The Anti-Asian Roots of Today’s Anti-Immigrant Politics

The Nation’s latest cover story, “The Anti-Asian Roots of Today’s Anti-Immigrant Politics,” contributor Mari Uyehara details the nearly 100-year campaign of brutal anti-Asian violence and bigotry on the West Coast—what she names “the Western strategy”: a distinct but reinforcing immigrant corollary to the Southern strategy (both the ethos of the post-Reconstruction South and, later, the explicit program of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon). It crystallized in California, Washington, and Oregon as they entered statehood and as Jim Crow laws swept the South. If the Southern strategy pursued pure political power in its first iteration and later brought about party realignment by stoking white racial animus toward Black people, aided by propaganda of Black criminality and inferiority and abetted by policies of segregation, degradation, and voter suppression, the Western strategy achieved bipartisan agreement by whipping up resentment toward Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian immigrants, aided by propaganda of foreign invaders who could never be assimilated and abetted by policies of race-based exclusion. This strategy quickly grew from a distinctly regional one, ruthlessly operationalized in the West, into mainstream national politics.

KJ