Word: nativistic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...extension, against Wilson. In a year when Republicans have so far stuck together like Gummi Bears, Jack Kemp and William Bennett, both ambitious men unlikely to buck their party, tried appealing to conscience. While acknowledging that illegal immigration must be stopped, they argued that Prop 187 is a nativist measure that appeals to the angry and won't fix the problem. The measure, said Kemp, would "corrode the soul of the party." Bennett warned, "It is going to label all immigrants; it is going to turn into a war of colors, a war of races -- it's bad stuff...
...Such nativist sentiments only grew after the Civil War. The once vast frontier seemed less vast, and economic recessions raised fears that cheap foreign laborers might take American jobs. There was also the openly racist argument that some newcomers, Asians especially, could not be "assimilated." In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, imposing a head tax and excluding whole categories of people -- convicts and the mentally ill, for example. For the first time there were real limits on European immigration. Twelve years later, a group calling itself the Immigration Restriction League adopted the pseudo science of eugenics...
...nativist sentiment that foreigners are somehow inferior to the American- born may be the nation's oldest and most persistent bias. (Curiously, it was not until 1850 that the U.S. Census took note of where Americans were born.) Apart from slaves, Asians (principally the Chinese) suffered most from this prejudice. Seeking fortune and escape from the turmoil of the Opium Wars, Chinese first began arriving in California during the 1840s. Initially, they were welcomed. During the 1860s, 24,000 Chinese were working in the state's gold fields, many of them as prospectors. As the ore gave out, former miners...
...story is not new. From the time Chinese Forty-Niners joined the California Gold Rush, Asians have tended to see America in terms of the old Cantonese name for San Francisco: Gao Gam Saan (Old Gold Mountain), or a land of economic opportunity above all. Nativist harassment of the newcomers, coupled with openly racist citizenship and immigration laws, encouraged the impulse to get ahead financially without bothering about assimilation into the mainstream society. Politics was something to be avoided. As an old Far Eastern maxim goes, the nail that sticks out gets hammered down...
...civil libertarian perspective on free-dom of speech misses the Nativist hegemony aspect of New Right intellectuals' smoke-and-mirror manipulation of free-speech cultural agency into hate speech. The libertarian perspective lacks a certain humane-enhancing quality, causing libertarian proponents to ignore the fact that hate speech of the Mansfield type typically traffics in four things our postmodern era everywhere generates plenty of--anxiety, insecurity, anger, and confusion...