The bipartisan origins of white nationalism

Abstract

Dysfunctional immigration and border policies implemented in recent decades have accelerated growth of the Latino population and racialized its members around the trope of illegality. Since the 1960s, Republicans have cultivated White fears and resentments toward African Americans, and over time these efforts broadened to target Hispanics as well. Until 2016, this cultivation relied on a dog whistle politics of racially coded symbolic language, but with the election of Donald Trump as president, White nationalist sentiments became explicit and White nationalism emerged as an ideological pillar of the Republican Party. This volume confirms this political transformation, describing its features and documenting its consequences. In this essay, I describe the unwise U.S. immigration and border policies that were steadily promulgated and expanded over the decades by Democrats as well as Republicans, inevitably leading to the current racist and nativist moment. I close by offering a way forward by granting legal status to those who currently lack it, while simultaneously dismantling the nation’s formidable machinery of immigration and border enforcement.