Clovis anthropologist challenges Trump’s wall

Donald Trump has repeatedly demanded the construction of a wall along the Mexican border, to block “drugs and rapists” entering the country, but to thwart illegal immigration as well. His message is laced with a double irony.

First, driven by a populist, “America-first” neo-nativism, Trump seems oblivious to the fact that this nation has always derived its vitality from an immigrant stream of diverse, worldwide peoples.

Second, this particular wall on this particular border defies historical precedent. The first point seems evident; the second merits a review of history.

The Spanish-Mexicans were in the Southwest long before the United States was founded. New Mexico was settled in 1598, Arizona in 1687 and California in 1769. Texas is of personal interest here.

In 1746, a motley group that included my own parental ancestors trekked north from central Mexico, and colonized the area where the Rio Grande now divides South Texas from Tamaulipas, Mexico.

I happen to be a descendant of the colonists who first settled the Texas side of the river. We did not immigrate to this country: it migrated to us.

The Hispanic Southwest did not succumb to American rule until 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War and ceded the entire territory to the Americans. Mexican negotiators tried to include a provision in the treaty legalizing the Spanish language in the conquered lands, but they failed.

The omission portended the kind of treatment the language and its speakers would endure in the future: Strangers in their own land, they suffered pervasive discrimination well into the 20th century. Native or foreign-born, Mexicans were effectively denied any economic or political power.

Yet the border remained open until the 1930s, perhaps in recognition that Mexicans had long been part of its landscape. The Great Depression ended the open-door policy, as economic hardship deepened already-jaundiced views that many Americans held toward the vanquished Mexicans.

Thousands were deported, including many Mexican Americans. However, when the Depression ended and the American economy began to expand, the pull of employment opportunities in the U.S. triggered renewed immigration.

Since then, American attitudes toward Mexican immigration have vacillated. During good economic times, the subject has remained muted; during recessions, anti-immigrant stirrings flare up. Yet until recently, except for diehard nativists, Americans were not particularly riled over the contentious issue of illegal immigration.

It may be because this immigration has been economically advantageous: Undocumented workers fill the lowest-wage jobs in the capitalist market, especially those in agriculture.

Then Donald Trump burst upon the scene. With his inflammatory rhetoric, including demands for his notorious wall, he reignited anti-immigrant sentiment that has lately reached an alarming level of animosity – particularly among his most reactionary followers.

Ironically, much of this animosity is directed against Mexicans, who collectively antedate the arrival in the Southwest of Americans now clamoring for their deportation. In any case, the promotion of the wall is at base a symptom of the historical amnesia that defines a surging neo-nativist ideology.

Besides denying the diverse origins of our nation, this nativism is of a piece with the ethnocentric/racial intolerance that rages through several European countries at this moment.

But the U.S. is not Bulgaria or Hungary – monocultural, ethno-centered countries. Ours has always been a multi-ethnic, polyglot society, albeit with a cultural thread (call it “Americanism”) that unifies the many diverse groups who are part of the national fabric.

In contrast, neo- nativism is a form of racial purism that obliterates our immigrant past, even as it strives for an elusive result: a homogenous, whitened America. In this it runs against counterbalancing processes: immigration, diversity, integration that historically make us who we are.

Donald Trump has fomented this neo-nativism with his attacks on Muslims, Africans and Mexicans. Witness the imperiled lives of DACA recipients, who are nothing but American in lifestyle, yet are now in danger of deportation – victims of their President’s machinations.

Oblivious to the irony, Trump recently proposed that only immigrants who “share our values” should be welcomed into America. DACA recipients and Muslims, who presumably don’t conform to the purist white, European model, are not candidates for inclusion.

Many Americans resist Trump’s agenda. But if neo-nativists’ efforts prevail, and we start rejecting “unassimilables” deemed a threat to “our values,” then we will have renounced one of our founding principles: inclusion, not exclusion, when it comes to immigration.

As the words emblazoned on the bronze tablet at the Statue of Liberty remind us: “From her beacon hand glows world-wide welcome.”

The future of the wall is now in doubt, however. Congress appropriated only a fraction of Trump’s $25 billion demand for border security – a sign, perhaps, that even Republican legislators are leery of the whole project and its implications. Meanwhile, an angry Trump has ordered National Guard troops be deployed on the border (where illegal immigration is at its lowest in 46 years).

Still, should the border monolith arise, it will loom as eternal reminder that America forfeited its role as welcoming refuge for Earth’s diverse peoples. Liberty’s beacon will glow no more.

This story was originally published April 7, 2018 at 5:13 AM with the headline "Clovis anthropologist challenges Trump’s wall."