Word: nativistic
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...native-born also feels the alien vibration. Alien is a dank and sinister word -- the ominous otherness, not our kind. The alien stands across a gap through which a killer wind can blow. The U.S. is being overrun, says a flickering fear. Racism in new combinations jounces around. Traditional nativist whites find themselves in the same improbable club with native American blacks condemning the brown and yellow foreigners who are taking their jobs away...
Americans alternate between hospitality and paranoia about the newcomers, between a promiscuous inclusiveness and a nativist recoil. It was different, they say, when the whole continent lay before us and needed building. The job is done. How many more can we take now? How long before all those foreigners, who have not the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in their hereditary code, who have not democracy and its disciplines (debate, voting), begin to tear out the Republic's circuit boards and leave them rotting in the yard? How long before the Third World overwhelms the First World...
...mood sometimes had its shadowed side, a touch of self-righteousness and meanness, a hint of the old nativist punitive zeal, it also showed great shine. America made a pageant of itself, erupting in a procession of spectacles of sudden self-celebration, all red, white and blue: the political conventions a turbulent sea of Old Glories, the campaign (the Reagan campaign, anyway) a triumphal masterpiece of the politics of mood. Walter Mondale ran a depressive, cautionary race, preaching selflessness and self-denial, his speeches like the parable of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf (the savage, devouring...
American Catholicism has also undergone some profound internal changes. In the age of immigration, Catholics essentially were strangers in a predominantly Protestant land. Reacting to nativist charges that their spiritual loyalty to Rome was somehow more important than political loyalty to their new homeland, Catholic immigrants and their children sometimes attempted to be superpatriots...
...today's America of stagflation and unemployment, nativist cries to "close the borders" are drowning out Lazarus's message. Illegal immigration from Mexico and massive boatlifts of Cuban, Indo-chinese, and Haitian refugees seems to many to threaten American culture and American jobs...