THE RACIST BASE:

On April 20, President Donald Trump announced on Twitter a plan to "suspend immigration" in light of the coronavirus pandemic, setting off a policy scramble that resembled the 2017 effort to carry out his campaign calls for a "shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." By the time he sent that tweet, his administration had already spent weeks trying to rename the new coronavirus the "Chinese virus"--despite the fact that implicitly blaming Asians and Asian Americans for the spread of the virus has led to a dramatic increase in violent hate crimes.

Given Trump's track record, some Americans rightly feared that he would use the pandemic to rationalize discriminatory policies and fuel nativist rhetoric. Trump's insistence on labeling the coronavirus as foreign echoes past nativist moments when diseases such as cholera, polio, and smallpox were linked to immigrants. So what can we learn from this, and how can Americans respond? In "Resisting the Call of Nativism," we assess democracies' experiences with nativism to offer advice--and warnings--for dealing with politicians who suggest some citizens are less equal than others.

Nativists are not simply voters who favor reducing immigration or desire an official national language; those are legitimate questions on which well-meaning people might disagree. Rather, nativists believe nationality is inherently based on race, ethnicity, or religion. This understanding of who counts as a "real" citizen leads them to propose second-class citizenship for some groups and to try to keep members of those groups out of the country. Nativists reject the full democratic participation of groups they deem undesirable, treating their policy preferences and beliefs as illegitimate. For example, Trump's July 2019 tweets telling four Congresswomen to "go back [to the...] places from which they came" made a direct appeal to nativism, suggesting the Congresswomen are not real Americans because they are not white.

Of the group of primary voters who propelled Trump to the Republican nomination, 77 percent thought one must be Christian to be "truly American" and 47 percent believed one must be of European descent.

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