Immigrant America? How Foreignness "Solves" Democracy's Problems

Abstract

Against the background of California's Proposition 187 and new U.S. federal legislation limiting the rights and benefits of legal and illegal immigrants, Americans on both the Right and the Left have sought to recover the iconic immigrant who once helped build this nation and whose heirs might contribute to the national future. Both political theorists and activists have responded to renewed anti-immigrant sentiment by stressing the gifts that foreigners have to offer receiving regimes.' Their efforts have given new life to the myth of an immigrant America. Unfortunately, however, because their efforts are all fundamentally nationalist, their xenophilic embrace of foreigners tends also to feed and not only to combat the xenophobia they deplore.2 The myth of an immigrant America depicts the foreigner as a supplement to the nation, an agent of national reenchantment that might rescue the regime from corruption and return it to its first principles, whether capitalist, communal/familial, or consensual.3 In the capitalist version of the myth, the immigrant functions to reassure workers of the possibility of upward mobility in an economy that rarely delivers on that promise, while also disciplining the native-born poor, domestic minorities, and unsuccessful foreign laborers into believing that the economy fairly rewards dedication and hard work.4