THE 18TH, 19TH, AND 20TH CENTURY ROOTS OF THE CURRENT DEBATE

Heated ethno-centric rhetoric is hardly new in America. In the mid-19th century, between the rapid Western expansion of the Californian gold rush and the work of building a trans-continental railroad, the need for cheap labor led to a massive influx of Chinese immigrants. As the gold dried up and the railroad was completed, however, these same immigrants faced a predictable backlash. Chinese laborers flooding into cities were accused of depressing wages and the political reaction led to the 1892 Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited the immigration of all Chinese people.

The emphasis on maintaining the ethnic makeup of the United States was reaffirmed in the early 20th century with the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921. That act instituted a “National Origins” formula — a quota system based on 1910 census data that limited immigration by nationality to 3% of the total already in the country in 1910. (Of course Chinese immigration remained prohibited.) The purpose of this law was explicit: the ethnic composition of the country should remain as it was, mostly white, European, and especially Anglo-Saxon.

Interestingly, immigrants from Latin America were not included in this quota system. Instead, it was assumed that Latin American immigration would be controlled at the administrative level, an assumption that continued to create problems for people from Latin America seeking to immigrate into the 1960s. As Mae M. Ngai, professor of Asian American Studies and History with Colombia University, explains:

Another factor in the “effects of administrative control in generating illegal immigrants” was the end of the Bracero Program, which was designed to counter labor shortages during World War II. While the Bracero Program has been criticized for worker abuses, it did allow migrant workers to enter and depart the United States freely for the purpose of earning a higher wage. When the program ended the demand for Bracero labor had not decreased; in fact, ending the program simply removed any security migrant workers felt that they could return home between jobs, actually increasing the number of permanent undocumented immigrants in America.

A year after the end of the Bracero Program, in 1965, the National Origins quota system was abolished with the Heart-Cellar Immigration and Nationality Act. Proponents of the act argued that granting visas on the basis of family ties and needed skills, rather than on ethnicity, was more just; they also argued that the ethnic makeup of the nation would not change very much. On that second point they were quite wrong. Instead, as National Public Radio Correspondent Jennifer Ludden points out, since the repeal of the quota system in 1965, the United States has seen a “profound demographic transformation.” She explains, “The chief driver of this change remains the system of family-based immigration put in place in 1965. Over time, in a process critics call ‘chain migration,’ entire families have re-established themselves in the United States” (Ludden Reference Ludden2006). This has led to a rise in Asian, African, and Middle Eastern populations, while Europeans have immigrated in far lower proportions.

Thus, the Hart-Cellar Act in conjunction with the end of the Bracero Program has had two crucial effects: rapid demographic changes coupled with increased illegal immigration from Latin America. Such rapid changes, moreover, can give rise to fears among those populations that see themselves threatened by the changes. In this case, two key groups who see themselves to be threatened are labor and white, Christian conservatives. In more extreme forms, that sense of being threatened can turn into a nationalist and nativist defensiveness, often articulated in terms that suggest that immigrants steal jobs, increase crime, and — perhaps most damningly — refuse to assimilate. In fact new American immigrants do assimilate, though full assimilation often takes one or two generations to be complete. The problem is that assimilation is a slower process than the quite rapid demographic changes seen with mass migrations, with the effect that many people get the impression that assimilation does not happen at all (Schildkraut Reference Schildkraut2010, 161).

Unfortunately, the sort of nationalist, nativist fear that drives the rhetoric of non-assimilation and criminality is hardly new. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1892 and the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 explicitly linked American identity and the capacity for assimilation with ethnicity. Even before that, however, as Robert Bellah reports, no less a figure than Benjamin Franklin “expresses the anxiety and hostility that immigrants would meet all through subsequent American history” (Bellah [Reference Bellah1975] 1992, 90). Franklin worried that immigrants did not learn the language, that their manners were disagreeable, and that they undercut the English for wages and jobs. Ironically, Franklin was worried about German immigrants, a group that would not be harshly affected under the 20th century quota system. But his rhetoric has been echoed down through the centuries, applied anew to each fresh generation of immigrants.

Another group of immigrants that were not harshly affected by the 20th century quota system — and whose descendants are today accepted as part of the broad racial and ethnic descriptor “white-European” — but who were subject to the same nativist fears as 18th century German immigrants were the Irish. Irish immigrants in the 18th and 19th centuries were met with open hostility from the Anglo-Saxon establishment in America, and the historian Noel Ignatiev offers an excellent analysis of this hostility — and its political ramifications — in his book, How the Irish Became White.

Ignatiev reports that in 18th century Ireland a dynamic of political colonization coupled with economically and religiously motivated oppression resulted in a series of events leading to the economic exploitation of the “Native Irish” on the part of British colonizers as well as the consolidation of land-holdings by wealthy Anglo-Irish property owners, which in turn led to a rise in Irish emigration to America in the late 18th century (Ignatiev Reference Ignatiev1995, 37–38). “The First Congress of the United States,” meanwhile, “voted in 1790 that only ‘white’ persons could be naturalized as citizens … but it did not settle the issue, since it was by no means obvious who was ‘white’” (Ignatiev Reference Ignatiev1995, 41). In the same decade that the First Congress limited naturalization to “white” persons, 30,000 Irish arrived in Philadelphia. Many of these new immigrants were influenced by an Irish radicalism, inspired by the French Revolution, which sought to overthrow the British monarchy in Ireland and to establish an independent Irish republic. In America, that radicalism inspired fears of a foreign conspiracy. And, as would later be the case with Chinese immigration, fear manifested itself in legislation: “Out of this fear arose the Alien and Sedition acts of 1798, which restricted naturalization, and hence voting rights, of immigrants. Some Federalists even sought to restrict the political rights of foreign-born citizens” (Ignatiev Reference Ignatiev1995, 65).

The strategy of political alienation would ultimately backfire on the Federalists, Ignatiev reports, and we will return to that point. At this point, though, what is important to keep in mind is that issues of labor, religion, economics, ethnicity, and political maneuvering helped not only produce the conditions for large numbers of ethnically distinct immigrants, but also sparked a backlash against them couched in fears about assimilation, voting patterns, and even foreign conspiracies. And as we will see, Patrick J. Buchanan in 2006 and certain far-right political figures in 2016 use much the same language to discuss the “Third World Invasion” that nativist opponents of Chinese and Irish immigrants used in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But how does such nativist rhetoric fit into civil religion?

CIVIL RELIGION, NATIVISM, AND ETHNO-CENTRIC RHETORIC

In The Broken Covenant, Robert N. Bellah explains that American political culture is built upon Roman republicanism along with largely Puritan “utopian millennial expectations” (Bellah [Reference Bellah1975] 1992, ix). These expectations and the mythology that express them form the core of American civil religion, an understanding of America's place and purpose in the world. Civil religion is therefore an interpretation of historical experience in the light of America's special place in Providence (Bellah [Reference Bellah1975] 1992, 3). Given this blend of Roman republicanism and a millennial emphasis on Covenant, American democracy and the shining example it would provide to the world would require the active participation of those subject to it — not just in terms of political participation (for example, through voting) but through an adherence to the moral content of the vision. Two mythological touchstones were central to this millennial and utopian vision of American destiny: the idea that America was a new Promised Land, and that Americans were a new Chosen People. In this political mythology, expressed in deeply Protestant language, reform of the soul and reform of the world went together in rebirth and purification.

If the New World was a new Promised Land of religious, political, and spiritual renewal, then the settlers of this new land were understood as a new Chosen People. Their Covenant was the responsibility to create a new kind of nation. And the dominant ethnic group among these new Chosen was Anglo-Saxon. The early racial dynamics of the nation, Bellah explains, was a major factor in allowing a people guided by a dream of freedom and equality to build a nation by means of genocide and slavery. The “ambiguities of chosenness,” in other words, kept much of white America “from seeing any crime at all” (Bellah [Reference Bellah1975] 1992, 39).

It worked like this: for many of the early settlers and founders, God had chosen them — and them alone — to do this great work, because the white, primarily Anglo-Saxon, European race and culture were especially suited to it. Bellah explains:

Thus Anglo-Saxon nativism in America is nothing new. It is a manifestation of the connection between a founding myth of chosenness with ethno-centric ideas about racial and cultural superiority. And though Bellah was primarily discussing the 18th and 19th century when he discussed the “ambiguities of chosenness,” we will see that Buchanan uses precisely the same rhetoric, fueled by precisely the same ideas of racial and cultural superiority.

There is, of course, another side to linking American chosenness and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity: in defining the chosen we necessarily also define those who are not chosen. More, chosenness is both individual and collective. It is each individual's duty to assimilate to and embody the ideals upon which the millennial, utopian vision is founded; yet some individuals, by virtue of ethnicity, are more or less suited to the demand. The Puritans were concerned to build a more Godly society in their new Promised Land, and while it was necessary that the people conform themselves internally to that Covenant, sinfulness among certain “reprobates” needed to be controlled by external force. The drive to control sin originally had nothing to do with ethnicity or race — it was a matter of individual morality — but “it was not long before certain of the characteristic traits of sinners were projected onto whole groups of people” (Bellah [Reference Bellah1975] 1992, 101). In the earliest colonies and in early America this meant particular European immigrant groups (like the Germans and Irish), Native peoples, Asians, and Africans. In the 21st century the “sinful” traits of laziness, selfishness, and criminality are all too often projected upon Latin American immigrants, while Muslim immigrants suffer charges of holding an un-American, even inherently anti-democratic, religious faith.

Increasing diversity since the repeal of the quota system in 1965 has driven some people to incorporate anew the (now implicit) Puritan narrative of sinfulness into American civil religion in explicitly ethno-centric terms. “When people are confronted with such issues,” writes Deborah J. Schildkraut, professor of American Politics and Political Psychology at Tufts University, “they look to their views of the norms and values that constitute American national identity in order to help them determine what they think are appropriate policy responses” (Schildkraut Reference Schildkraut2010, 12). Of course, the norms and values that constitute American identity are usually couched in narrative: the mythology of American chosenness that has been part of American civil religion from the beginning.

A willingness to assimilate not only to American values but also to American cultural norms is a key part of what constitutes a “good” immigrant. Thus, we see criticisms of Latin American immigrants (whether they immigrated legally or illegally) “for deviating from a notion of the ideal immigrant from earlier eras that welcomed his or her new identity as Americans without looking back” (Schildkraut Reference Schildkraut2010, 18). Granted, those earlier, “ideal” immigrants’ contemporaries hardly saw them the same way — both German and Irish immigrants, for example, who later became folded into the protection of “whiteness,” initially faced precisely the same fears.

In any case, the import for civil religion as it concerns the contemporary immigration debate in America is this: if America is a shining city on a hill, a New Jerusalem with a special and determinative place in Providence, then immigrants of the “wrong kind” — sinfully lazy Hispanics, non-Christian Asians, or even anti-American Muslims — can be portrayed as not only threatening the American economy and culture but as going against the will of God Himself. Buchanan and certain figures in the 2016 presidential campaign who intentionally play on fears of criminality, in-assimilation, and conspiracy evoke precisely this mythological narrative, whether intentionally or not.

TWO CASE STUDIES IN ANTI-IMMIGRATION RHETORIC

Patrick J. Buchanan has had a long resume in politics, which he has followed with a career as a conservative commentator. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Buchanan was an assistant to Richard Nixon and was his first full-time staffer. He also worked in the Ford White House. In the mid-1980s, he served as Ronal Regan's White House Director of Communications, during which time he wrote foreign policy speeches. He has run for president and written 10 books and numerous articles. He currently appears regularly on news programs — most frequently on Fox News — and serves as the editor of The American Conservative. He is also chairman of the American Cause Foundation, a right-wing educational group.

Buchanan has had the ear of presidents, and he continues to be a loud voice of far-right conservatism in the culture wars. He self-consciously and intentionally evokes the language of “culture war” to this day. Indeed, Raymond J. Haberski Jr., Professor of History and Director of American Studies at Indiana University in Indianapolis, has called Buchanan “the fiercest partisan in this new war.” Haberski quotes Buchanan's speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention, where Buchanan calls the culture wars “a new religious war” for nothing less than “the soul of America” (Haberski Reference Haberski2012, 169). Such war-talk, Haberski suggests, is hardly unintentional: “war had consistently helped clarify an American civil religion,” he argues, and thus it is unsurprising that partisans like Buchanan would use war-talk to rally people to their causes (Haberski Reference Haberski2012, 171).

Among Buchanan's publications is our first case study: State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. In that book, published in 2006, Buchanan explicitly links American identity with religion and ethnicity, arguing that rapid demographic changes since 1965 signal a disintegrating American culture and an existential crisis. It is certainly a call to cultural (if not actual) war. The book begins with the strident warning that “the crisis of Western civilization consists of three immanent and moral perils: dying populations, disintegrating cultures, and invasions unresisted” (Buchanan Reference Buchanan2006, 2). Buchanan is well aware that America is a nation of immigrants — why then is this wave of immigrants in particular seen as an invading force? Here Buchanan reverts to differentiating the “good” immigrants of the past from the current “invading force”:

One phrase there is important to note: “One to 2 million enter every year and stay, half of them in defiance of America's laws” (italics added). That point is important: Buchanan is not concerned only about illegal immigration — illegal immigration is only half of his real fear. Even legal immigrants of the wrong kind (Asians and Hispanics who have no interest in turning their backs on their native lands) are part of this invading force.

Lest it seem that I am misrepresenting Buchanan — that he is not, in fact, saying that the current waves of immigration are dangerous because of the ethnicity or faith of these immigrants — Buchanan makes the point explicit within the first two chapters. “America faces an existential crisis,” he warns. “If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors have built. No nation has ever undergone so radical a demographic transformation and survived.” Of course, Buchanan ignores the fact that America is unique in being self-consciously created on ideals rather than ethnicity. His fear and his warning are explicitly ethno-centric: “In California and Texas, Americans of European descent are already a minority and their share of our population fall every year. Hispanics account for 34 percent of our two most populous states and their numbers are surging” (Buchanan Reference Buchanan2006, 11–12).

Further, Buchanan combines the ethno-centric claim that the “Third World invaders” cannot assimilate with the claim that they are immoral and un-American because they do not want to assimilate properly. A classic move; it has Puritan roots.

On this short passage a number of points should be made. First, Buchanan again makes it clear that he is not merely concerned with illegal immigration. Second, these immigrants cannot be effectively integrated because they are not culturally prepared to do so, and America has no experience with assimilating them anyway. And even if Asians and Hispanics could be assimilated, runs Buchanan's reasoning, in any case, they do not want to be. Hence the moral Puritanism of his argument: “millions of Mexicans are determined to retain their language and loyalty to Mexico. They prefer to remain outsiders. They do not wish to assimilate, and the nation no longer demands that they do so” (Buchanan Reference Buchanan2006, 28).

Again and again, Buchanan returns to the war-talk intentionally designed to rally the good people of America. Not only are non-European immigrants threatening due to sheer numbers; not only are they incapable of being assimilated; not only are they morally reprobate in their refusal to adapt to American values — this invading force is actually part of an anti-American plot, a conspiracy between Mexico and American elitists, and, in the end, a push to dissolve America and set up one world government.

Lest we imagine that this is merely a conflict between Mexico and the United States over contested territory — lest we forget that this is part of the broader culture war Buchanan has been fighting since the 1960s — he reminds us of the global elites’ role in the plot in terms that play explicitly on conspiracy fears: “For generations U.S. and foreign elites have sought to diminish national sovereignty and dilute our national identity,” Buchanan warns. “The penultimate step to one world government … This is where NAFTA was designed to lead us” (Buchanan Reference Buchanan2006, 128).

Buchanan has not forgotten that the culture wars are religious wars, though, which brings us back around to civil religion. Buchanan does not believe that our American creed is enough to save us:

The notion that American identity and Americanism is defined by a set of ideas — as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the writings of Jefferson and Madison, and the speeches of Lincoln, Kennedy, and Obama — forms the very core of American civil religion. And this ideal is precisely what Buchanan rejects in favor of ethno-centric nativism.

Yet if America is united not primarily by a common creed — by civil religion — then what does unite us? Only this: “language, faith, culture, and memory,” and “blood and birth” (Buchanan Reference Buchanan2006, 147–148). In other words, what truly unites Americans is the English language, the Christian faith, cultural memory, and ethnic and regional identity. “Should America lose her ethnic-cultural core and become a nation of nations, America will not survive,” Buchanan warns (Buchanan Reference Buchanan2006, 150). It is for this reason and for no other that he calls Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American immigrants a “Third World Invasion” and an existential threat that drives his war-rhetoric: “How we define who we are defines our interests, and how we define our interests tells us whom we must fight,” he writes. “Language, faith, culture, and history — and, yes, birth, blood, and soil — produce a people, not an ideology… Democracy is not enough. If the culture dies, the country dies” (Buchanan Reference Buchanan2006, 162–163).

On the one hand, Buchanan denies that an American creed is enough to unite the nation. Yet the sort of ethno-centric rhetoric Buchanan trades in is the product of the American civil myth of chosenness. Buchanan derives his ethno-centrism from civil religious myths, and at the same time he denies that the creed expressed by those myths is enough to overcome ethno-centrism. Buchanan has come out of the darker realms of American civil religion, and he has departed back into them.

Of course, Buchanan's book is 10 years old. How relevant does it remain today? I suggest that its relevance lies not in whether it is on the best-seller lists today, but in that the ways Buchanan folds immigration into his broader culture war concerns continues to be echoed in anti-immigration rhetoric in 2016. Buchanan was an early and influential culture wars soldier, and through his role as a presidential speech-writer, author, and commentator his ideas (and the ideas of others like him) have percolated through those elements of the population that feel they are losing the culture wars — and, by extension, losing America's special place in Providence. That loss is reflected in economic disorder, increasing sexual permissiveness and cultural secularism, and decreasing American power and influence abroad. Part of the cause of the loss, the story goes, is unchecked immigration — especially immigration of the “wrong kind.” That kind of rhetoric is especially pronounced in the 2016 presidential race in America, especially on the parts of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson.

In the announcement of his campaign, Trump claimed that Mexico is sending its criminals to America: “When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best,” Trump famously declared. “They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us [sic]. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people” (Time Magazine 2015). A key element of that declaration is insufficiently considered: the conspiratorial tone. Mexican (and, one presumes, other Latin American) immigrants are not merely refugees from poverty and crime; they are undesirables being intentionally sent to America. Of course this clearly echoes Buchanan's fears of a plot between Mexican and American elites to undermine America's power. It also echoes the fear that Irish immigrants in the 18th century were part of a French plot to undermine Pennsylvania's Anglo-Saxon leadership.

Trump's notorious 2015 speech is not an isolated claim, either. His campaign website reiterates the point in no uncertain terms: “For many years, Mexico's leaders have been taking advantage of the United States by using illegal immigration to export the crime and poverty in their own country (as well as in other Latin American countries)” (Trump Reference Trump2016). Nor is Trump an anomaly in the field. Others, most notably Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, also deploy the rhetoric of invasion — which, of course, logically extends into militarization. Ben Carson, for example, advocates using armed drones along the Mexican border, and while he suggests only using them against unoccupied hideouts, American use of drones in other global conflicts has been notorious for unintentional civilian casualties, a point Carson seems not to consider. For his part, Ted Cruz explicitly links his anti-immigration rhetoric to the language of war and invasion on his campaign website: “Border security is national security,” reads the first sentence of that site's section on immigration (Cruz Reference Cruz2016).

Nor is it only Latin American immigrants facing this kind of exclusionary rhetoric. Muslim immigrants and refugees are also the object of suspicion. Both Trump and Cruz propose distinguishing between Christians and Muslims as part of their strategy for dealing with refugees from the Middle East. Trump has suggested suspending Muslim immigration altogether, and Cruz suggests that Muslim refugees should be resettled in Muslim-majority countries — presumably on the rationale that their religion would make it more difficult to assimilate in America (Fahrenthold, Sullivan, and Tsukayama Reference Fahrenthold, Sullivan and Tsukayama2015). Such suspicion on the grounds of faith points back to the religious undercurrents of this rhetoric — America has a special place in Providence; the religious and ethnic makeup of the nation is part of that divine mission (after all, the God who gave us that charge is the God of the Bible, not the God of the Qur'an); and excessive dilution of America's “chosenness” threatens that mission. Thus, grounded in an American civil-religious myth, religion and ethnicity become markers for the “wrong kind” of immigrant.

Lest it be suspected that this analysis is explicitly partisan, though, it is crucial to stress that such nativism is not universally Republican nor is it exclusive to the Republican Party. Not only has labor — traditionally a stronghold of the Democrats — often been nativist due to economic concerns, but in the 2016 Republican field such rhetoric marks a clear divide. For example, John Kasich explicitly appeals to compassion when discussing immigration, and Jeb Bush takes a quite moderate stance focused on practical solutions including a path for those in the country illegally to “earn legal status” (if not full citizenship) alongside a call for stronger border security (Jeb! 2016). Still, the fact remains that the more moderate voices on immigration seem in early 2016 to be doing worse — far worse — in national polls. This is apparently due to the fact that almost half of Republican voters “favor deporting all immigrants here illegally and barring Syrian refugees from entering the United States,” and these voters “cross traditional Republican constituencies” (Tankersley and Clement Reference Tankersley and Clement2015).

In the end, the kind of militaristic rhetoric Trump, Cruz, and Carson trade in echoes 18th and 19th century fears about foreign conspiracy. That rhetoric finds its way from labor to the right via the culture wars rhetoric of Buchanan and his ilk. That culture wars rhetoric in turn inflames the far-right base, which becomes primed for pronouncements of those like Trump and Cruz, while the success of Trump and Cruz in early polls pulls the field further right, thus closing the circle. Behind it all is a story about what America is — and about who Americans are. Nor did nativist fears of in-assimilation and conspiracy disappear from the culture wars between 2006 and 2016; they swirled around President Obama's executive actions on immigration as well.

EXECUTIVE ORDER AND THE CULTURAL AND RELIGIOUS “OTHER”

As Bellah articulated it, the American civil religion should be prophetic — it should continuously strive to bring Americans back to the highest ideals of the creed: freedom, equality, and democracy. It was by articulating that kind of civil religion that Martin Luther King Jr. became one of America's greatest prophets. On the other hand, as Bellah says, “A return to primordial loyalties in the face of cultural and social breakdown can be defensive, based more on fear than joyous reaffirmation” (Bellah [Reference Bellah1975] 1992, 109). That kind of defensive fear, clearly, is what drives Buchanan's, Trump's, and Cruz's war-talk — if not their own fears, at least the fears of the base that they court. Furthermore, according to the skillful analyses of Rhys H. Williams, Professor and Department Chair in Sociology at Loyola University in Chicago, this same sort of fear of the religious and cultural “other” in America has driven immigration debates to the forefront of the culture wars during the Obama presidency.

In the 1890s, 1910s–1920s, and the 1960s, immigration reform issues were central to American domestic policy debates, leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act, the national origins quota system, and the Hart-Cellar Act. Since Vietnam those domestic policy debates came to be dominated by the culture wars. The culture wars tended to focus on issues of gender, abortion, and gay rights, and: Patrick J. Buchanan was one of the right's most fierce early partisans in those battles. Now, in the first decades of the 21st century, immigration has joined gender and sexuality as a core issue in the culture wars. Further, according to Williams, the rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric correlates in important ways with increasingly virulent anti-Obama sentiment among conservatives.

Recall Buchanan's fears — President Barack Hussein Obama, Williams argues, literally embodies these fears:

Thus, the source of the most aggressive anti-Obama rhetoric may be not simply (or perhaps even primarily) about policy disagreements. In fact, President Obama has proven to be a moderate Democrat who has betrayed his more far-left early supporters on a range of issues. Many among the far right fear Obama not simply due to his policies, Williams argues, but on the basis of a long-running narrative about national identity.

Yet concerns about the president's identity, policy disagreements, and the nativist rhetoric of national identity do crystallize on one issue — immigration policy — and the most striking and visible nexus of those concerns is easily President Obama's Immigration Accountability Executive Action, announced November 20^th, 2014. Opponent of Obama's executive action on immigration label it illegal, an unconstitutional over-reach, amnesty, and — at least according to Charles Krauthammer (Reference Krauthammer2014) — “impeachment bait.” In fact, it is none of these.

First, the Immigration Accountability Executive Action does not grant undocumented immigrants blanket amnesty from prosecution. Instead, it temporarily removes the threat of prosecution from certain categories of immigrants: undocumented parents of children born in the US; those in the country for five years or more who have not committed a crime; and those brought to the country illegally while they were children. This accounts for less than half of all undocumented immigrants in the country at the time of the orders (Ehrenfreund Reference Ehrenfreund2014). Importantly, furthermore, this is not the same as granting undocumented immigrants legal status by executive fiat — it is a temporary reprieve from the threat of deportation set to last for three years and easily reversed.

Second, since the action does not grant legal status to undocumented immigrants, it does not unconstitutionally change the law of the land, as critics charge. Instead, the action is “based on longstanding legal precedents that give the executive branch the right to exercise ‘prosecutorial discretion’ in how it enforces the laws” (Shear, Preston, Parker Reference Shear, Preston and Parker2014). In other words, the executive branch of the government is tasked with enforcing the laws of the land, and law enforcement has always had the discretion of choosing where to focus limited resources. And the need to prioritize resources is real: “There are 11.5 million people in this country who are already technically in violation of immigration law,” notes John Sandweg, former acting general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security. “In 2012 ICE removed approximately 400,000 individuals — the highest total in the government's history of removals” (Sargent Reference Sargent2014).

Still the fact remains that while conservative voices called for the government to “secure the border” the President took what many considered unilateral action to defer prosecution and deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. That issue could not have been more symbolic for many of those opposed to Latin American and Muslim immigration, says Williams:

Ultimately, therefore, whether the move is legal or not is beside the point. For nativist civil religion, Obama's failure to secure the border — nay, even his unilateral move to open it wider than ever — is just the latest move in the plot between Mexican officials, global elites, Islamist Jihadists, and American elites to destroy all that makes America great.

Rush Limbaugh — who regularly stresses President Obama's “otherness” by emphasizing his middle name, leaning in for “Barack Hussein Obama” — stresses that conservatives of his stripe do not hate immigrants:

Of course, President Obama enacted the Immigration Accountability Executive Action precisely for the purpose of prioritizing enforcement resources given the sheer number of undocumented immigrants currently in the country. Yet, Limbaugh has a more serious concern than law enforcement resources:

According to Limbaugh, the 2014 Immigration Accountability Executive Action is part the same old elitist plot to transform the nation and undermine American greatness — in this case, by bringing into the United States more and more immigrants who have no interest in assimilating but who will vote Democrat. And, if Buchanan is to be believed, they will ultimately transform America into something unrecognizable.

Michelle Bachman has echoed the same sentiment, accusing the president of granting amnesty to millions of “unskilled, illiterate” new Democratic voters: “Even though the president says they won't be able to vote, we all know that many, in all likelihood, will vote” (Costa Reference Costa2014). Sean Hannity, too, falsely calls the executive action “amnesty,” which allows Hannity to claim that with the executive action “Obama will be unilaterally creating laws” (Hannity Reference Hannity2014). And according to Bill O'Reilly, “the issue is not really about the five million undocumented human beings it's about President Obama challenging the constitution” (O'Reilly Reference O'Reilly2014).

Here we should note that the point is not whether Limbaugh and the other commentators are nativist in the same way that Buchanan explicitly is. Nor is the point really that they are factually wrong. Rather, like Trump, Cruz, and Carson, these commentators tap into a constellation of rhetoric that is grounded in a particular, civil-religious mythology of chosenness, national identity, and manifest destiny that they deploy to inflame fellow partisans for political ends. Limbaugh, Bachman, Hannity, and O'Reilly seem to willfully miss the point that the President's executive order in no way changes immigration law — it only tries to prioritize law enforcement resources and ease immigrant fears by making clear that, for three years at least, the US will dedicate resources by not acting against certain clearly defined immigrant populations. The action is well within the President's constitutionally granted powers as the head of the Executive Branch tasked with enforcing the laws and determining law enforcement priorities. The rhetoric notwithstanding, the executive order in no way grants amnesty from US laws, nor does it somehow seek to change the Constitution. The real fear, therefore, seems to be that America's cultural character is changing too rapidly, or that elitists are changing the country against the wishes of the people. Both of these fears echo Buchanan's rhetoric, and those fears are again exploited by some (though certainly not all) Republican presidential contenders.

Yet that rhetoric of fear for political ends may well backfire, just as it did for the Federalists in the case of Irish immigration in the 1790s. Many Latin American immigrants are fleeing economic oppression and many Muslim immigrants and refugees are fleeing political conflicts, in both cases a parallel to the plight of the Irish in the 18th century. Like the Irish, too, both of these groups are all too often painted as being part of a foreign conspiracy — and like the Irish, both of these groups are, at least in principle, capable of assimilation.

With these parallels noted, however, it is important to note a key dissimilarity. The Irish, for all their religious and cultural differences from the Anglo-Saxon majority of the time, shared one crucial attribute with them: the color of their skin. Still, as Ignatiev (Reference Ignatiev1995, 59) points out, “while the white skin made the Irish eligible for membership in the white race, it did not guarantee their admission; they had to earn it” — and the Irish were able to assert their “whiteness” in part because it was politically expedient for some powerful American interests to recruit them to help maintain the institution of slavery. “The need to gain the loyalty of the Irish explains why the Democratic party [in opposition to the Federalists in the 18th and 19th centuries], on the whole, rejected nativism. It also explains why not merely slavery but the color line became important to it” (Ignatiev Reference Ignatiev1995, 69). So it seems that there was a tension between nativism and ethno-centrism in the 18th and 19th century not as easily seen today.

This also shows how concerns of political power as well as civil-religious mythology are always at play in these issues. The Irish were made “white” to help counter anti-slavery forces as well as to consolidate Democratic votes against the Federalists, who had stoked anti-Irish fears in the first place — until, in the end, “the Federalists’ suspicion of immigrants brought about the very result they wished to prevent” (Ignatiev Reference Ignatiev1995, 66). And here we find one last parallel. In the 21st century, even as culture war politics and fear of immigrant “invasions” enflame the far-right base and stoke militaristic rhetoric, Republican strategists warn that alienating Hispanics could well serve only to lose elections.