Asia-Pacific Australia Many Australians opposed the influx of Chinese immigrants at time of the nineteenth-century gold rushes. When the separate Australian colonies formed the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, the new nation adopted "
White Australia" as one of its founding principles. Under the White Australia policy, entry of Chinese and other Asians remained controversial until well
after World War II, although the country remained home to many long-established Chinese families dating from before the adoption of White Australia. By contrast, most
Pacific Islanders were deported soon after the policy was adopted, while the remainder were forced out of the canefields where they had worked for decades. Antipathy of native-born white Australians toward British and Irish immigrants in the late 19th century was manifested in a new party, the
Australian Natives' Association. Since early 2000, opposition has mounted to
asylum seekers arriving in boats from Indonesia.
Pakistan The Pakistani
province of
Sindh has seen nativist movements, promoting control for the
Sindhi people over their homeland. After the 1947
Partition of India, large numbers of
Muhajir people migrating from India entered the province, becoming a majority in the provincial capital city of
Karachi, which formerly had an ethnically Sindhi majority. Sindhis have also voiced opposition to the promotion of
Urdu, as opposed to their native tongue,
Sindhi. These nativist movements are expressed through
Sindhi nationalism and the
Sindhudesh separatist movement. Nativist and nationalist sentiments increased greatly after the
independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971.
Taiwan Taiwan nativist literature (鄉土文學) is a genre of
Taiwanese literature that was born in the 1920s, the
Taiwan under Japanese rule. Taiwan nativist literature was suppressed by the rise of
Japanese fascism in 1937, and after the
surrender of Japan, it was suppressed by the
White Terror of the Chinese Nationalist Party (
Kuomintang) and began to gain attention again in the 1970s. After the
Chinese Civil War, Taiwan became a sanctuary for Chinese nationalists who followed a Western ideology, fleeing from communists. The new arrivals governed through the Kuomintang until the 1970s. Taiwanese identity constructed through literature in the post-civil war period led to the gradual acceptance of Taiwan's unique political destiny. This led to a peaceful transition of power from the Kuomintang to the
Democratic Progressive Party in the 2000s. A-chin Hsiau (Author of Politics and Cultural Nativism) claims the origins of
Taiwanese national identity to the 1970s, when youth activism transformed society, politics and culture which some are still present.
Americas Brazil The Brazilian elite desired the
racial whitening of the country, similarly to
Argentina and
Uruguay. The country encouraged European immigration, but non-white immigration always faced considerable backlash. On 28 July 1921, representatives Andrade Bezerra and Cincinato Braga proposed a law whose Article 1 provided: "The immigration of individuals from the black race to Brazil is prohibited." On 22 October 1923, representative Fidélis Reis produced another bill on the entry of immigrants, whose fifth article was as follows: "The entry of settlers from the black race into Brazil is prohibited. For Asian [immigrants] there will be allowed each year a number equal to 5% of those residing in the country.(...)". In the 19th and 20th centuries, there were negative feelings toward the communities of
German,
Italian,
Japanese, and
Jewish immigrants, who conserved their languages and cultures instead of adopting Portuguese and
Brazilian habits (so that nowadays, Brazil has the most communities in the Americas of
Venetian speakers, and the second-most of German), and were seen as particularly likely to form ghettos and to have high rates of
endogamy (in Brazil, it is regarded as usual for people of different backgrounds to marry), among other concerns. It affected the Japanese more harshly, because they were Asian, and thus seen as an obstacle to the whitening of Brazil.
Oliveira Viana, a Brazilian jurist, historian and sociologist described the Japanese immigrants as follows: "They (Japanese) are like sulfur: insoluble". The Brazilian magazine
O Malho in its edition of December 5, 1908 issued criticised the Japanese immigrants in the following quote: "The government of São Paulo is stubborn. After the failure of the first Japanese immigration, it contracted 3,000 yellow people. It insists on giving Brazil a race diametrically opposite to ours". In 1941 the Brazilian minister of justice,
Francisco Campos, defended the ban on the admission of 400 Japanese immigrants into São Paulo writing: "their despicable standard of living is a brutal competition with the country's worker; their selfishness, their bad faith, their refractory character, make them a huge ethnic and cultural cyst located in the richest regions of Brazil". During World War II they were seen as more loyal to their countries of origin than to Brazil. In fact, there were violent revolts in the Japanese community of the states of
São Paulo and
Paraná when
Emperor Hirohito declared the Japanese surrender and stated that he was not really a deity, which news was seen as a conspiracy perpetrated in order to hurt Japanese honour and strength. Nevertheless, it followed hostility from the government. The Japanese Brazilian community was strongly marked by restrictive measures when Brazil declared war against Japan in August 1942. Japanese Brazilians could not travel the country without
safe conduct issued by the police; over 200 Japanese schools were closed and radio equipment was seized to prevent transmissions on short wave from Japan. The goods of Japanese companies were confiscated and several companies of Japanese origin suffered restrictions, including the use of the newly founded Banco América do Sul.
Japanese Brazilians were prohibited from driving motor vehicles (even if they were taxi drivers), buses or trucks on their property. The drivers employed by Japanese had to have permission from the police. Thousands of Japanese immigrants were arrested or expelled from Brazil on suspicion of espionage. There were many anonymous denunciations because of "activities against national security" arising from disagreements between neighbours, recovery of debts and even fights between children. a subsequent debate in the population was concerned with the reasons why Brazil has such lax laws and enforcement concerning illegal immigration. According to the 1988's
Brazilian Constitution, it is an unbailable crime to address someone in an offensive racist way, and it is illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of his or her race, skin colour, national or regional origin or nationality; thus, nativism and opposition to multiculturalism would be too much of a polemic and delicate topic to be openly discussed as a basic ideology for even the most right-leaning modern
political parties.
Canada Throughout the 19th century, well into the 20th, the
Orange Order in Canada attacked and tried to politically defeat the Irish Catholics. In the
British Empire, traditions of
anti-Catholicism in Britain led to fears that Catholics were a threat to the national (British) values. In Canada, the Orange Order campaigned vigorously against the Catholics throughout the 19th century, often with violent confrontations. Both sides were immigrants from Ireland and neither side claimed loyalty to Canada. The
Ku Klux Klan spread in the mid-1920s from the U.S. to parts of Canada, especially
Saskatchewan, where it helped topple the Liberal government. The Klan creed was, historian Martin Robin argues, in the mainstream of Protestant Canadian sentiment, for it was based on "Protestantism, separation of Church and State, pure patriotism, restrictive and selective immigration, one national public school, one flag and one language—English." In
World War I, Canadian naturalized citizens of German or Austrian origins were stripped of their
right to vote, and tens of thousands of Ukrainians (who were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire)
were rounded up and put in internment camps. Hostility to the Chinese and other Asians was intense, and involved provincial laws that hindered immigration of Chinese and Japanese and blocked their economic mobility.
In 1942 Japanese Canadians were forced into detention camps in response to Japanese aggression in World War II. Hostility of native-born Canadians to competition from English immigrants in the early 20th century was expressed in signs that read, "No English Need Apply!" The resentment came because the immigrants identified more with England than with Canada. '', August 9, 1899, by
J. S. Pughe. Angry
Uncle Sam sees hyphenated voters (including an
Irish-American, a
German-American, a
French-American, an
Italian-American, and a
Hungarian-American) and demands, "Why should I let these freaks cast whole votes when they are only half Americans?"
United States According to the American historian
John Higham, nativism is: an intense opposition to an internal minority on the grounds of its foreign (i.e., "un-American") connections. Specific nativist antagonisms may and do, vary widely in response to the changing character of minority irritants and the shifting conditions of the day; but through each separate hostility runs the connecting, energizing force of modern nationalism. While drawing on much broader cultural antipathies and ethnocentric judgments, nativism translates them into zeal to destroy the enemies of a distinctively American way of life.
Colonial era There was nativism in the
colonial era shown by English colonists (who comprised most of the 17th century primary settlers) against the
Palatine German immigrants in the
Pennsylvania Colony.
Benjamin Franklin questioned about allowing Palatine refugees to settle in Pennsylvania. He was concerned about the potential consequences of their arrival, particularly regarding the preservation of Pennsylvania's English identity and heritage. He questioned whether it was prudent for a colony established by English settlers to be overwhelmed by newcomers who might not integrate into English culture and language.
Early republic Nativism was a political factor in the 1790s and in the 1830s–1850s. Nativism became a major issue in the late 1790s, when the
Federalist Party expressed its strong opposition to the
French Revolution by trying to strictly limit immigration, and stretching the time to 14 years for citizenship. At the time of the
Quasi-War with the
French First Republic in 1798, the Federalists and Congress passed the
Alien and Sedition Acts, including the Alien Act, the Naturalization Act and the Sedition Act.
Thomas Jefferson and
James Madison fought against the new laws by drafting the
Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. In 1800, Jefferson was elected president, and removed most of the anti-immigrant legislation.
1830–1860 '', an
anti-Catholic caricature by the
Ku Klux Klan-affiliate
Alma White (1943), founder and bishop of the
Pillar of Fire Church The term "nativism" was first used by 1844: "Thousands were Naturalized expressly to oppose Nativism, and voted the Polk ticket mainly to that end." Nativism gained its name from the "Native American" parties of the 1840s and 1850s. In this context "Native" does not mean
Indigenous Americans or
American Indians but rather descendants of the inhabitants of the original
Thirteen Colonies. It impacted politics in the mid-19th century because of the large inflows of immigrants after 1845 from cultures that were different from the existing American culture. Nativists objected primarily to
Germans, and to the
Irish Roman Catholics because of their loyalty to the
Pope and also because of their supposed rejection of
republicanism as an American ideal. Under the Polk administration, "nativism was flourishing in the United States, and immigrants, especially Germans, had to suffer many indignities." While the U.S. military was expanding under the President's policy of
Manifest Destiny and the
Mexican War in 1846, the military became a refuge from nativism, ignoring it altogether. Nearly half of the 30,000 men in the regular army, and a good portion of the 74,000 volunteers were immigrants, mostly Irish and German. Nativist movements included the
Know Nothing or "American Party" of the 1850s, the
Immigration Restriction League of the 1890s, the anti-Asian movements in the
Western states, resulting in the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the "
Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907", by which the government of
Imperial Japan stopped
emigration to the United States.
Labor unions were strong supporters of Chinese exclusion and limits on immigration, because of fears that they would lower wages and make it harder for workers to organize unions. Nativist outbursts occurred in
the Northeast from the 1830s to the 1850s, primarily in response to a surge of Irish Catholic immigration. In 1836,
Samuel Morse ran unsuccessfully for
Mayor of New York City on a nativist ticket, receiving 1,496 votes. In
New York City, an Order of United Americans was founded as a nativist fraternity, following the
Philadelphia Nativist Riots of the preceding spring and summer, in December 1844. The American historian
Eric Kaufmann has suggested that American nativism has been explained primarily in psychological and economic terms due to the neglect of a crucial cultural and ethnic dimension. Furthermore, Kauffman claims that American nativism cannot be understood without reference to an
American ethnic group which took shape prior to the large-scale immigration of the mid-19th century. The nativists went public in 1854 when they formed the "American Party", which was especially hostile to the immigration of Irish Catholics, and campaigned for laws to require longer wait time between immigration and naturalization; these laws never passed. It was at this time that the term "nativist" first appeared, as their opponents denounced them as "bigoted nativists". Former President
Millard Fillmore ran on the American Party ticket for the presidency in 1856.
Henry Winter Davis, an active Know-Nothing, was elected on the American Party ticket to Congress from Maryland. He told Congress the un-American Irish Catholic immigrants were to blame for the recent election of Democrat
James Buchanan as president, stating: The recent election has developed in an aggravated form every evil against which the American party protested. Foreign allies have decided the government of the country -- men naturalized in thousands on the eve of the election. Again in the fierce struggle for supremacy, men have forgotten the ban which the Republic puts on the intrusion of religious influence on the political arena. These influences have brought vast multitudes of foreign-born citizens to the polls, ignorant of American interests, without American feelings, influenced by foreign sympathies, to vote on American affairs; and those votes have, in point of fact, accomplished the present result. The American Party also included many former
Whigs who ignored nativism, and included (in
the South) a few Roman Catholics whose families had long lived in
North America. Conversely, much of the opposition to Roman Catholics came from
Protestant Irish immigrants and
German Lutheran immigrants, who were not native at all and can hardly be called "nativists." This form of
American nationalism is often identified with
xenophobia and
anti-Catholic sentiment. In
Charlestown, Massachusetts, a nativist mob
attacked and burned down a Roman Catholic convent in 1834 (no one was injured). In the 1840s, small scale riots between Roman Catholics and nativists took place in several American cities. In
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1844, for example, a series of nativist assaults on Roman Catholic churches and community centers resulted in the loss of lives and the
professionalization of the police force. In
Louisville, Kentucky, election-day rioters killed at least 22 people in attacks on German and Irish Catholics on 6 August 1855, in what became known as "
Bloody Monday." The new Republican Party kept its nativist element quiet during the 1860s, since immigrants were urgently needed for the Union Army. European immigrants from England, Scotland, and Scandinavia favored the Republicans during the
Third Party System (1854–1896), while others especially Irish Catholics and Germans, were usually Democratic. Hostility toward Asians was very strong in the Western region from the 1860s to the 1940s. Anti-Catholicism experienced a revival in the 1890s in the
American Protective Association. It was led by Protestant Irish immigrants hostile to the Irish Catholics.
Anti-German nativism From the 1840s to the 1920s,
German Americans were often distrusted because of their separatist social structure, their German-language schools, their attachment to their native tongue over English, and their neutrality during
World War I. The
Bennett Law caused a political uproar in
Wisconsin in 1890, as the state government passed a law that threatened to close down hundreds of German-language elementary schools. Catholic and Lutheran Germans rallied to defeat Governor
William D. Hoard. Hoard attacked German American culture and religion: :"We must fight alienism and selfish ecclesiasticism.... The parents, the pastors and the church have entered into a conspiracy to darken the understanding of the children, who are denied by cupidity and bigotry the privilege of even the free schools of the state." Hoard, a Republican, was defeated by the Democrats. A similar campaign in Illinois regarding the "Edwards Law" led to a Republican defeat there in 1890. In Australia thousands of Germans were put into internment camps.
Anti-Chinese nativism In the 1870s and 1880s in the
Western states, ethnic White immigrants, especially
Irish Americans and
German Americans, targeted violence against Chinese workers, driving them out of smaller towns.
Denis Kearney, an immigrant from Ireland, led a mass movement in
San Francisco in the 1870s that incited attacks on the Chinese there and threatened public officials and railroad owners. The
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first of many nativist acts of Congress which attempted to limit the flow of immigrants into the U.S.. The Chinese responded to it by filing false claims of American birth, enabling thousands of them to immigrate to California. The exclusion of the Chinese caused the western railroads to begin importing Mexican railroad workers in greater numbers ("
traqueros").
20th century In the 1890s–1920s era, nativists and labor unions campaigned for immigration restriction following the waves of workers and families from Southern and Eastern Europe, including the
Kingdom of Italy,
the Balkans,
Congress Poland,
Austria-Hungary, and the
Russian Empire. A favorite plan was the
literacy test to exclude workers who could not read or write their own foreign language. Congress passed literacy tests, but presidents—responding to business needs for workers—vetoed them. Senator
Henry Cabot Lodge argued the need for literacy tests, and described its implication on the new immigrants: {{Blockquote Responding to these demands, opponents of the literacy test called for the establishment of an immigration commission to focus on immigration as a whole. The United States Immigration Commission, also known as the
Dillingham Commission, was created and tasked with studying immigration and its effect on the United States. The findings of the commission further influenced immigration policy and upheld the concerns of the nativist movement. talking to PI reporter Robert Berman in
Seattle, Washington (circa 1923). Photograph currently preserved by the
Museum of History & Industry. Between the 1920s and the 1930s, the
Ku Klux Klan developed an explicitly nativist, pro-
Anglo-Saxon Protestant,
anti-Catholic,
anti-Irish,
anti-Italian, and
anti-Jewish stance in relation to the growing political, economic, and social uncertainty related to the
arrival of European immigrants on the American soil, predominantly composed of
Irish people,
Italians, and
Eastern European Jews. The racial concern of the anti-immigration movement was linked closely to the
eugenics movement that was sweeping in the United States during the same period. Led by Madison Grant's book,
The Passing of the Great Race nativists grew more concerned with the
racial purity of the United States. In his book, Grant argued that the American racial stock was being diluted by the influx of new immigrants from the Mediterranean, Ireland, the Balkans, and the ghettos.
The Passing of the Great Race reached wide popularity among Americans and influenced immigration policy in the 1920s. After intense lobbying from the nativist movement, the United States Congress passed the
Emergency Quota Act in 1921. This bill was the first to place numerical quotas on immigration. It capped the inflow of immigrations to 357,803 for those arriving outside of the western hemisphere. Despite the fact that Mexican people descend from actual natives to the region, when noting
Mexican immigration in the Southwest, the European-American Cold-War diplomat
George F. Kennan wrote in 2002 he saw "unmistakable evidences of a growing differentiation between the cultures, respectively, of large southern and southwestern regions of this country, on the one hand", and those of "some northern regions". In the former, he warned: {{Blockquote David Mayers argues that Kennan represented the "tradition of militant nativism" that resembled or even exceeded the Know Nothings of the 1850s.
21st century By late 2014, the "
Tea Party movement" had turned its focus away from economic issues, spending, and
Obamacare, and towards President
Barack Obama's immigration policies, which it saw as a threat to transform American society. It planned to defeat leading Republicans who supported immigration programs, such as Senator
John McCain. A typical slogan appeared in the
Tea Party Tribune: "Amnesty for Millions, Tyranny for All." The
New York Times reported: :What started five years ago as a groundswell of conservatives committed to curtailing the reach of the federal government, cutting the deficit and countering the
Wall Street wing of the Republican Party has become a movement largely against immigration overhaul. The politicians, intellectual leaders and activists who consider themselves part of the Tea Party have redirected their energy from fiscal austerity and small government to stopping any changes that would legitimize people who are here illegally, either through granting them citizenship or legal status. Political scientist and pollster
Darrell Bricker, CEO of
Ipsos Public Affairs, argues nativism is the root cause of the early 21st century wave of populism. :[T]he jet fuel that’s really feeding the populist firestorm is nativism, the strong belief among an electorally important segment of the population that governments and other institutions should honour and protect the interests of their native-born citizens against the cultural changes being brought about by immigration. This, according to the populists, is about protecting the "Real America" (or "Real Britain" or "Real Poland" or "Real France" or "Real Hungary") from imported influences that are destroying the values and cultures that have made their countries great. :Importantly, it’s not just the nativists who are saying this is a battle over values and culture. Their strongest opponents believe this too, and they are not prepared to concede the high ground on what constitutes a "real citizen" to the populists. For them, this is a battle about the rule of law, inclusiveness, open borders, and global participation. In his 2016 bid for the presidency, Republican presidential candidate
Donald Trump was accused of introducing nativist themes via his controversial stances on temporarily banning foreign Muslims from six specific countries entering the United States, and erecting a
substantial wall between the
US-Mexico border to halt
illegal immigration.
Journalist John Cassidy wrote in
The New Yorker that Trump was transforming the GOP into a populist, nativist party: :Trump has been drawing on a base of alienated
white working-class and middle-class voters, seeking to remake the G.O.P. into a more
populist, nativist, avowedly protectionist, and semi-isolationist party that is skeptical of immigration, free trade, and military interventionism. Donald Brand, a professor of political science, argues: :Donald Trump's nativism is a fundamental corruption of the founding principles of the Republican Party. Nativists champion the purported interests of American citizens over those of immigrants, justifying their hostility to immigrants by the use of derogatory stereotypes: Mexicans are rapists; Muslims are terrorists.
Language American nativists have promoted
English and deprecated the use of
German and
Spanish.
English Only proponents in the late 20th century proposed an English Language Amendment (ELA), a
Constitutional Amendment making English the official language of the United States, but it received limited political support.
Europe Following the post-1950s wave of immigration in Europe, nativism was perceived to rise. They debate the role of cultural differences, ghettos, race,
Muslim fundamentalism, poor education and poverty play in creating nativism among the hosts and a caste-type underclass, more similar to white-black tensions in the US.
France Once Italian workers in France had understood the benefit of
unionism, and French unions were willing to overcome their fear of Italians as
strikebreakers, integration was open for most Italian immigrants. The French state, which was always more of an immigration state than other
Western European nations, fostered and supported family-based immigration, and thus helped Italians on their immigration trajectory, with minimal nativism. Algerian migration to France has generated nativism, characterized by the prominence of
Jean-Marie Le Pen and his
National Front. By 2006, rising levels of antisemitism were recorded in French schools. Reports related to the tensions between the children of North African Muslim immigrants and North African Jewish children. In the first half of 2009, an estimated 631 recorded acts of antisemitism took place in France, more than the whole of 2008. Speaking to the
World Jewish Congress in December 2009, the French Interior Minister Hortefeux described the acts of antisemitism as "a poison to our republic". He also announced that he would appoint a special coordinator for fighting racism and antisemitism.
Germany For the Poles in the mining districts of western Germany before 1914, nationalism (on both the German and the Polish sides) kept Polish workers, who had established an associational structure approaching institutional completeness (churches, voluntary associations, press, even unions), separate from the host German society. Lucassen found that religiosity and nationalism were more fundamental in generating nativism and inter-group hostility than the labor antagonism.
United Kingdom The city of
London became notorious for the prevalence of nativist viewpoints in the 16th century, and conditions worsened in the 1580s. Many European immigrants became disillusioned by routine threats of assault, numerous attempts at passing legislation calling for the expulsion of foreigners, and the great difficulty in acquiring
English citizenship. Cities in the
Dutch Republic often proved more hospitable, and many immigrants left London permanently. Nativism emerged in opposition to Irish and Jewish arrivals in the early 20th century. Irish immigrants in Great Britain during the 20th century became estranged from British society, something which Lucassen (2005) attributes to the deep religious divide between
Irish Protestants and
Catholics. == See also ==