Changing Perspectives from Eurocentric Nativism to a Cosmopolitan View
©
by Patrick M. Kane Ph.D.
Immigration studies and its history are central to the
discussion of the United States and North American history. Immigration, both free and unfree, is also
central to the understanding of modern world history and America is a central
part of this history. Immigration
studies are also charged with historical claims and narratives that were
formerly framed on the centrality of European immigration in the making of the
United States. This older view of
history held a central place in the myth making of an ethnocentric Anglo elite
who were upheld as the model for nation-building from the arrival of the
Pilgrims and their successors in New England, and of English colonists in
Virginia. From the perspective of the 21st
century this simplified view would not at first seem so plausible. Yet, the rhetorical nature of the current US
presidential campaign with regards to immigration policies along the Mexican
border, or those of the Muslim faith suggest that the claim to a simpler or
Nativist view of immigration is still very much at issue.
The politics and history of immigration policy places
the history student at the crossroads of the older Eurocentric, or what
contemporaries called a Nativist view of entitlement and the development of
racial policies that excluded others. As
Peter Schrag has shown, from colonial times, American immigration was subjected
to racial and religious prejudices and attempts at exclusionary restrictions (Schrag 2011). Since the passage
of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1789 attempts to limit or control the nature
of immigration have been political issues.
These laws were somewhat relaxed or left unenforced as the continental
system expanded to the West. But after
the West was largely absorbed within the United States, the exclusion of large
groups of Asian, East European and most other non-white and non-Western
European immigrants became policy beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of
1882, and the preference for white
European immigration through the quota system of the 1952 Immigration and
Nationality Act (Daniels 2004). The persistence of
racism in American immigration and wider culture forces the historian and
history student to confront the problem of the recurring resort to Nativism. It was the Nativist 19th century
ideology that gave rise to the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, the forerunner
of the Republican Party, and the revival of Nativists within the Republican
party in the 1950s enshrined the last of the preferential Western European
immigration quota laws in 1952 during the Eisenhower administration. This
movement went hand-in-hand with segregation and Jim Crow laws of the American
South in the same period, but it had also allowed for the forced interment into
concentration camps and confiscation of property of Japanese Americans in World
War II.
We now know and acknowledge that this older view of
history, what I refer to as a Nativist or Eurocentric view, needs to be reread
and openly discussed in view of the realities of the immigration of prehistorical
periods, the movements of the first peoples or Native Americans, the forced
immigration of millions of slaves from Africa, and the significance of Asian
immigrants of the 19th and 20th centuries. Also integral to the history of American
history is the existence of Mexican and Hispanic or Latino populations that
preceded their absorption into the United States and what I refer to as a
natural economy of movement and immigration that exist in land-based or
continental territories and empires, like that found in North America.
In appealing for
a cosmopolitan view of immigration, I’d suggest that this approach allows us to
give greater weight to the longer trajectories of migration patterns, as in the
history of Native American populations and settlements that settled and
developed significant population centers and civilizations as at Cahokia near
St. Louis (600-1400 AD), and that had long-distance trade networks connected
with the central Mexican trading empires.
Such an approach would allow us to carry this forward to study the
significance of Mexican populations, town settlements and early state
formations underway in Texas and California prior to the aggressive expansion
of the United States as it absorbed the Southwest into its continental
state-formation. Another fruitful
approach is to study the interaction of Comanche, Apache and Mexican settlers
in the 19th century. The
changed realities of these regional towns and settlements differs dramatically
from the earlier conquistador model of settlement and conquest that led to
altering periods of eradication and rebellion as in the Pueblo Revolts of the
17th century. The history of this is admirably analyzed by Andrés
Reséndez who shows that the reliance, cooperation and ultimately rivalry
between Anglos and Mexicanos from the 1820s through the 1840s is far more
complex than the simple narrative of pioneers and rise of the Republic that
dominated the older histories of this period (Reséndez 2004). The existence of a bilingual English and
Spanish newspaper in Monterey, California in the 1850s attests to this as well.
The longer history of the American Southwest as a region of considerable flow
and movement of populations in a north-south pattern is still understudied, but
has received considerable attention in the wake of the extensive Bracero oral history project on the post-World
War II Bracero labor program.
The notion of the African Diaspora as a way of
reframing the history of slavery as part of immigrant history is necessarily a
part of this needed revision. Edouard
Glissant (1928-2011) was a writer from Martinique who examined the phenomenon
of African diaspora in the Caribbean islands.
In his series of books, poems and novels he explored the depths of
African culture and its adaptation within the Americas. He advanced the notion of creolization as a
paradigm for describing the transformation of African culture in the
Americas. Glissant proposed that
creolization, was a process of cultural fusion among slaves who retained key
elements of traditions and culture that resonated through religious, social and
linguistic formation in the Caribbean and Atlantic colonies (Glissant
1989). Rather than accept a simple subordination of
the entire Atlantic World to the supremacy of European rule, scholars and
critics of cultural studies showed how slaves themselves created a new culture
of their own. Slaves from Africa did not
remain passive but brought and retained cultural influence and philosophies.
The life of Olaudah Equiano (1745-1798), who was captured from the Igbo region
of the West African coast and brought as a slave to the Caribbean, but who
gained his freedom and became an eloquent spokesman for abolition in late 18th
century London, illustrates this capacity (Equiano 1789). The Trans-Atlantic Slavery Database project is highly recommended for students.
Patrick Manning's studies of African history and his
recent, The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture (2010), situates
the influence of Africans throughout the modern world (Manning 2010). He argues that Africans like Olaudah Equiano,
many of them former slaves, became important agents for social change and
transformation who influenced efforts to abolish slavery in the 19th century. The reason we found multiple movements toward
the abolition of slavery in the early to mid 19th century in Britain, the US,
Russia and the Ottoman Empire, was a product of the diaspora and rise of
prominent and articulate Africans to positions of prominence and influence
within those countries. Here, the role
of Frederick Douglas as the intellectual of anti-slavery resistance as well as
a representative of the new realities of internal migration or internal
immigration from the South to the North, may be studied as a new type of
intellectual and a new type of internal immigrant.
With an expansive historical consciousness, it is
possible to provide greater depth of appreciation for all forms and origins of
immigrant experiences. The many problems
of absorbing Swedish and other non-English immigrants into a newly
industrialized economy and expansive continental system were given poignant
literary form in the late 19th century writer, Stephen Crane’s The
Blue Hotel (Crane 1899)[1].
From the classical studies of European and other immigration by Oscar
Handlin (Handlin 1951), to digital resources and databases on American immigration, there are numerous outlets for
students to pursue in their studies and projects for understanding the making
of American society as an ongoing process that was never static or fixed. In many ways popular culture and society are
better ways to find the actual responses and trends in ethnic or immigrant life
and society in American history. Amid
the racism and prevalent segregation of the 1950s, musicals and films like the
suppressed film, Salt of the Earth (1954), and the highly popular Flower Drum Song
(1958) or West Side Story (1961) broke barriers by centering main
characters as Mexican-American workers, or Chinese and Puerto Rican established
immigrants or children of immigrants.
Yet much more remains to be done and with a philosophy
that is cognizant of the pitfalls of Nativism and other forms of historical
abuse. The dangerous revival of the older Nativist or Eurocentric approach to
immigration studies have been given timely reassessment in a recent study, White
Backlash: Immigration, Race and American
Politics (Abrajano, Marisa; Hajnal, Zoltan L. 2015). As Abrajano and Hajnal note, the number of
immigrants to the United States since 2000 is about forty million, when
counting both documented and undocumented immigrants, so that fully one in four
of all Americans are now immigrants or their children. This has led to a polarized division in the
electorate, that the authors label the white backlash that has realigned itself
with the Republican party, while those of the new immigrant affiliate
themselves with the Democratic Party.
While I personally, need to read further of this analysis and certainly
cannot predict the future, this trend raises familiar but highly worrisome
lessons from the Nativist policies of the 19th and 20th
century. Their central thesis and
conclusion that immigration will be the overriding issue in American politics
for the foreseeable future should also situate the importance of immigration
for scholars and students of American history and related fields.
Bibliography
Abrajano, Marisa; Hajnal, Zoltan L. 2015.
White Backlash: Immigration, Race, and American Politics. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Crane, Stephen. 1899. “The Blue Hotel.”
In Complete Works of Stephen Crane, by Stephen Crane. Delphi Classics.
Daniels, Roger. 2004. Guarding the
Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882. New
York: Hill and Wang.
Equiano, Olaudah. 1789. The
Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the
African. Written by Himself (1789). Online edition from University of
North Carolina. London. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/equiano1/summary.html.
Glissant, Eduoard. 1989. Caribbean
Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesvile, VA: University of Virginia
Press.
Handlin, Oscar. 1951. The Uprooted:
The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People.
Boston: Little, Brown.
Manning, Patrick. 2010. The African
Diaspora: A History Through Culture . New York: Columbia University
Press.
Reséndez, Andrés. 2004. Changing
National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Schrag, Peter. 2011. Not Fit for Our
Society: Immigration and Nativism in America. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
[1]
After a reading of The Blue Hotel, a student of American history may note the ironic arrogance in the
anti-immigrant rhetoric of Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate,
who in his autobiography claims some Swedish heritage.
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