America for Americans

Historian Erika Lee argues that xenophobia, an ideology rooted in the fear and hatred of foreigners, is not an aberration in American history but an enduring tradition that has coexisted with the nation's identity as a "nation of immigrants." Drawing on archival research spanning the colonial era to the present, Lee traces how successive waves of immigrants have been demonized, restricted, and expelled, with race serving as the single most important factor in determining which groups are targeted. She contends that xenophobia is a form of racism rooted in the enslavement of Africans and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and that it has shaped American capitalism, democracy, and foreign relations across centuries.

Lee opens with a visit to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island during the summer of 2016, juxtaposing the celebratory narrative of American immigration with the xenophobic campaign rhetoric of Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, who targeted Muslims and Mexicans. She draws on her own family history as the descendant of Chinese immigrants, including a grandfather who entered with false papers and was detained at San Francisco's Angel Island immigration station under the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The historical narrative begins in colonial Pennsylvania, where Benjamin Franklin, a prominent political leader, complained in 1755 that "swarthy" German immigrants were too numerous, could not assimilate, and threatened English language and governance. Germans were the colonies' largest non-British white community, actively recruited by colonial officials to expand settlement. Pennsylvania authorities regulated German immigration through passenger lists, loyalty oaths, and an immigrant registry, yet these measures facilitated naturalization rather than restricting immigration, because Germans were needed as white settlers. The Seven Years' War (1756-1763) hardened racial boundaries, uniting diverse Europeans under the category of "white" in opposition to Native Americans. The 1790 Naturalization Act codified racial inequality nationally by restricting citizenship to "free white persons," a barrier not fully removed until 1952.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Catholic immigrants from Ireland became the primary target. The Great Potato Famine (1846-1855) killed over a million people and drove 2.1 million abroad, making the Irish the largest immigrant group of the 1840s. Protestant leaders launched a crusade framing Catholic immigration as a conspiracy orchestrated by the pope to destroy American democracy. The Irish were racialized as biologically inferior through pseudoscientific theories, and the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, known as the Know Nothing Party, emerged as the first organized political movement built on xenophobia. In Massachusetts, Know Nothings swept the 1854 elections and forcibly removed over 15,000 immigrants from the state. The slavery question destroyed the party by 1860, but its brand of political xenophobia endured.

Lee then turns to the anti-Chinese movement, which made race the central axis of American xenophobia. Chinese immigrants, recruited for the California gold rush and the transcontinental railroad, numbered about 63,000 by 1870. Anti-Chinese rhetoric explicitly grouped all European immigrants as "our own people" for the first time, expanding the boundaries of whiteness while sharpening the line against Asians. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 became the first federal law to ban an entire group based on race and national origin, establishing the first federal immigration inspectors and deportation procedures and defining undocumented immigration as a crime. Anti-Chinese violence accompanied the law, with mobs forcibly expelling entire Chinese communities in cities like Tacoma and Seattle, Washington. Chinese immigration fell from 39,579 in 1882 to just 10 in 1887. The act lasted 61 years and became a global template for restrictive immigration policies.

The Immigration Restriction League, founded in 1894 by Harvard-educated Boston elites, used eugenics to argue that "new" immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were innately inferior to "old" immigrants from northern and western Europe. Eugenicist Madison Grant's 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race became the movement's seminal text, and anti-Semitism intensified through publications like industrialist Henry Ford's newspaper the Dearborn Independent. The Immigration Act of 1924 slashed annual immigration to 155,000, set quotas favoring northwestern Europe, and barred Asian immigrants. Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany, praised the act and described Grant's book as "my bible." When Jewish refugees fled Nazi persecution in the 1930s, the United States largely refused them entry.

Lee devotes a chapter to the mass deportation and repatriation of Mexicans during the Great Depression. Although much of the American Southwest had belonged to Mexico until the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexican Americans became "foreigners in their native land" through land dispossession and racial segregation. Between 1900 and 1930, 1.5 million Mexicans migrated north, recruited by employers who praised them as uniquely suited for demanding labor. The Immigration Act of 1929 made undocumented entry a criminal offense, disproportionately affecting Mexicans who had crossed informally for decades. From 1929 to 1935, the federal government deported 82,400 Mexicans. Local repatriation programs coerced families to leave through deception, making no distinction between undocumented immigrants, legal residents, and US-born citizens: 60 percent of those removed were American citizens by birth.

The incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II forms another chapter. Anti-Japanese xenophobia long predated the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, authorized the forced removal and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of them US citizens, in camps surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers. The Supreme Court upheld these actions in Korematsu v. United States (1944). Simultaneously, the US government deported 2,264 Japanese Latin Americans from 12 countries, classifying them as "illegal aliens" upon arrival despite having forcibly transported them.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the national origins quotas but inaugurated what Lee calls color-blind xenophobia, in which race-neutral language justifies policies that still disproportionately impact nonwhite immigrants. Conservative lawmakers forced the first-ever numerical cap on Western Hemisphere immigration, intending to restrict Latin American migration. The act's consequences diverged from predictions: European immigration fell while Asian and Latin American immigration surged. The near-simultaneous end of the bracero program, a federal initiative that brought Mexican agricultural workers north on temporary visas, and the new 20,000-per-country cap dramatically reduced legal Mexican migration, producing massive visa backlogs and a surge in undocumented immigration.

Lee traces the escalating "war on illegal immigration" from the 1990s onward. California's Proposition 187 (1994) proposed denying all public benefits to undocumented immigrants; though ruled largely unconstitutional, its ideology became federal policy under President Bill Clinton, whose 1996 immigration laws expanded deportable offenses and merged criminal and immigration law. Deportations rose from 29,000 per year in the 1975-1995 period to over 400,000 by 2012, and under President Barack Obama, 5.2 million were deported over eight years. Border militarization accelerated under both parties, diverting migration to deadly desert routes.

Islamophobia forms another major thread. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the government launched what experts call "the most aggressive national campaign of ethnic profiling since World War II." Trump exploited anti-Muslim sentiment throughout his 2016 campaign, and his Executive Order 13769, signed in January 2017, banned nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries. The Supreme Court upheld a revised version in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), formally overruling Korematsu but, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued in dissent, merely replacing "one 'gravely wrong' decision with another."

In a concluding chapter and epilogue, Lee argues that xenophobia threatens American democracy by enabling constitutional violations, de-Americanizing long-term residents, and elevating white supremacy. The epilogue examines how the COVID-19 pandemic intensified xenophobia: Trump's repeated use of "Chinese virus" correlated with spikes in anti-Asian hate incidents, and the administration enacted 63 immigration-related actions in six months. The March 2021 mass shooting that killed six Asian women in greater Atlanta underscored the intersection of racism and misogyny that has placed Asian women at disproportionate risk of violence throughout American history. Lee concludes with cautious hope, noting President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s immediate policy reversals and growing cross-racial coalitions, but warns that xenophobia remains one of America's enduring preexisting conditions.