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Phantom Menace: The Psychology Behind America's Immigration Hysteria PDF Print E-mail
Contributed by Tony Cheek   
Sunday, 02 March 2008
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Phantom Menace: The Psychology Behind America's Immigration Hysteria
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As the argument against immigration has fanned out from Arizona to other parts of the country, it has retained its original ideological structure. Anti-immigrant activists--even in states with little illegal immigration--claim that their livelihood and the safety of their homes and family have been affected in some way by illegal immigration. Bill from New Hampshire told me, "I did landscaping while I was in high school. Now they are taking all the landscaping jobs." Cina, whose county has been less affected by illegal immigration than South Carolina's coastal and northwestern counties, complains that he wouldn't be able to get a job stocking shelves in a supermarket because he would have to compete with other native-born workers who, if not for illegal immigrants, would be repairing roofs or cutting grass. But anti-immigration activists are equally insistent on the threat to the American way of life. Says former Myrtle Beach mayor Mark McBride, who also plans to challenge Lindsey Graham's reelection this year, "It's absolutely a cultural problem. If you want to come here, I believe you want to come here to be an American."

Nationally, the chief ideologues of the anti-immigration movement usually give precedence to cultural arguments over economic ones. CNN commentator Lou Dobbs warns that the United States is becoming a "Third World country." Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo laments that "we are undergoing a radical change in our national character and social structure, not to mention language. " Pat Buchanan (author of the best-selling State of Emergency) asks, "Will the American Southwest become a giant Kosovo, a part of the nation separated from the rest by language, ethnicity, history and culture, to be reabsorbed in all but name by Mexico from whom we took these lands in the time of Jackson and Polk?" Dobbs, Tancredo, and Buchanan have helped to transform what might have been a regional movement into a national one. Their names invariably come up when talking to local activists. But their advocacy doesn't entirely explain what happened.

To understand that, you have to examine the movement's historical antecedents--a strain of political protest that begins in the late Jacksonian era with the Know-Nothings and continues through the Populists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to today's anti-immigration movement. It is based on the displacement--sometimes with cause, sometimes without--of deep-seated social and economic anxieties onto an "out-group," and it is voiced most often by the "intermediate strata," the social and economic classes most threatened by the development of capitalism. In the nineteenth century, the intermediate strata comprised urban artisans and small farmers; in the twentieth century, small businessmen, farmers, and craft workers undermined by industrialization; and, more recently, workers who lack adequate technical training or whose jobs are being sent overseas. These workers have seen themselves as "producers" victimized by "parasites"--by Wall Street and big business from above and by an underclass of African Americans and immigrants from below.

Today's anti-immigration movement is rooted in these intermediate strata and in this neo-populist ideology. According to an extensive 2003 survey sponsored by Hamilton College, opponents of immigration are particularly concentrated among those who have no more than a high school diploma, make less than $50,000, and live in small towns or rural areas. According to a poll conducted in December by Democracy Corps, those who believe that "immigrants take more from our country than they give" are strongest among men between the ages of 30 and 39 without a college degree. This is a rough approximation of those Americans who work at a lower--but not the lowest--rung of blue-collar or white-collar jobs, who own very small shops or businesses, and who are most susceptible to losing their jobs or income in economic downturns or through outsourcing.
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