National Identity in an Age of Migration

The US experience

Peter Kivisto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367025342
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134865925
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection explores, from a variety of angles, the beliefs of citizens and noncitizens about the impact that contemporary migration to the USA is having on American culture and on national solidarity. As in other liberal democracies that have experienced mass migration during the past several decades, there is considerable fear and anxiety in the USA about what newcomers are doing to the nation—economically, politically, and (especially) culturally. At the symbolic level, Americans largely embrace the idea that theirs is a nation composed of people from many different origins, but recent arrivals put to the test the extent to which the nation is actually prepared to embrace diversity.

The six empirical studies in this volume are divided between those examining how citizens respond to immigrants—including right-wing populists, pragmatic multiculturalists, and immigrant advocates—and how immigrants in turn attempt to integrate into the receiving society. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies.

Floods, Invaders, and Parasites: Immigration Threat Narratives and Right-Wing Populism in the USA, UK and Australia

Jackie Hogan & Kristin Haltinner

In the last 20 years, industrialised Western nations have witnessed a marked increase in right-wing social movements and political parties. While the origins and agendas of these groups differ in important ways, all arose in a climate of intensifying globalisation. All arose in the context of a widespread embrace of multiculturalism and cultural diversity. And all are keenly focused on the perceived threats posed by immigration. This paper examines immigration threat narratives constructed by four of these groups: the British National Party, the One Nation Party, the Tea Party Patriots, and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. Striking similarities in the narratives employed by these groups suggest the emergence of a transnational right-wing populist ‘playbook’. The paper further argues that even when the direct electoral impact of such groups is relatively small, they have the potential to substantially reshape broader political discourse and public policy.

In the last 20 years, industrialised Western nations have witnessed a marked increase in right-wing social movements and political parties: the National Front in France, the Danish People’s Party, Italy’s Northern League, Australia’s One Nation Party, Britain’s United Kingdom Independence Party and British National Party, and the Tea Party and Minutemen movements in the United States, to name just a few (Curran 2004, Atton 2006, Mughan and Paxton 2006, Mudde 2007). While the origins and agendas of these groups differ in important ways, all arose in a climate of intensifying neoliberal globalisation. All arose in the context of a widespread embrace of multiculturalism and cultural diversity. And all are keenly focused on the perceived threats posed by immigration. This paper examines immigration threat narratives constructed by four of these groups, the British National Party (BNP), the One Nation Party, the Tea Party Patriots (TPP) and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC). We find striking similarities that suggest a cross-fertilisation of ideas and rhetoric between right-wing populist groups across the globe, and the emergence of a transnational right-wing populist ‘playbook’ which can be successfully adapted and employed in a variety of national settings.

It is crucial at the outset to note that terms such as ‘populist’ and ‘right-wing’ suffer from considerable conceptual slippage. While populist movements feature a variety of demands and actors, in white-dominated societies they generally mobilise working- and middle-class whites, idealise a nostalgic past, emphasise the importance of private property and individual responsibility, and demonise labour unions and big government (Canovan 1981, p. 292, Berlet and Lyons 2000). Blee and Creasap (2010, p. 270) characterise right-wing movements as those which ‘focus directly on race/ethnicity and/or promote violence as a primary tactic or goal’. So right-wing populist parties and movements are characterised by ethnonationalist, xenophobic and anti-immigrant sentiments; an emphasis on the ‘traditional’ social order, which usually includes a tough-on-crime stance with severe penalties for those who violate the rules; and the scapegoating of perceived ‘freeloaders’ including government and intellectual elites and a non-productive welfare-dependent underclass (Mudde 2007).

The cases selected for analysis here include two social movement organisations (the MCDC and TTP in the US) and two political parties (the BNP and the One Nation Party of Australia).¹ We reject the notion of clear boundaries between social movements and political organisations and, instead, take a Weberian approach to understanding the classification of these organisations. Drawing on Weber, we argue that the boundaries between political social movements and political parties are porous. We employ Weber’s concept of ‘party’ to understand all four organisations. Weber argues that ‘parties’ are collectives who seek to acquire social power by ‘influencing social action’ (Weber 1978, p. 938). Parties take a variety of forms, from clubs and other voluntary organisations to more formal arms of the state, but they always seek power for whatever group they represent (1978). The four parties analysed here employ organised tactics to increase social, economic, and political power for white working- and middle-class members of society vis-à-vis new immigrants. Furthermore, all have influence on national political decisions and broader socio-cultural discourses. While right-wing populist parties and movements may achieve only limited direct electoral impact, such groups have the potential to significantly reshape national politics by nudging public discourses and public policy to the right.

Contexts

As Rydgren (2005) notes, while there is a tendency for analysts to regard new right-wing movements and parties (particularly on the far right) as unique phenomena growing out of specific political, social and economic conditions in each country, there are such clear commonalities between right-wing groups in diverse national contexts that the rise of these groups cannot be explained by local factors alone. Nonetheless, an examination of national contexts is crucial for understanding both the proliferation and the social and political impact of right-wing populist groups around the world. To this end, we begin with a brief review of the emergence of the BNP, the One Nation Party, and the TPP and MCDC movements.

The Rise of the British National Party

To understand the deeper roots of contemporary right-wing populism in Britain, we must consider the reach and the decline of the British Empire. During the Victorian Era, with the Empire at its zenith, Anglocentrism reached full flower in Britain as the nation took up ‘the white man’s burden’ (Kipling 1899) to civilise the ‘primitive’ races of the world. The subsequent national traumas of World War I and World War II challenged notions of natural white British superiority. In particular, losses to the Turks (conceptualised as an Asian race), the occupation of many of its Asian colonies by Japan, and massive casualties at the hands of Germany (another supposedly civilised, white Christian nation), dealt a blow to ethnonationalist self-conceptions (Hogan 2009, pp. 62–67).

In the decades following World War II, the British Empire disintegrated. First India and Pakistan broke away, then Britain’s other Southeast Asian colonies, most of its colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, Central America and the Pacific, and finally Hong Kong. This process of decolonisation brought many former colonial subjects to Britain, leading to considerable increases in both ethnic diversity and inter-ethnic conflict. The first notable clash came with the 1948 arrival of the Empire Windrush, a ship carrying some five hundred West Indian immigrants. Their arrival sparked public outrage and panicked rhetoric about an impending invasion of dark-skinned colonials stealing British jobs, increasing crime and violence, and overburdening the welfare system. It is important to note that no such outcry was sparked by issuing work permits to some three hundred thousand post-war migrants from Germany, Austria, Italy, and Belgium (Rutherford 1997). Amid mounting paranoia over the perils of non-white immigration, the 1950s saw the emergence of the Keep Britain White movement, the White Defence League, violent anti-black gangs known as the Teddy Boys, and alarmist politicians like Enoch Powell who famously warned that continued black immigration would result in ‘rivers of blood’ running through British streets (Gilroy 1987, Hogan 2009, pp. 67–68).

By the mid-1970s, growing ethnic minority communities within Britain, particularly the Afro-Caribbean and South Asian communities in urban areas, had started to gain mainstream acceptance. However, the British economy was also in decline, and the neoliberal policies implemented by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government to increase the global competitiveness of British industry, resulted in the loss of one in four of the nation’s manufacturing jobs in Thatcher’s first term alone, with still more losses resulting from subsequent privatisation and austerity policies (Chakrabortty 2011). It was in this context that Britain’s far-right National Front emerged. It gained a following predominantly among younger working-class white men in areas of high unemployment and increasing numbers of black and Asian immigrants (Ford and Goodwin 2010), but with its neo-fascist rhetoric and reputation for violence, it failed to achieve significant electoral success. As Thatcher pushed the Conservative Party increasingly towards the right, she pulled support from the National Front, further weakening the group. And in 1982 National Front leader John Tyndall defected to found the BNP.

The BNP remained a marginal force in British politics until 1999 when Nick Griffin, another former National Front member, successfully challenged Tyndall for leadership of the party. Griffin set about rebranding the BNP to make it more palatable to the electorate. In his 2005 BNP ‘manifesto’, he still pledged to halt immigration and deport many immigrants and refugees who were already in Britain (Copsey 2007). But instead of framing his arguments in the overt white supremacy of the group’s precursors, Griffin justified his policies as a way of protecting the endangered ‘indigenous’ people of Great Britain – by which he meant whites. Dropping more explicit biologically based racism, presenting the BNP’s policies as a defence of an oppressed indigenous culture, and stressing the notion of cultural incompatibility (especially between Christian democratic values and Islam) gave the group new respectability, which translated into unprecedented electoral success. While the group had won only one council seat in the 1990s, by 2003 that rose to 16 seats, and by 2006, it increased further to 46 seats (Wood and Finlay 2008). In 2001, Griffin himself won more than 16% of the vote in his parliamentary district, the largest vote ever won by a far-right party (Renton 2005).

As anti-immigration, anti-asylum and anti-Muslim sentiment gained traction (particularly in the wake of the 2005 London transit system bombings by ‘Islamic extremists’), the mainstream political parties seemed to validate BNP concerns by embracing more restrictive policies on immigration and asylum and supporting increased monitoring of Islamic groups within Britain (Renton 2005, Pitcher 2006, Richardson 2008). The rightward shift of the mainstream parties once again pulled votes away from the BNP, and in combination with a number of personal scandals and off-message inflammatory comments by BNP candidates, the party lost its electoral momentum.² Nonetheless, as we will observe in other national contexts, the real and lasting impact of this right-wing populist party has been to push both mainstream parties and public discourse towards the right, particularly on matters related to immigration and an ethnonationalist conception of the nation.

The Rise of One Nation

Australia has long suffered from what commentators have called an ‘invasion complex’ (Papastergiadis 2004, Elder 2007). When Australia gained its national independence in 1901, one of the first actions of its new federal parliament was to pass an Immigration Restriction Act to keep out ‘undesirable’ migrants, particularly the ‘Yellow Hordes’ of Asia (Mondon 2012). Fears of an Asian invasion only intensified during World War II when the Japanese came perilously close to breaching Australia’s borders. After this near-miss, national attention focused on the need to ‘populate or perish’, that is to people the nation with the ‘right’ kind of migrants to stave off any future threats from its Asian neighbours. In order to attract enough migrants, the state relaxed conceptions of whiteness to include not only Anglo-Celts and Northern Europeans, but also Southern and Eastern Europeans and even some Middle Eastern groups (Lack and Templeton 1995). While Australia accepted (and indeed courted) these immigrants in the decades following WWII, the state maintained a firmly assimilationist policy. These ‘New Australians’ might have had darker skin than previous migrants, but they were promised acceptance if they conformed to the norms of ‘white Australia’.

This assimilationist policy was challenged in the 1960s and 1970s by a growing Aboriginal rights movement, and a looming refugee crisis created by conflicts in Indo-china. As increasing numbers of ‘boat people’ arrived, the Australian state dropped its assimilationist policies and adopted official multicultural policies aimed at fostering cultural diversity and promoting equal opportunity and civic engagement for minority groups (Lack and Templeton 1995). Although this new embrace of diversity was more strongly associated with the political left, successive governments on both the left and the right framed multiculturalism not only as an appropriate way of managing a diverse population, but also as a pathway towards economic growth. Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating, in particular, promoted foreign investment and trading relationships with Asia, fuelling fears of the ‘Asianisation’ of Australia (see Blainey 1984).

Under the neoliberal policies of governments from the 1980s onward, the Australian manufacturing and agricultural sectors came into more direct competition with lower wage countries, leading to a loss of Australian manufacturing jobs and a drop in many commodity prices. These changes helped fuel debates about immigration and fears of migrants ‘stealing our jobs’ (Hogan 2009, pp. 26–32). In 1996, in a climate of backlash against multiculturalism, globalisation and relatively open immigration policies, Keating’s left-leaning Labor party lost to John Howard’s right-leaning Liberal party. One Liberal politician in particular stood out for her vitriol towards immigrants and Indigenous Australians, whom she saw as demanding special treatment and threatening to destroy Australian culture – Pauline Hanson (Curthoys and Johnson 1998, Money 1999, Curran 2004). While the Liberal party eventually dis-endorsed Hanson, her statements ignited heated national debates about race, immigration and entitlements, and about a perceived ideological gap between ‘ordinary’ Australians and ‘Chardonnay-sipping’ political and intellectual elites (Jackman 1998). Riding this wave of discontent, in 1997 Hanson formed the One Nation party, which won a remarkable 23% of the vote in the 1998 Queensland state elections, brought 11 representatives to the legislature, and attracted the support of 12% of the electorate nationally (Gibson et al. 2002).

The focus of O...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Introduction–National Identity in an Age of Migration: The US Experience
• 1. Floods, Invaders, and Parasites: Immigration Threat Narratives and Right-Wing Populism in the USA, UK and Australia
• 2. Multiculturalism as the Normative Context of Immigrant Reception: Somali Immigrant Inclusion in Lewiston, Maine
• 3. Disclaimed or Reclaimed? Muslim Refugee Youth and Belonging in the Age of Hyperbolisation
• 4. Mobilising for Immigrant Rights Online: Performing ‘American’ National Identity through Symbols of Civic-Economic Participation
• 5. Personal and Cultural Trauma and the Ambivalent National Identities of Undocumented Young Adults in the USA
• 6. Practicing Citizenship: Bolivian Migrant Identities and Spaces of Belonging in Washington DC
• Index