Opinion In Trump-Vance narrative, cats, dogs and revival of nativist American nationhood

The summits of politics, business and pop culture often get entangled in US elections, but historians of US elections can’t recall when they became so intertwined with cats and dogs, if ever. The world outside is also puzzled, sometimes in amusement. So what is going on?

Let us start with pets. Anthropologists have done a lot to advance our knowledge of why animals come to acquire status in human societies. The late Marshall Sahlins famously wrote that sacralisation of dogs is the reason dog meat is not eaten in the US, though it is in East Asia and perhaps elsewhere. Dogs are not religiously sacred in the US, as cows are in much of Hindu society (hence beef is banned in many Indian states), but they are culturally sacred. Eating dogs would be an un-American act.

But who is engaged in this grossly unpatriotic activity? It is the recent Haitian immigrants, say Trump and Vance, unleashed on America by the immigration policies of the Biden-Harris Administration. Democrats would rather import illegal immigrants waiting to be regularised as citizens — and therefore turned into Democratic voters — than protect the nation. Recall the Indian parallel. In the 2019 election campaign, Amit Shah called Bangladeshi immigrants “termites” worthy of deportation (or incarceration). Proposing mass deportation as a solution, Trump would also send the undocumented Haitians and other Hispanic immigrants back to their original homelands. According to Trump, “Making America Great Again” (MAGA), among other things, desperately requires mass deportation of unworthy and unwanted aliens, who weaken the nation.

That the Haitian immigrants of Springfield were legal US citizens did not matter to Trump and Vance; they should not have been allowed to come in the first place.

Both say they are for legal immigration, but fail to explain why that argument does not apply to Springfield’s legal Haitian immigrants. Trump and Vance are simply invoking a long tradition in American history, which thrives on claiming that some immigrant groups are unfit to be Americans.

The controversy also fits well into the larger scholarly debates over nations and nationalism. Although it is sometimes argued that all nationalisms are majoritarian in nature, scholars of nationalism are quick to draw a distinction between two different kinds of nations; those based on blood lines (jus sanguinis) such as, historically, Germany and Japan, and those based on birthright citizenship regardless of ethnicity or race (jus solis). The latter nations are also often rooted in an ideational foundation, as in the US (freedom and equality) and France (freedom, equality and fraternity). Most such nations also permit easier immigration and naturalisation.

It is clear why racially/ethnically diverse immigration would be a problem for jus sanguinis. Germany’s post-1950 relationship with the Turks, and recently with the Syrians, is a case in point. But even nations with ideological foundations have struggled with maintaining “purity”. Rogers Brubaker shows how in the late 19th and early 20th century, France had a wrenching debate on whether Jews could be truly French, and how Muslims replaced the Jews in the last few decades. Similarly, scholars of American politics and history have pointed to the contestation between two different concepts of nationhood: One committed to the ideals of the American revolution and the other calling the US a White nation.

Trump’s argument about immigrants is a contemporary version of White nationalism. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) was the first big American example of how an immigrant community could be termed unfit. In the 1850s and 1860s, the Chinese came in large numbers to build railroads in California. In a language similar to what Trump is using for the mostly Hispanic immigrants today, an 1873 article in San Francisco Chronicle called attention to “The Chinese Invasion! They are coming, 900,000 strong”. The “moral deficiency” of the Chinese was also cited, justifying their exclusion. The Nationality and Immigration Act of 1965 finally lifted all nationality and race restrictions, bringing America’s immigration law close to its founding principles and launching a huge non-White immigrant flow, especially from South and Central America.

Though their obstacles were not as forbidding as those of the Chinese, it is noteworthy that the Irish and Italians, immigrating in large numbers during the 1840s and 1910s, also had significant trouble. Neither was treated by many nativists as “fully White”. Whiteness of a Different Color (1998) by MF Jacobsohn narrates how the Irish (or Greeks) became White Americans. And Working Toward Whiteness (2006) by David Roediger tells how Italians moved from a “liminal racial status” to a White status.

The tale of cats and dogs revives the nativist tradition of American nationhood. If Trump wins, a more racist America should be expected. If Harris wins, America’s more inclusive narrative will come to the fore, at least for the next four years.

The writer is Sol Goldman professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University, where he also directs the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at the Watson Institute