Ever since Alexis de Tocqueville famously claimed America and Americans to be “exceptional”, comparisons between the United States and Europe have privileged differences over similarities. We have seen this in many scholarly fields, but the emphasis on differences is particularly noticeable in the field of migration studies. While immigration and diversity are burning issues on both sides of the Atlantic, the framing of the debate in the United States – at least until recently, and in contrast to many European countries – did not focus on the failure of ethnic and racial minorities to integrate into the native majority. Blacks in the United States are of course not postcolonial immigrants, but the descendants of slaves with histories in the country going back centuries. Many authors thus consider blacks in the United States as natives, as African-Americans.

But what about the rise of political nativism in the United States today? “The rapid growth of Mexican immigration and most especially undocumented immigration since the early 1990s has led to a growth in nativist rhetoric and punitive laws targeting both legal and illegal immigrants and even their children” (Waters 2014: 153). Is the new American nativism comparable to developments in Europe? How did nativism emerge in a country where immigration is so central to national identity, where nobody (except Native Americans) can claim proprietary rights based on historical rootedness?

Myths and ideologies

A common claim is that nativism as an ideology is more likely to flourish in Europe because of how countries construct and teach their national histories. Scholars here suggest that migration plays a limited role in the “origin myths” and “national identities” of European countries; while the history of immigration is mobilized as a core feature of American identity, European national myths hold that there are “true” Europeans who are geographically and historically rooted in the land. Alba and Foner (2015) suggest that it is much more challenging for European societies to include newcomers in the national “we”. North Americans, looking at West European anxieties about immigration – especially the cleavages between the European secular/Christian mainstream and Muslim immigrants and their children – often see confirmation of this idea.