The Making of the American Working Class in a “Nation of Immigrants”

The current demonization, criminalization, and exclusion of migrants is not new. While immigrants have been repeatedly singled out for vicious attacks by the MAGA movement, contemporary nativists tap into and have revived a long history of American racism and xenophobia. From the brutal genocide of Native Americans and enslavement of African Americans, to the subordination of indentured servants and waves of Irish, German, Chinese, Italian, Jewish, and other Southern and Eastern European immigrants, to the dehumanization and deportation of Mexicans in the 1930s, the Bracero program and “Operation Wetback,” to the mass incarceration of the Japanese in the 1940s, all the way up to the present mass detention and deportation of migrants today, racists and nativists have a long track record of demonizing, criminalizing, and excluding those deemed as “others” by dominant groups ( Ngai, 2014 ; Ramírez, 2018 ; Beltrán, 2020 ).