By Associate Professor Inéz Valdez, Department of Political Science and director of the Latino/a Studies Program

Throughout his 2016 campaign trail and during his current rallies, Donald Trump continually vilifies immigrant workers for taking Americans’ jobs and portrays (white) Americans as the victims of massive immigration. This project tracks the origins of the narrative of immigrants as threats to the white working class at the turn of the century, which back then targeted Asian immigrants, who, because of their relative “frugality,” created unfair job competition. Instead of critiquing the exploitative conditions offered by employers in a regime of imperial capitalism, white workers scapegoated workers of color. As a result, labor laws that restricted Asian labor flows were put into place, not just in the United States, but around the British settler world (Canada, Australia and South Africa). 

The MMI grant allowed me to partially fund a trip to the archives of the India Office at the British Library. There, I could access the debates that led the British Empire to establish indentured labor programs for Indian and Chinese workers and emigration incentives for British workers. These debates proceeded based on racial discourses regarding discipline and propensity to work and catered to planters’ needs for disciplined labor after the 1834 abolition of slavery in the British empire. Importantly, as British emigrants reached the United States or the settler colonies, they appropriated these racial discourses in order to make a case for the exclusion of non-white workers, which had been recruited into the areas they were now occupying only a few decades ago. 

In other words, white workers opted to persuade governments to restrict entry to non-white migrants (while incentivizing the entry of white ones) rather than challenge employers to tackle exploitative working conditions writ large. As a consequence, discourses of progressive enfranchisement absorbed imperial racial discourse and resulted in racially limited notions of popular sovereignty.

These imperial dynamics reappear today, as right-wing populist leaders channel economic discontent against immigrants and refugees, rather than targeting large corporations, which pay little in taxes and are rarely held accountable as they exploit workers and deplete public recourses that used to allow for a basic standard of living for the white working class. This, in turn, cements exploitative conditions for immigrant workers who labor under surveillance. 

This post is based on the piece “Why anti-immigration politics hurt white workers” (whose title I did not choose) published in the Washington Post and part of a new project on the imperial origins of popular sovereignty. I am thankful to Aayushi Chandra for her assistance summarizing the original piece and for the Humboldt Stiftung Fellowship and the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg for their support research on the new project.