners that have come to the U.S.: “German immigrants in the 18^th century; Irish and Chinese in the 19^th century; Italian, Jews, Japanese, and Mexicans in the 20^th century; and Muslims more recently.”

She attended the Republican convention in 2016, where multiple speakers “painted a terrifying portrait of American under siege by immigrant criminals, terrorists, and gang members.” She cited former New York City mayor Rudy Guliani claiming that the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, supported open borders that would admit Syrian refugees who would come to the U.S. to kill us.

In reality, Lee wrote, studies show that immigrants, including those who are undocumented, are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S.

She notes that historians, sociologists, political scientists, and journalists have predictably tracked the rise of xenophobia — which literally means “fear and hatred of foreigners” — particularly when there are economic downturns. She noted that, like others, she did not take Trump’s political messaging as more than an aberration before he was elected in 2016. “I did not fully understand how central xenophobia has been to the making of the United States, and how effective it has been in American politics.” She researched hate crime statistics, speeches, tweets, and much more — including a 1920 pamphlet from the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan titled “America for Americans.”

She learned that xenophobia has been a constant and defining feature of American life and has been “actively promoted by special interests in the pursuit of political power. … Even as Americans have realized that the threats allegedly posed by immigrants were, in hindsight, unjustified, they have allowed xenophobia to become an American tradition. … It promotes an irrational fear and hatred of immigrants. It defines immigration as a crisis, likening the movement of peoples to an invasion of hostile forces requiring a military-like response. It is born from a narrow and exclusive definition of who is American — and who is not. It is easily weaponized during times of change and anxiety, but it exists and flourishes during times of peace and war, prosperity and depression, low and high immigration, and racial struggle and racial progress.”

White Americans started this practice by naming Native Americans and African Americans as the country’s first “others” — forged by the enslavement of Africans, the seizure of native lands, the elimination of Indigenous peoples, and the violence and denial associated with the pursuit of equal rights. “Others” have been described as savages and violent to dehumanize and dub as racially inferior, thus more easily enabling the rejection of equal treatment.

Judaism, Catholicism, and Islam have all been demonized — anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia are cut out of the same cloth. Immigrant women were particularly labeled immoral (while ignoring the immorality of, for example, white men in positions of power). At one time, Chinese women were believed to be prostitutes who threatened Americans with disease. Then Mexican women were claimed to have too many babies reliant on the welfare system. Today, Muslim women can be condemned for wearing a hijab and thus rejecting assimilation in the name of religion.

Eugenics in the early 1900s classified white northern and western Europeans as superior — a way of thinking eventually embraced, of course, by Hitler and others to justify genocide — leading to an immigration quota system in the U.S. that lasted from the 1920s to 1965.

Little regard has been given to understanding why some people move out of their country, including the role the U.S. might have played. As Lee wrote, well before today’s more public ICE occupations that detain Black and brown people, the U.S. government’s border security efforts focused on Mexican immigrants as dangerous “illegals.” This has systematically led to “show me your papers” racial profiling. Previously on Ellis Island, Jewish immigrants were denied because they were “likely to become public charges.”

Mexicans, Chinese, and Japanese have been deported with regularity for much of the past century, even if they were legal residents or U.S.-born citizens. Debates about who counts as an American and is allowed — distinguishing “good” immigrants from “bad” — has generally been determined by skin color.

Religion also has been a determining factor. As Lee points out, once upon a time white Protestant settlers were dubbed the “native” Americans, with special privileges (like voting) and protections, while Catholic European immigrants were not. The “native” status claimed in the 19^th century by white Protestants was asserted to justify the taking of land and the breaking of treaties with actual Indigenous peoples. It also led white Protestants to indicate they “should be recognized as ‘true’ Americans who alone knew what was best for the country.”

The definition of who has superiority snakes around over time. Just a few decades after Irish Catholics had been demonized as the greatest threat to America, for example, they were grudgingly accepted as ‘good immigrants’ and even ‘good Americans’ as the nation began to grapple with the arrival of new immigrants from China and southern and eastern Europe.

Lee points out that xenophobia is profitable. “The U.S. economy has flourished by exploiting workers, especially those whom American society has already defined as dangerous, ‘illegal,’ and unworthy of protection or equal rights. These workers become a permanent class of deportable immigrants who remain socially marginal and economically exploitable even as they continue to serve American economic interests.”

It also serves a big business infrastructure, from arrests to deportation. She cites Corrections Corporation of America [now known as CoreCivic, based in Tennessee], which won its first government contract in 1984 to run a detention center in Houston. Its annual revenue rose from $50 million in the early 1990s to $462 million in 1997. In 2016, 28 percent of its multi-million-dollar annual revenue came from immigration-related contracts with the federal government.

In short, Lee’s research — which unfolds in great detail after these introductory pages — enabled her to write extensively about the mindset that has consistently woven through U.S. history. The fuel to white nationalism that first elected Donald Trump in 2016 was not a temporary aberration but spoke to a large segment of the population that believes in the superiority of white privilege — whether as a justification to business interests, or a salve to wounded egos, or more simply the “belonging” that can come from racist indoctrination.

Subsequent to Lee’s book publication in 2019, the even more radical administration that took over the White House in 2025 takes power from the American valuation process that has festered since white people expansion across the country.

The “others” — Indigenous, Black, Asian, Jewish, Muslim, LGBTQ+, women — recognize the limitations of today as part of a long-standing pattern. The roots of selectivism are the consolidation of power in the hands of people of certain immigrant lines — and increasingly visible as socioeconomic in nature. Why else would we have a ruling class so divorced from a working class that supports its dominance?

 

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