Volume 17, Issue 3

As the white share of America continues to decline, white identity is becoming more important for politics. I show that white identity is considerably stronger among whites who are attached to their ancestry, i.e. Irish, ‘American’ or Italian. Accordingly, we should see it as more reflective of cultural attachment than a desire for politico-economic advantage. In addition, a separate dynamic I term ethno-traditional American nationalism, is important. This is not white nationalism, but a form of American national identity in which ethnocultural elements form an important part but do not, like the American accent, form a condition of equal national membership. Ethno-traditional nationalism is about the ‘what is American’ question of symbolic attachment, rather than the ‘who is American’ question of which groups belong and are excluded, that has received the lion’s share of academic attention.

White evangelicals constitute the core of President Trump’s electoral base. The loyalty of White evangelical Trump supporters to the President is grounded in racial anxieties expressed well before Trump’s 2016 campaign. White evangelicals’ anti-immigration agenda runs deep, and it is as important to understanding the current political moment as their anti-abortion agenda. Perceptions of discrimination against Whites drives the group’s conservative views on immigration. Even as growing numbers of Black, Asian, and Latinx evangelicals exhibit political attitudes and behavior that stand in sharp contrast to their White evangelical counterparts, White evangelicals’ overrepresentation in the electorate relative to dwindling population share creates a pathway to continued political influence.

This study examines new open-ended and closed-ended survey responses among white liberals and conservatives in the US to assess the role they think their racial group membership plays in how they think about politics. It then uses insights from those responses to develop and test a new measure designed to capture how white identity operates politically. To date, much political science research on white racial identity documents the links between white identity and right-leaning candidate and policy preferences. Much less is known about the role of whiteness on the left. The analysis here shows that even though white liberals talk about anti-racism, privilege, and institutional racism when asked about race and politics and say that they have become more aware of their race in recent years, they generally do not view their own whiteness as a politically salient identity. The results indicate that it is important for scholars to use measures that distinguish between whites who appear “woke” but do not act on their “wokeness” from whites for whom an awareness of privilege motivates them toward an anti-racist agenda.

In recent years, American politics has been defined by party polarization driven in part by Americans’ diverging attitudes toward immigration. In this article, I suggest that Donald Trump was able to capitalize on this polarization and on the way in which race is implicated in the issue of immigration. He did so by appealing to the attitudes held by two distinct groups of white Americans – those who possess a sense of animosity toward members of immigrant groups like Muslims and Latinos, and separately, whites who may demonstrate little out-group hostility, but instead have a strong sense of solidarity with their racial group. I show how white hostility toward Latinos and Muslims and white racial consciousness have become two distinct forces in American politics, driving opposition to immigration and bolstering support for Donald Trump above and beyond other presidential candidates, regardless of their party affiliations.

President Trump won an Electoral College majority in 2016 bolstered by voters who supported him, but not the previous nominee, Mitt Romney. Evidence suggests that a campaign promising a more restrictive immigration policy was the key to this improved performance among cross-pressured voters. In the months since inauguration day 2017, however, voters did not remain unaware of the administration’s programmatic steps on immigration and the opposition they encountered. I interpret evidence from a panel survey to suggest that voters gained knowledge about immigration policy after 2016, and began to align their policy views with the positions of their favored political parties. Inasmuch as voters’ policy positions become identical with their party preference, the potential for immigration policy to again act as a wedge issue in 2020 is greatly reduced. President Trump’s 2020 campaign may be able to mobilize more base voters given this increase in policy-party congruence but he may not be as successful as in 2016 in attracting crossover voters.

At least since Emma Lazarus’s famous sonnet became associated with the Statue of Liberty, Americans have confounded important differences between immigrants and refugees. Cold War politics contributed further to that misapprehension. In recent years the continuing crisis at our southern border has rendered this confusion more evident and problematic. At the same time, a global refugee crisis of genuinely historic proportions has been unfolding. More than ever, it is critical to delineate carefully between the needs of refugees and the preferences of immigrants. Yet now there are strong counter-pressures at work, blurring critical distinctions between these two categories. These are particularly evident in the international political arena, where the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is highly susceptible to pressure from the media, academics, and activists to once again confound the two.