We are thankful to Sara Wallace Goodman for putting forward a clear, concise, and comprehensive overview of White Backlash. We could not have done a better job illuminating the core themes and contributions of the book. We would, however, also like to respond to some of the questions she raised about the project and the larger phenomenon of immigrant backlash.
Goodman rightly wonders whether the rightward-leaning political backlash against recent immigrants in the American context represents a unique pattern that requires its own distinct explanation or whether it can be fruitfully compared with hostile responses to immigrants in other countries. We whole heartedly agree that this is not a case of American exceptionalism. Waves of backlash against immigrants have been well documented in the European context by Rafaela Dancygier (Immigration and Conflict in Europe, 2010), Daniel Tichenor (Dividing Lines, 2002) and others. More recently, scholars such as Claire Adida (Immigration Exclusion and Insecurity in Africa, 2014) and David Fitzgerald and David Cook-Martin (Culling the Masses, 2014) have also examined the political repercussions of South-to-South immigration and have found both similar patterns and distinct responses. It is also worth noting that we do not even have to go outside of the American context to identify constructive cases for comparison. As we note in our book, American “history provides plenty of evidence to suggest that immigration can fundamentally alter the nation’s politics” (p. 6).
We mention these different kinds of comparisons in passing in the book, but we agree with Goodman that we could have done much more to incorporate this work and to think more deeply about how our theory of immigrant backlash does or does not apply to these different cases. Future research would be well served by drawing out those parallels in greater detail. A critical next step in stemming the anti-immigrant tide would be to try to understand how and when immigrant backlashes have flared up in other contexts and, perhaps even more importantly, when and why they have receded.
Goodman also raises an important question about what exactly it is that is driving the backlash in the American case. Is it a story of racial threat or is it more fundamentally about issues of illegality, security, and law, and order? Even now after considerable reflection, we do not have a clear answer. In American politics, the two themes of race and illegality have been so closely intertwined since at least the 1960s that it is extraordinarily difficult to disentangle the two. We suspect instead that in the mind of the typical American voter, the concepts are typically irreversibly muddled together. Today, when most Americans think of an immigrant, the [inaccurate] picture they often conjure up is of an undocumented Latino. It is possible, as Goodman suggests, that more in-depth interviews or experiments could pull out one core motivation. Factor analysis or some other novel empirical technique might tell us whether race or illegality has slightly more predictive power. But we are skeptical of the value of this kind of endeavor. If proponents of the backlash continue to conflate and entangle race and illegality, it matters little which factor predicts more in a regression model.
Finally, what of other racial and ethnic groups? As Goodman perceptively notes, there is nothing that precludes African Americans, Asian Americans, and other minority groups from contributing to the backlash on immigration. Although we believe that the backlash will be and is, in fact, most pronounced among white Americans, we agree that it is unlikely to be confined to white Americans. Given the growing diversity of the nation, understanding how racial and ethnic minorities react to immigration will be an increasingly critical question for the partisan balance of power in American politics. Future researchers would do well to expand the focus to these other groups.
